After Institutions

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.

"Para- hosting" as a cooperative methodology for arts institutions.
What can established art institutions learn from small-scale organizations' approaches to invitation, hosting, and publicness? In Beyond Caring: Para-hosting as Curatorial Escape, Paul O'Neill explores how new forms of invitation can reimagine host–guest relations and open escape routes from fixed institutional roles. Moving between speculation, critique, and proposition, the essay introduces "para- hosting" as a cooperative methodology of generosity and self-organization without absorption. For O'Neill, para-hosting is a form of escape that enables transformative possibilities beyond existing power structures within institutions and otherwise.

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.

Paul O'Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer and educator. He is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS, a curatorial agency with a dedicated library, event space and reading room in Vallila Helsinki, since 2017.

Edited by Carolina Rito.
Contribution by Gerrie van Noord.

In Perpetual Slavery, Ciarán Finlayson investigates the relationship of art to freedom in the work of Cameron Rowland and Ralph Lemon, who both utilize imagery of labor haunted and structured by the historical experience of slavery.

Finlayson suggests that these two artists' work overcomes the dichotomy between the recording of history and its interpretation by making both the object of artistic experience, thereby providing a space to grasp the continuing effects of slavery.

Ciarán Finlayson is a writer and editor based in New York City. His essays have appeared in periodicals including Artforum, Bookforum, Papers on Language and Literature, Studio magazine, Kunst und Politik, PARSE, Archives of American Art Journal, and 032C. He is the managing editor of Blank Forms. His primary research is on contemporary art with emphases on Marxism, Black studies, philosophy of history, and conceptual art. He writes with the London-based Black Study Group and is a founding member of the political education collective Hic Rosa.

How queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state.

Queer theory has often been hesitant to align itself with a politics of the state, approaching it with a negative or pragmatic framework. A Queer Theory of the State offers a more optimistic perspective. Rather than eschew engagement with democratic theorizing, the historian Samuel Clowes Huneke asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answering this question, Huneke shows how the state is an integral component of a politics that seeks to subvert and undo the oppression of queer lives.

Samuel Clowes Huneke is assistant professor of history at George Mason University. His first book, States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (2022), won the Charles E. Smith Award for best book in European History from the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. Huneke has written for Boston Review, the Washington Post, The Point, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Nazareth Hassan’s devastatingly brilliant Slow mania is a powerful document of senses and sense-making where estrangement and ugliness meets longing and beauty. The artist begins with a photographic sequence: two white-blue sky panels; a shattered glass storefront window; a street gutter clutching leaves, smashed straw sleeves and plastic lids; then snow holding a disassembled red stained chest of drawers. These are the writer’s plinths where form as waste is configured: “smoggy breath thru burnt-edged holes tracking acid mucous inside your home.” Slow mania provokes through enumerative structures, for instance, “screening bodies” who keep a sex club’s gates open only to some: “…197 mmm maybe lemme think / 151 yes / 162 yes / 197 ok yes, but keep your shirt on.” The poet deftly folds human intimacy into interspecies metaphor: “The rat torso twitches in agreement. Across / the street, the flies continue to starve,” where “…you’re lost in your own hole: what did you find?” Hassan attends to this painful search, bearing witness to the disturbingly exultant, offering a radical state of being, in and out of which the stunning and timely Slow mania lives and thrives. — Ronaldo V. Wilson

Slow mania is resistance to resolution, it’s pointillistic magic, it’s Seurat in Bed-Stuy: the tighter you zoom, the more undifferentiated beauty you encounter. It’s kinky (the kinked-up curls of somebody’s greased-up chops). It’s tender (bruised and brown, like the overripe fruit that haunts your summer kitchen waiting to be crumbled into a crumble). The colors are blurry, the edges are soft, the stakes are high, and everything—everything!—shimmers in the space between life and afterlife. Hassan’s gaze is a hot summer steam that sneaks into the skinniest, stinkiest crevices; the grimiest seams, the most miraculous cracks. Breathe into the abyss, that’s the invitation. Take it in, let it in. Be a wit(h)ness to every single being. — Steffani Jemison

This amazing book reads like a synesthetic performance, the only thing missing is the smell of sweat, of streets, of loss. A book of choreographed pages, scores, movements, image blur, hand-scribbles. The bleak, unsparing texts hidden among the materials turn out to be the record of sudden eruptions, violent street scenes, pick-up scenes, unclear dialogues, insults, self-debasing verbal injuries on repeat. The performers are racialized, sexualized, anonymized “persons,” “meats,” numbers, lovers, passers-by, all caught up in these dangerous yet desperately emotional and triggering dances at the limit. It will leave you raw, spaced-out, both roused and alarmed as though coming out of an intoxicating show, and wanting more. — Caroline Bergvall

In response to surges of violent British nationalism and political paranoia around borders, and to related social and ethical crises, JT Welsch and Ágnes Lehóczky have assembled an anthology to mark the vital contribution of non-UK-born writers to this country’s poetry culture. Wretched Strangers brings together innovative writing from around the globe, celebrating the irreducible diversity such work brings to ‘British’ poetry. While documenting the challenges faced by writers from elsewhere, these pieces offer hopeful re-conceptions of ‘shared foreignness’ as Lila Matsumoto describes it, and the ‘peculiar state of exiled human,’ in Fawzi Karim’s words.

