Hatje Cantz Text – serie

On the Pulse of the Museum as Institution of the FutureFor quite some time now, ethnographic museums in Europe have been compelled to legitimate themselves. Their exhibition-making has become a topic of discussion, as has the contentious history of their collections, which have come about through colonial appropriation. Clearly, this cannot continue. That the situation can be different is something that Clémentine Deliss explores in her current publication. She offers an intriguing mix of autobiographically-informed novel and conceptual thesis on contemporary art and anthropology. Reflections on her own work while she was Director of Frankfurt’s Weltkulturen Museum (Museum of World Cultures) are interwoven with the explorations of influential filmmakers, artists and writers. She introduces the Metabolic Museum as an interventionist laboratory for remediating ethnographic collections for future generations. CLÉMENTINE DELISS has achieved international renown as a curator, cultural historian and publisher of artist’s books. In her role as Director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, as a curator, and as a professor and researcher at eminent institutes and academies, she focuses on transdisciplinary and transcultural exchanges. She is Associate Curator of KW Berlin and Guest Professor at the Academy of Arts, Hamburg.

As museums worldwide shuttered in 2020 because of the novel coronavirus, New York-based cultural strategist András Szántó conducted a series of interviews with an international group of museum leaders. In a moment when economic, political, and cultural shifts are signaling the start of a new era, the directors speak candidly about the historical limitations and untapped potential of art museums.Each of the twenty-eight dialogues in this book explores a particular topic of relevance to art institutions today, and tomorrow. What emerges from the series of in-depth conversations is a composite portrait of a generation of museum leaders working to make institutions more open, democratic, inclusive, experimental and experiential, technologically savvy, culturally polyphonic, attuned to the needs of their visitors and communities, and concerned with addressing the defining issues of the societies around them. The dialogues offer glimpses of how museums around the globe are undergoing an accelerated phase of reappraisal and reinvention.CONVERSATION PARTNERS: Marion Ackermann, Cecilia Alemani, Anton Belov, Meriem Berrada, Daniel Birnbaium, Tom Campbell, Tania Cohen, Rhana Devenport, Maria Mercedes Gonzales, Max Hollein, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Mami Kataoka, Brian Kennedy, Koyo Kouoh, Sonia Lawson, Adam Levine, Victoria Noorthoorn, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Anne Pasternak, Adriano Pedrosa, Suhanya Raffel, Axel Ruger, Katrina Sedwick, Franklin Sirmans, Eugene Tan, Phil Tinari, Marc-Olivier Wahler, Marie-Cécile Zinsou

The work of the Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Rosa Barba is distinguished by her conceptual exploration of film. In this publication she devises a progressive vision for the cinema of the future. Barba translates questions of composition and plasticity into precisely staged arrangements that open up new ways of looking at both the material and the conceptual conditions of the medium of film. Starting with Barba’s artistic research, this volume deals with the concept of an anarchical organization of filmic spaces—a work principle that could shape a new way of thinking by destabilizing traditional cinematic structures. Through this, the author undertakes a journey to an imaginary political trope for today’s cinema.

If data is the greatest collective treasure of a digital society, basic material for business and politics: Why are the places where it is stored still so invisible? Niklas Maak, architectural critic and Professor for Architecture at Städelschule Frankfurt, explores this question in his new publication and envisions radical solutions for the future.

How is art criticism to be understood within an expanding artistic field? A look at its history and its manifestations within globalized conditions shows the variety of the genre, of the criteria and of the styles of writing. This reader is an attempt to bring a diverse range of art-critical voices and perspectives into conversation with each other, with texts from the 18th century to the present. The editors Beate Söntgen and Julia Voss have invited colleagues from various geographical and intellectual backgrounds to present and discuss the art critics of their choice, choosing one example from their respective bodies of work to comment upon. How have these writers approached art criticism? Which styles do they employ? What makes them extraordinary? What can we learn from their writings today, and why is it important in its contemporary context?Texts by: Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Denis Diderot, Takashi Kashima, Patrick Mudekereza, Annemarie Sauzeau-Boetti, Bertha Zuckerkandl and many more Comments by: Juli Carson, Yuriko Furuhata, Isabelle Graw, Angela Harutyunyan, Monica Juneja, Wolfgang Kemp, Florencia Malbran, Yvette Mutumba, Azu Nwagbogu, Sarah Wilson and many more

