This volume brings together writing and imagery from the experimental “beachwalk” session(s) at the Third Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, On the Beach: Precariousness, Risk, Forms of ...Life, Affinity, and Play at the Edge of the World. We began with conversations about the sea. We meditated together on chance, discovery, agency, beauty, and material ecology. We talked about the delicate care of treading the world, the confluence of the personal and the professional, and the possibilities of storytelling. We thought about what happens when we encounter stuff, when we take it, change it, do something with it. When we display it, or sculpt it, or collect it. When we make something an object, and an object of looking. Then we met on the beach. We walked and talked about loss, home, agency, and liminality. We collected things: We picked up stones, feathers, seaweed. We pointed to stuff, gathered it, let it strike our fancy. Every shell nurtured a conversation among the artists, scientists, historians, poets, archivists, surfers, philosophers, and pirates who had joined the walk. We brought the sea-things back, manipulated them, and displayed them as works of art. Walk on the Beach is a souvenir of that project, a record of our bounty. It emerges from the process at the heart of art historical work: close looking. Thinking through objects, thinking with objects. Letting the things help us tell their stories. This is a tiny collection of looking, together
"The Event of Art presents, in fifty-two modular chapters and over eight hundred pages and images, the works of artist Marc Lafia. The book interweaves essays, notes, photographic archives, and a ...host of exhibitions wherein Lafia traverses his wide body of work and examines how his early strategies of cultural reading of photography and film, of interface, network culture, and social media, transform into an investigation of materiality itself. If his interest was once the way media becomes the message, his interest later becomes the realm of the sensible and the sensate in themselves. Here he presents art as the medium itself, giving us wide permission to explore and examine our deepest feelings and senses, our world and its becoming. The book is introduced by two essays. The first is by curator and art dealer Mathieu Borysevicz, where he recounts meeting Lafia at his first artist residency, and the many projects they would go on to do together. He introduces Lafia’s interest in recording as it becomes digital and computational where ""recording is not only memory, and a data structure, but a permutational instrument and ever-changing horizon of iterations.” The other introductory essay is by critic Daniel Coffeen, who writes, ""while Lafia may not have a traditional medium – there is no such thing anymore – he does in fact have one consistent medium: imaging making itself, its apparati of creation, consumption, and circulation. In fact Lafia’s medium is the discourse of art – what it is, how it comes to be, how we experience it.” The Event of Art presents the work of art as a complex material and societal event. The event is multiple, a continual becoming of perception, being, materiality, participation, a coming to the senses and the making, shaping and opening to them, not only of one’s self, but the world becoming."
"Schöne Wissenschaften" is dedicated to the art and natural science collections of the time of Emperor Joseph II (reigned 1765-1790). The Imperial Coin Cabinet, the Physical Cabinet and the Natural ...History Cabinet, the collection of wax anatomical models in the Josephinum and the Imperial Picture Gallery in the Upper Belvedere form the starting point for far-reaching questions on the history of the collections and the public and scientific understanding in Vienna during the Enlightenment. With "Schöne Wissenschaften" (Beautiful Sciences), a central philosophical term of the Enlightenment is taken up, in which different ideas of beauty and science are combined. These ideas played a role in art and natural science collections in the late 18th century and direct the attention to the revealing and interesting structures of knowledge and cognition of that time. Authors: Nora Fischer, Elisabeth Hassmann, Hans Christian Hönes, Eva Kernbauer, Markus Krajewski, Anna Mader-Kratky, Anna Maerker, Gernot Mayer, Debora J. Meijers, Christa Riedl-Dorn, Andrea Seidler, Werner Telesko und Thomas Wallnig
