A Queer Theory of the State

Production of exhibitions and production of discourse on exhibitions.

With the paradigm of salon exhibitions, developed some three centuries ago, bourgeois art patrons were moved to transform their experience of an exhibition into words. This incitement to discourse persists as a central component of contemporary curatorial practice, within and beyond exhibitions as singular events. In On Discourse and the Curatorial, Mick Wilson draws out the link between the dual imperatives to generate discourse and to cultivate culture, which emerge in the genealogy of the salon, the exhibition complex, and the museum.

In the early 2010s, the idea of "the curatorial" arose after a short but intense debate about what it means to curate exhibitions. The books in the On the Curatorial series look at the consequences of that discussion today and ask: Do we need different curatorial tools to engage with deepening social, political, and ecological crises? The series allows earlier participants in the debate to reflect on how their concepts and practices have changed, while younger generations of curators explore the ongoing need for new conceptual approaches to curation.

The series is edited by Carolina Rito, who is professor of creative practice research at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities, Coventry University, UK, and executive editor of Contemporary Journal.

Mick Wilson is professor of art and director of doctoral studies at the University of Gothenburg and co-chair of the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary.

The current crisis of museums and the future of Institutional Critique.

Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critique has responded to the social embeddedness of art institutions by looking at the inner workings of such organizations. In After Institutions, Karen Archey expands the definition of Institutional Critique to develop a broader understanding of contemporary art's sociopolitical entanglements, looking beyond what cultural institutions were to what they are and what they might become.

Karen Archey is curator of contemporary art at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She is a 2015 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient for short-form writing. Since joining the Stedelijk Museum in April 2017, Archey has organized solo exhibitions by artists Rineke Dijkstra, Stefan Tcherepnin, Catherine Christer Hennix, Steffani Jemison, Metahaven, Jeff Preiss, Charlie Prodger, and Hito Steyerl. She has written numerous catalogue essays and is a contributor to several art publications, including Artforum and Frieze.

Art, empathy and political solidarity.

Can empathy deliver political change? Does art that elicits emotional identification with others take us where we need to go? In Imperfect Solidarities, writer and art historian Aruna D'Souza offers observations pulled from current events as well as contemporary art that suggest that a feeling of understanding or closeness based on emotion is an imperfect ground for solidarity. Empathy—and its correlate, love—is a distraction from the hard work that needs to be done to achieve justice. Rather, D'Souza contends, we need to imagine a form of political solidarity that is not based on empathy, but on the much more difficult obligation of care. When we can respect the unknowability of the other and still care for and with them, without translating ourselves into their terms, perhaps we will fare better at building political bridges.

Aruna D'Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board. Her writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Bookforum, Frieze, Momus, and Art in America, among other places. Her book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited), was named one of the best art books of 2018 by The New York Times. She is the recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for art journalism and a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant.

Love & Lightning: A Collection of Queer and Feminist Manifestos is a thematically ordered, inconclusive collection of queer, feminist and queer-feminist manifestos. Girls Like Us Magazine and author Sarah van Binsbergen have composed a publication showcasing the different forms a manifesto might have, from classical, activist formats to more poetic, associative texts. The manifestos highlighted in this book cross borders, forms and disciplines, refuse binary logics, transcend our concepts of time and space and surpass the neoliberal logic.

Love & Lightning does not claim to be a complete anthology, but it rather aims to show the myriad of ways manifestos can be composed, and what their legacy until this day is. It presents manifestos from 1851 until now, divided into eleven chapters, introduced in their socio-historical and geographical contexts, with many from Asia, Africa, Latin-America. Not only does this publication give new insight in the style of the manifesto, it aims to emancipate the reader to propose their own revolution, whether big or small.