The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival is an artwork, a sculpture, created by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn in a peripheral borough of Amsterdam’s south-east known as the Bijlmer in 2009. This book recounts the event through the eyes of its “Ambassador”, art historian Vittoria Martini, who was invited by the artist to be an eyewitness to the existence of this “precarious” work. A term Hirschhorn sees as positive and creative: a means of asserting the importance of the moment and of the place, of asserting the Here and Now to touch eternity and universality. Appreciating the art historian’s presence as a central element of his sculpture, Hirschhorn consciously challenged the certainties of the profession by empowering and activating the role, thus leading Martini to find a new working methodology that she calls “precarious art history”. Accompanying the readers through her experience of the physical existence of The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival, Martini’s commentary leads to the profound understanding of how a work that no longer exists physically, can live on in the mind— elsewhere, at some other time—because in the meantime it has become universal.

An Encounter Between Art and the TechnosphereProprietary algorithms, secret data troves, and inscrutable systems rule the day. How is this registered in art? In Poetics of Encryption Nadim Samman explores works that highlight the hidden dimensions of our technological landscape. Running counter to erroneous claims regarding a new culture of transparency and openness, such artworks address black sites, black boxes, and black holes—all the while, toggling between enlightened concern and occult dreaming.

The photobook visually and materially contextualizes arrangements of photographs and brings them into a sensually tangible form. The book format, the materiality of the paper, and the type of binding have just as much effect on the viewer as the selection of images, their positioning in the layout, typography, and texts. The artist and theorist Bettina Lockemann provides an approach to the medium from a research perspective: considering the photobook as an independent subject of art studies, phenomenological discussions complement methodological lines of thought. An important contribution to the photobook as an independent field of research, Lockemann elaborates precise terms for analyzing this medium of renditions. Through a practice-based examination of contemporary photobooks, this reader gets to the root of the field of photo books.

Following on the widely-read The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues, which explored how museums are changing through conversations with today’s generation of museum directors, New York-based author and cultural strategy advisor András Szántó’s new compilation turns its attention to architects. The conclusion of The Future of the Museum was that the “software” of art museums has evolved. Museum leaders are “working to make institutions more open, inclusive, experiential, culturally polyphonic, technologically savvy, attuned to the needs of their communities, and engaged in the defining issues of our time.” It follows that the “hardware” of the art museum must also change. Conversations with a carefully selected group of architects survey current thinking in the field, engaging not only architects who have built some of the world’s most iconic institutions, but also members of an emerging global generation that is destined to leave its mark on the museum of the future.

Where is Charles Simonds? Throughout the 1970s, his diminutive Dwellings, tiny architectural ruins of an imaginary civilization, could be found throughout the crumbling infrastructure of downtown New York. Preoccupied with the relationship between the grown and the built, the archaeological and the urban, Simonds shared friendship and ideas with Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson. Like Lucy Lippard, with whom he lived during that decade, Simonds believed in combining art and activism, always preferring what he called the “real world” to the art world. Yet despite taking part in many of the seminal exhibitions and art events of 1970s New York, Simonds has left few traces on art history. In order to explain Simonds’s absence while simultaneously arguing for his central place within it, Jules Pelta Feldman reconsiders the decade’s self-conception, finding that Simonds exemplifies much of what has been ignored in 1970s art - and much of what establishes it as a unique period of experimentation and possibility.

Milkyways is a collection of essays by artist Camille Henrot, exploring the ambivalence of motherhood and the process of creation in both art-making and life. Each chapter delivers a cosmos of references in literature, cartoons, art history, psychoanalysis, and more - from ancient maternity myths to modern maternity wards; from Marcel Proust to Maggie Nelson to Hélène Cixous. Alongside illustrations of the artist’s work in painting, drawing, and sculpture, Henrot’s perspectives in writing oscillate freely between the personal and the societal, the obvious and the more complex, the visceral and the utterly mundane. Milkyways was originally conceived for Republik magazine on invitation by Antje Stahl. Written with Jacob Bromberg, Antje Stahl, and Léa Trudel.

The Arab art scene from the 1960s to the 1990s. Story of Water and Fire is a captivating account of the joint life of two prominent figures in the Iraqi art scene, poet and art critic May Muzaffar and artist Rafa Nasiri. This book offers a glimpse into the social and artistic milieu of Baghdad from the 1960s to the 1990s, as well as the couple’s travels during this period and their years of exile in Amman and Manama. Through vivid descriptions and rarely seen photographs, May Muzaffar provides insights into their position in the Arab and international art scenes. The book serves as a guide to the archival material that al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art at NYU Abu Dhabi has digitized and made available for researchers, creating an expanded space for exploration and understanding of the remarkable work of this generation.

