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Arts

Pioneering!

"Trying to compete in the economy of attention from the field of contemporary art is a naive goal in the twenty-first century."

Fiction

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first…

Discourse

Haifa’s architectural modernism

Ines Weizman synchronises different narratives that have been swept away by the chaotic hurricanes of time.

Middle East
Israel
history of architecture
memory

Humanities

Questioning the United Fruit Company archive

On the very make-up of the United Fruit Company’s neocolonial plantation machine

history of media
archive
Caribbean
cultural studies
photography
capitalism

Magazine

Surrogacies

Myths and visions of motherhood and fathering, brings together artistic and theoretical positions on reproduction and communication, gender and genus, addressing and conception.

queer theory
father figure
contemporary art
aesthetics
feminism
body
mother figure
motherhood
gender

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ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:<br>Art, Magazine, Books

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

New releases

Karin Gludovatz, Matthias Warstat, ...: Intervenierende Künste

Eva Backhaus (ed.), Grit Dommes (ed.), ...: Dynamics of the Intransitive

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback (ed.), David Payne (ed.): Breaking Grounds

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: In Touch: Encounters between Art and Research

Observing the Spectator

Article

Complicity in Spectatorship

The special case of lustful murdering soldiers of King Herod and the introduction of spectators on frescos by Giotto and pulpits by the Pisani are at the core of this contribution, which poses the question: How is cruelty visualized in Italy around 1300? The introduction of detached spectators in opposition...

Beate Fricke

Complicity in Spectatorship

Article

The Invented Beholder: Allegorical Powers of Persuasion as Visual Strategy

It is not just the painting that needs a beholder. The allegorical literature at the end of the Middle Ages is addressed to listeners as well as to spectators: the elaborated tableaux developed at the mind’s eye implicitly address a large audience. The prototypic description of paintings on the gardenwalls...

Cornelia Logemann

The Invented Audience

Anthology

Kunst und Gesellschaft

Die Ausstellung ist in den letzten Jahrzehnten zu einem der erfolgreichsten kulturellen Ereignisse avanciert. So zumindest scheint es angesichts der Vielzahl neuer Museumsbauten, der globalen Verbreitung sogenannter Biennalen und dem zunehmenden Maß an medialer und diskursiver Aufmerksamkeit, das der bildenden Kunst zuteil wird. Worin aber gründet dieser Erfolg? Welche gesellschaftliche...

Carolin Meister (ed.), Dorothea von Hantelmann (ed.)

Die Ausstellung

Article

The Relentlessness of Perspective. A Look at the Bystanders in 15th-Century Italian Painting

In the center of this article stands Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ. The enigmatic painting has been the object of innumerable interpretations; while for the most part, research has focused on the identification of the three prominent figures in the foreground, this article suggests that it is not the...

Urte Krass

Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit

A coffin to bury the statues of the ancestors

I was initially slightly sceptical of the ramifications and undertones of Renzo Martens’ project in central Congo…

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colonialism
museum
sculpture
colonial history
Africa
contemporary art

Current Texts

Hurrah!

We rehearsed the crowd scenes in the Winter Palace, in the Throne Room and the Armorial Hall.

ABO

Current Texts

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? OPEN
ACCESS

Tyler Coburn

However convincingly space agencies justify the enormous budgets, there’s one gratuitous expense: training astronauts for free fall. ABO

Ute Holl

“Communism will be when we understand something of love.” OPEN
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Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

“I don’t believe in progress, no.” OPEN
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Arts

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

DIAPHANES Magazine No. 11

This issue explores practices of human and non-human substitution.

What claims the place of the nuclear family in the face of hybrid kinships and social freezing? What could new elective kinships be in times of chatbots and pseudonymisation? Is this the time for surrogate mother tongues and extra-human rhetorics of surrogation? Sophie Lewis claims a gestational communism and hunts our grannies. Barbara Vinken reflects on spiritual motherhood, Luciana Parisi on human automata and gendered proxies. For Zuzana Cela, language is a foreign body that can be invaginated. Werner Hamacher strolls...

gender
motherhood
body
mother figure
contemporary art

Arts

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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Simon Critchley

Iggy showed the error of human existence, the breathless nearness of death, and the lure of fun and action. He was like a much better-looking version of Schopenhauer. ABO

To lay a hand on the shoulder of future victims…

Donatien Grau, Pierre Guyotat

»By using voices I have rediscovered what we call humanity.« OPEN
ACCESS

»Three hundred people left The House that Jack Built. I think that’s very good, and it wasn’t Cannes.« ABO DE

Arts

Zoran Terzić

Symbolical transplants are necessary

Strangeness is everywhere, but strangers are only where we define them.

ABO DE FR

Arts

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.”