„Schöne Wissenschaften“ widmet sich den kunst- und naturwissenschaftlichen Sammlungen zur Zeit Kaiser Josephs II. (reg. 1765–1790). Das kaiserliche Münzkabinett, das Physikalische Kabinett und das Naturalienkabinett, die Sammlung medizinischer Wachspräparate im Josephinum und die kaiserliche Gemäldesammlung im Oberen Belvedere bilden dabei den Ausgangspunkt weitreichender Fragen zur Sammlungsgeschichte und zum Öffentlichkeits- und Wissenschaftsverständnis in Wien zur Zeit der Aufklärung. Mit „Schöne Wissenschaften“ wird eine zentrale philosophische Begrifflichkeit der Aufklärung aufgegriffen, in der sich verschiedene Vorstellungen von Schönheit und Wissenschaft verbinden, die in kunst- und naturwissenschaftlichen Sammlungen im späten 18. Jahrhundert eine Rolle spielten und den Blick auf die aufschlussreichen und interessanten Wissens- und Erkenntnisstrukturen jener Zeit richten. AutorInnen: Nora Fischer, Elisabeth Hassmann, Hans Christian Hönes, Eva Kernbauer, Markus Krajewski, Anna Mader-Kratky, Anna Maerker, Gernot Mayer, Debora J. Meijers, Christa Riedl-Dorn, Andrea Seidler, Werner Telesko und Thomas Wallnig
Museum of Nonhumanity is the catalogue for a full-size touring museum that presents the history of the distinction between humans and animals, and the way that this artificial boundary has been used ...to oppress human and nonhuman beings over long historical periods. Throughout history, declaring a group to be nonhuman or subhuman has been an effective tool for justifying slavery, oppression, medical experimentation, genocide, and other forms of violence against those deemed “other.” Conversely, differentiating humans from other species has paved the way for the abuse of natural resources and other animals. Museum of Nonhumanity approaches animalization as a nexus that connects xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, and the abuse of nature and other animals. The touring museum hosts lecture programs in which local civil rights and animal rights organizations, academics, artists, and activists propose paths to a more inclusive society through intersectional approaches. The museum also hosts a pop-up book shop and a vegan café. As a temporary, utopian institution, Museum of Nonhumanity stands as a monument to the call to make animalization history.
Coincidentally, the 30th edition of Encontros da Imagem – International Photography and Visual Arts Festival, will be celebrated in an odd time and of continuous uncertainty, in a very strange, ...different and difficult year, as a result of the Pandemic caused by Covid-19. The year 2020 will remain in everyone’s memory as “the year of wearing the mask”. Now, more than ever, we feel the responsibility for the role of cultural intervention that we have conquered over more than thirty years, in this sharing with the audiences that are interested in the current visual arts and in particular in photography. For this reason and concerning the respect that everyone deserves, again and again, we seek to overcome the difficulties and the numerous obstacles that we face, inherent to the present moment and thus carry forward, with due adjustments, the global project that we have outlined for this year’s edition, whose main theme is Genesis. Similarly to the last two years and recovering a tradition from the late nineties, the thirty-six (36) exhibitions will be spread over twenty-three (23) spaces in the cities of Braga, Barcelos, Guimarães, Porto and Avintes (Vila Nova de Gaia), showing the works and projects of sixty-six (66) national and foreign photographers. Twenty years later, the project called Memories of the City is also incorporated. After addressing an invitation to the photographers from Braga, the brothers Hugo and Gonçalo Delgado, images were produced and fixed for future memory of moments and situations that marked the daily lives of the city, as a result of a confinement imposed by a Pandemic, which will forever define the year 2020. Supporting the idea of photography as a form of expression and artistic creation, alongside well-known names, other artists are also invited, which we consider equally important to the festival. As a result of an Open Call and the selection made by an international jury, works by young artists are also shown, which generally reflect avant-garde trends. It is true that the route is not long. But there are thirty-three years and thirty editions made. We crossed the most diverse paths of photography: historical, documentary and conceptual, contributing in a systematic and pedagogical way to a comprehensive vision of photography as a means of expression. However, it is long enough for us to be aware of having contributed positively to the development and qualitative growth of photography in Portugal.