How to trace nonbinary relations at the Venice Biennale, an aging institution burdened by spatial subdivision into national domains of representation? With a queer transversal approach. Queer transversality is a model of collectivity that combines queer subjectivity with a device for mapping the potential of desire within groups. For Félix Guattari, “Transversality is a dimension […]

Titled ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero,’ the 10th Berlin Biennale (BBX) positions itself in the negative. It emphasizes a refusal of the status quo, of the imagined necessity of a savior to free us from the messy present. Yet, while the show exposes viewers to artists and positions critically missing from German institutions, the exhibition […]

The group exhibition Evidentiary Realism identifies an ongoing trend in contemporary art, as well as in broader cultural circles, that takes up “evidence” as a material or animating subject matter. Characteristic works deal with social structures that exist to perpetuate crime or to hinder it, to represent or claim authority over certain groups through data […]

Distinct from the droves of international biennales and triennials birthed in recent decades, the Skulptur Projekte Münster (Sculpture Projects Münster) sets itself apart as an unparalleled cultural moment once every 10 years that places strong emphasis on site-specificity and encourages long-term artistic study. The decennial’s first edition in 1977, curated by Klaus Bussmann and Kasper […]

An article about local initiatives surrounding Documenta 14 on the occasion of the meta-exhibition’s recent opening in Athens. In a city reeling from six years of politico-economic distress and an unresolved lack of dignified housing and basic services for refugees, Documenta 14 could amount to a spectacle where ‘the Germans,’ who have been vilified in the […]

What are the implications of media in today’s so-called post-truth society? Mediating technologies permeate everyday life, and rather than serving an emancipatory agenda, they tend to reinforce baked-in prejudices and ideological assumptions. Global media corporations like Google and Facebook extract billions of dollars of surplus value by exploiting their users’ self-generated, cultural and biometric information. […]

The black box gives commands outside the performers’ control, but of course within the execution of those commands there is an element of discretion…If the algorithm cannot know that skin is soft and glass is sharp, can it be malicious in creating the circumstances under which that violent incident occurred? Did the choreographers intentionally accelerate […]

In the last keynote conversation of transmediale 2016, Hito Steyerl presented a perplexing image to the audience. The classified material leaked by Edward Snowden seemingly presents little more than static, or noise. Encrypted, the image would traditionally require machine decryption to be read. But instead of revealing the photograph concealed behind it, Steyerl referred to […]

Wohnungsfrage, translated as “housing question”, is the title of the first major event within the long-term 100 Years of Now project at HKW Berlin. Bernd Scherer, director of the HKW, introduced the housing question as a kaleidoscope through which the world’s greatest problems become visible. Meanwhile, an unprecedented 60 million displaced persons worldwide have been […]

The stark Corbusian modernism of Berlin’s Tierheim – “animal home” – may seem a strange stylistic choice for a building meant to shelter homeless pets. Benjamin Busch visited the structure (actually built 2002, rather than 1962), to see how its uncompromising forms have fared with use, and found the solid monumental architecture with its programmatic […]