OPEN
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documenta
ethics
concentration camp
contemporary art
Poland
National Socialism
migration
propaganda
gift
political aesthetics

Authors

Fiction

An immodest proposal

Stephen Barber

A War of Fragments: World Versus America

J.G. Ballard’s self-declared ‘Immodest Proposal’ for a global war-alliance to exact the destruction of America demonstrates the provocatory zeal of his last fiction plans, as well as their enduring prescience. As Ballard emphasises several times in the World Versus America notebooks, he is utterly serious in his concerns and visions. Although the Ballard estate declined permission for any images of pages from the World Versus America archival notebooks to accompany this essay, any member of the general public interested to do...

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Fiction

Pierre Guyotat

“This text was written at the end of 1962, after my return from Algeria. For me the text is the matrix for Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats.” P.G. OPEN
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Jean-Luc Nancy

غریبه‌ها غریبه‌ها

ازخودبیگانه‌ ها راه‌ گم‌کرده‌ ها از کدامین اصل نامرئی؟ OPEN
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Jochen Thermann

I really should not have hired him…

Waldemar—well, that was not actually his name… ABO DE FR

Rolf Bossart, Milo Rau

We are bodies. It makes no sense to debate this. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Fiction

Stephen Barber

Twenty-four hours in state of unconsciousness

Now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself…

Now the dead will no longer be buried, now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself, now human bodies will expectorate fury and envision their own transformation or negation, now infinite and untold catastrophes are imminently on their way —ready to cross the bridge over the river Aire and engulf us all — in this winter of discontent, just beginning at this dead-of-night instant before midnight, North-Sea ice-particles already crackling in the air and the last summer long-over, the final moment of my seventeenth birthday, so we have to go, the devil is at our heels… And now we’re running at full-tilt through the centre of the city, across the square beneath the Purbeck-marble edifice of the Queen’s Hotel, down towards the dark arches under the railway tracks, the illuminated sky shaking, the air fissured with beating cacophony,...

ABO

Fiction

Kim Gordon

It was another 75° day in LA.

Where do you go when you disappear?

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Authors

Books

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): A Sinister Assassin

Frédéric Morlot, Anne-Margot Ramstein: Albert Einstein's Bright Ideas

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): The Human Face and Other Writings on His Drawings

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Artaud the Mômo

Discourse

Digital disrupture

Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

The machine remains alien to any mechanical limitation.

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result...

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Discourse

Slavs and Tatars

To what extent can a revolution of the inner world impact the external, material world surrounding us? OPEN
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Dan-el Padilla Peralta

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
ACCESS

Sylvia Sasse

“Lifestyle must conform to the above-named circles of persons or be easily adapted,” “artistic talent,” “strong general education.” OPEN
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Mengia Tschalaer

“The sexual asylum story is everything,” OPEN
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Discourse

Marie Glassl, Sophie Lewis

On Gestational Communism

“If you love your family, you want family abolition for them!”

ABO DE

social movements
family
birth
community
critique of neoliberalism
motherhood
communism

Discourse

Sina Dell’Anno

The Disobedience of the Word

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.”

OPEN
ACCESS DE

Authors

Books

Tom McCarthy: Recessional—Or, the Time of the Hammer

Philippe Despoix (ed.), Siegfried Kracauer, ...: The Past's Threshold

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Artaud 1937 Apocalypse

Sebastián Eduardo Dávila (ed.), Rebecca Hanna John (ed.), ...: On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices

Humanities

The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization

Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...

Liquidity, Flows, Circulation

Today, it has become a truism that capital circulates, that data, populations and materials flow, that money offers liquidity.

Today, it has become a truism that capital circulates, that data, populations and materials flow, that money offers liquidity. These terms appear crucial for any description of our contemporary situation, whether in economics, media studies, or contemporary art. This book asks whether the preponderance of talk of flow, liquidity, and circulation is an expression of the cultural logic of today’s environmental capitalism.

capitalism
digital media
art
cultural critic
digital culture

Humanities

Alexander García Düttmann

Can contemporary theatre recognize itself in the boxing ring so that its fist, the fist of the past, strikes a forceful and violent blow? ABO DE

Sandra Frimmel

What does it mean? ABO DE

Sina Dell’Anno

The rebellion of the signifiers against their semantic taming OPEN
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Marcus Quent

Belief in the world is what we most lack.

Is it possible to regain a lost belief? Is it possible to do as we will with belief? OPEN
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Humanities

Nothing is at home

Philosophy is found wanting. It is considered anachronistic, some say dead. The tradition is in ruins.

ABO

Modernism
aesthetics
art theory
phenomenology
art

Humanities

Barbara Basting

Based on a brilliant trick

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s closeness to fascism has put him in a dubious light. Barbara Basting tells of her personal fascination with futurism and her dehabituation from its aura and central figure.

ABO DE