No Going Back Skin in the Game follows on from the acclaimed fieldwork diary, The Metabolic Museum. In this new book written in a conversational style, Clémentine Deliss expands on how artists today understand the creativity to be found in historical research collections. Questions are raised on how to work with contentious collections, the law from the perspective of Indigenous artists, and the concept of the “prototype” that defines an artist’s career. Deliss speaks with leading women artists—Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Rosemarie Trockel, Joëlle Tuerlincx, and Andrea Zittel—, about their moment of “skin in the game,” when they knew there was no going back, and that art practice would become their Hades and paradise in one. What was the prototype that defined their practice and that like a revenant returns over the course of an artist’s lifetime?

Stopgap Measures presents an exciting selection of essays, interviews and shorter pieces written over more than three decades by noted art historian and cultural critic John C. Welchman. It includes reflections on specific works including Kelley’s early performances Confusion (1981-84) and Monkey Island (1982-83); Liquid Diet (1989/2006), the artist’s only extended reflection on the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland; Fresh Acconci (1995, with Paul McCarthy); Petting Zoo created for Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2007; the landmark installation Day Is Done (2005); and Kelley’s final work Mobile Homestead. The volume features a signature series of pathbreaking essays on Kelley’s innovations in photography, writing, physical comedy and verbal humor; memory, popular culture, dress-up and Americana; the uncanny, imaginative projection and dark fantasy; appropriation and giving; authorship and self-construction; and the artist’s little-remarked negotiation with histories of and ideas about Asia. The book concludes with a new essay connecting the refrain disappearances that punctuate Kelley’s career with specters of social catastrophe and nuclear annihilation.

Records of a long-term friendship between the artist and the writerWhen Abdul Rahman Munif embarked on the first extensive study in Arabic about Marwan Kassab Bachi, he mailed the artist asking about how his art emerged, its contextual influences, and timely interpretations. Marwan recorded his answers on seven audio tapes and sent them to Munif, but also started writing his memoirs in Arabic. This book is an anthology of the letters exchanged between two friends, Marwan in Berlin and Munif in Damascus, from 1990 to 2004.

How do geopolitical, economical, and socio-political upheavals impact the field of art todayThis monograph takes a look at how the increasing multipolarity of our world affects art. It is a diagnosis of the socio-political contexts that surround art and questions what the upheavals in geopolitics, economic and social policy mean for the field of art today. The text is divided into four sections. First, the phenomenon is conceptualized and theorized. This is followed by an in-depth examination of the interrelationships using documenta fifteen as a case study, an exhibition that can be seen as a crystallization point for current political shifts. This is followed by an in-depth reading of Chinese art policy, which oscillates between particularist and universalist claims, in order to arrive at the concluding section, which opens up a horizon of thought and experimentation that helps us to come to terms with the era of multipolarity.

Portrait of the art world in a rapidly changing societyThe third in a series of books investigating the future of the museum, following on The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues (2020) and Imagining the Future of the Museum: 21 Dialogues With Architects (2022). Rounding out the previous volumes, which examined the "software" and the "hardware" of the museum, the 40 dialogues in the third installment of the trilogy survey the social, cultural, economic, institutional, and technological conditions of the wider ecology in which museums operate. The conversations include leading figures from around the world, engaging voices not heard in the prior volumes: artists, curators, collectors, members of the art trade, sociologists, entrepreneurs, and others. Together, they offer a portrait of an art world seeking to adapt to a rapidly changing society. CONVERSATION PARTNERS:Refik Anadol, Albert-László Barabási, Ana Brzezinska, Larissa Buchholz, Diana Campbell, Joshua Citarella, Michael Connor, Jonathan Crockett, Marcello Dantas, Simon Denny, Ophelia Deroy, Souleymane Bachir Diagne,Léuli Eshraghi, Thomas Girst, Holly Herndon & Mathew Dryhurst, Noah Horowitz, Isaac Julien, William Kentridge, Mona Khazindar, Agnieszka Kurant, José Kuri, Pablo León de la Barra , Sylvain Levy, Mia Locks, Carol Yinghua Lu, Miranda Massie, Atsuko Ninagawa, Tokini Peterside-Schwebig, Yoram Roth, Alain Servais, Marc Spiegler, Calum Sutton, Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Fatos Ustek, Olav Velthuis, Ge Wang, Mariët Westermann, Dustin Yellin.