Marina Vishmidt – författare

The work of 38 established and emerging artists explore the creative potential of risk-taking and transgression in contemporary lifeThe unconventional theme underlying the art featured in this book is the struggle between risk-taking and the prediction algorithms that have become a feature of contemporary life. Does the influence of machine intelligence, and the coincident avoidance of risk, homogenize creative thought? These ideas are explored in the work of 38 established and emerging artists in a variety of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, sculpture, video art, computer art, and performance. Featured artists include Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Ed Atkins, Esther Ferrer, Mounira Al Solh, and Shezad Dawoud. The book takes its title from a town on the French-Belgian border with a history as a well-known customs outpost.Distributed for MercatorfondsExhibition Schedule:WIELS Museum for Contemporary Art Brussels(September 12, 2020–February 10, 2021)

In Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, Marina Vishmidt offers a new perspective on one of the main categories of capitalist life in the historical present. Writing not under the shadow but in the spirit of Adorno's negative dialectic, her work pursues speculation through its contested terrains of philosophy, finance, and art, to arrive at the most detailed analysis that we now possess of the role of speculation in the shaping of subjectivity by value relations. Featuring detailed critical discussions of recent tendencies in the artistic representation of labour, and a brilliant reconstruction of the philosophical concept of the speculative from its origins in German Romanticism, Speculation as a Mode of Production is an essential, widescreen theorisation of capital's drive to self-expansion, and an urgent corrective to the narrow and one-sided periodisations to which it is most commonly subjected.

As we search for a life beyond capital, the dream that galleries and museums can function as a refuge from existing social relations appears less credible by the day. In response, Infrastructural Critique proposes a new materialist counterpraxis. By treating contemporary art institutions as a site of struggle as well as a resource, Marina Vishmidt reanimates critique.A tour de force of Marxist theory and art criticism - embracing such disparate subjects as Milanese radical feminism, dinosaur documentaries, and the water crises of Flint and Detroit - Infrastructural Critique, edited in the wake of the author's tragic early death, blends theory and praxis to assess the work of artists such as Cameron Rowland, Dora Budor, and Carolyn Lazard. This volume showcases the light-bending, life-shaping thinking of one of the most playful, politically radical theorists of her era.