Manifestos include: Ain’t I a Woman by Soujourner Truth; Work Will Not Save Us: An Asian American Crip Manifesto; Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey; The Manukan Declaration of the Indigenous Women’s Biodiversity Network; W.I.T.C.H. Manifesto; Fag Hags Fight Back!!!; Manifesto for Maintenance Art by Mierle Laderman-Ukeles; Dyke Manifesto from the Lesbian Avengers; Killjoy Manifesto by Sara Ahmed; Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation by Laboria Cuboniks; The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto from Sandy Stone; Refugia! Manifesto for Becoming Autonomous Zones by subRosa; Countersexual Manifesto from Paul B. Preciado; and many, many more.

This tale about seduction, obsession, family, and the confines of capitalism is one of director Pier Paolo Pasolini's most fascinating creations, based on his transcendent film of the same name.

Theorem is the most enigmatic of Pier Paolo Pasolini's four novels. The book started as a poem and took shape both as a work of fiction and a film, also called Theorem, released the same year. In short prose chapters interspersed with stark passages of poetry, Pasolini tells a story of transfiguration and trauma.

To the suburban mansion of a prosperous Milanese businessman comes a mysterious and beautiful young man who invites himself to stay. From the beginning he exercises a strange fascination on the inhabitants of the house, and soon everyone, from the busy father to the frustrated mother, from the yearning daughter to the weak-willed son to the housemaid from the country, has fallen in love with him. Then, as mysteriously as he appeared, the infatuating young man departs. How will these people he has touched so deeply do without him? Is there a passage out of the spiritual desert of modern capitalism into a new awakening, both of the senses and of the soul? Only questions remain at the end of a book that is at once a bedroom comedy, a political novel, and a religious parable.

Elizabeth Povinelli's anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In these essays, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishment of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.

The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet.

Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Motivated by personal revelations, Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as both architect and exemplar of the modern feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for the many queer women of letters to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with numerous people who knew her, Hilary Holladay digs deep into never-before-accessed sources to portray Rich in full dimension and vivid, human detail.

T is a long poem in multiple parts and its author's second book. “The two genders are YES and NO, so you stutter or else shut up forever”. 

From the Afterword: "Between 2017-2018 I was involved in a trial with a group of TERFs after a scuffle emerged during a counter protest against a ‘debate’ about sex-based rights in light of proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act which would have made trans people’s lives marginally easier. Luckily I wasn’t actually in the dock, but I appeared to give evidence, and for everyone involved it was a humiliating ordeal as we were doxxed, harrassed online and in real life, while the relentless media campaign which ensued took a toll on the entire trans community. The caricaturesque reduction of a complex interrelation of political positions, epistemologies, traumas and personal grievances into two ‘sides’ ultimately worked to further the persecution of trans people, but nevertheless highlighted a social logic on whose terms the so called debate was forced to appear: sex was pitted against gender (or more revealingly ‘gender identity’), objective biology against subjective ‘self-identification’, nature against culture, or perhaps, first nature against second nature."

What does a poet say (what does anyone say), when placed on the stand, how answer the binary logics forced like a cage in the legally-grounded violence which splittingly interrogates solidarity, the splitting invocation of law? In answer, T spreads across the page as if desperately finding a form for speech acts forced into a garrotted tick-box, a witness stand, video evidence, Nature’s originary disguise as history or vice versa, wrapped inside ‘common sense’ as a pronominal shroud, in the policing of body, speech, and every fungible fibre of being. The author writes: “I want the whole text to be a kind of horrific inorganic body with awkward parts, both to replay at the level of form some of the critiques of organicist thinking with reference to nature that the poem tries to articulate, and also, more glibly, to be somewhat like a trans body, awkwardly fitting together with some parts undercutting others”. An extended enquiry into Materialism and its material (fleshed) stakes, driven through the heart and to the heart of things, T sees lyric poem shudder to line-broken essay to fragment of play to citational drop; in tight compression sprawling, a poem whose argument is necessary and necessarily incomplete, poetry can do thinking, this thinking we do outside and within it, sprung trap, open and closing door.