The book is published by Boiler House Press to commemorate the anniversary of the June 2016 EU Referendum and in solidarity through struggles ongoing and to come. Proceeds will be donated to charities fighting for the rights of refugees.

Alireza Abiz • Astrid Alben • Tim Atkins • Andre Bagoo • Veronica Barnsley • Khairani Barokka • Leire Barrera-Medrano • Katherine E. Bash • Áine Belton • Caroline Bergvall • Sujata Bhatt • Rachel Blau DuPlessis • Fióna Bolger • Ben Borek • Andrea Brady • Serena Braida • Wilson Bueno • James Byrne • Kimberly Campanello • J.R. Carpenter • Mary Jean Chan • che • Matthew Cheeseman • Iris Colomb • Giovanna Coppola • Anne Laure Coxam • Sara Crangle • Emily Critchley • Ailbhe Darcy • Nia Davies • Tim Dooley • Benjamin Dorey • Angelina D’Roza • Katherine Ebury • Dan Eltringham • Ruth Fainlight • Kit Fan • León Felipe • Alicia Fernández • Veronica Fibisan • Steven J Fowler • Livia Franchini • Ulli Freer • Anastasia Freygang • Kit Fryatt • Monika Genova • Geoff Gilbert • Peter Gizzi • Chris Gutkind • Cory Hanafin • Edmund Hardy • David Herd • Jeff Hilson • Áilbhe Hines • Alex Houen • Anthony Howell • Nasser Hussain • Zainab Ismail • Maria Jastrzębska • Lisa Jeschke • Evan Jones • Loma Sylvana Jones • Maria Kardel • Fawzi Karim • Kapka Kassabova • Özgecan Kesici • Mimi Khalvati • Robert Kiely • Michael Kindellan • Igor Klikovac • Ágnes Lehóczky • Éireann Lorsung • Patrick Loughnane • John McAuliffe • Aodán McCardle • Niall McDevitt • Luke McMullan • Christodoulos Makris • Ethel Maqeda • Lila Matsumoto • Luna Montenegro • Stephen Mooney • Ghazal Mosadeq • Erín Moure • Vivek Narayanan • Cristina Navazo-Eguía Newton • Alice Notley • Terry O’Connor • Wanda O’Connor • Gizem Okulu • Claire Orchard • Daniele Pantano • Astra Papachristodoulou • Fani Papageorgiou • Richard Parker • Sandeep Parmar • Albert Pellicer • Pascale Petit • Adam Piette • Jèssica Pujol Duran • Alonso Quesada • Ariadne Radi Cor • Nat Raha • Nisha Ramayya • Peter Robinson • William Rowe • Lisa Samuels • Jaya Savige • Ana Seferovic • Sophie Seita • Seni Seneviratne • Timea Sipos • Zoë Skoulding • Irene Solà • Samuel Solomon • Agnieszka Studzinska • James Sutherland-Smith • George Szirtes • Rebecca Tamás • Harriet Tarlo • Shirin Teifouri • Virna Teixeira • David Toms • Sara Torres • Kinga Toth • Claire Trévien • David Troupes • Arto Vaun • Juha Virtanen • J. T. Welsch • David Wheatley • Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese • Jennifer Wong • Isaac Xubín • Jane Yeh

In this new collected edition of his recent articles, Simon Critchley - one of the most important living philosophers - takes us through his reflections on death, questions of doubt and reason, the legacy of David Bowie, the nature of fear and empathy in a broken society and a critique of narrative identity - among other things. YOUR LIFE IS NOT A STORY explores the contemporary world and its psychological impact on us, offering us a way to see our situation different and resist its tricks and contrivances.

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

Look at Hazards, Look at Losses developed out of a series of conversations, exchanges and visits between kuda.org, Anthony Iles and Marina Vishmidt over 2015-2017 through which different approaches to common problems of cultural production in early-21st century Europe and its peripheries were debated and conceptually probed. Setting out from Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of ‘the aesthetic relations of production’ these discussions proceeded to explore problems bearing upon organisation in small groups in the field of culture, philosophical idealism and materialism, poetry, error and crisis.

The anthology assembled reflects these concerns through engagement with the writing of others who have helped orientate us through these discussions. The book which is the outcome consists of seven original contributions by poets and theorists which attempt to move toward new political interventions in culture and beyond ‘crisis as a way of life’.

Entropia (vol. I & II) – written by William Kherbek and edited in collaboration with Jack Clarke – is a publication which seeks to recount and re-examine a decade of artistic curation, production, and critique between London, Berlin, and other urban art centres from 2010 to 2020.

Comprised of two volumes, this publication contains a compendium of over one hundred reviews and interviews with luminaries of contemporary art (Vol I), as well as a speculative attempt to create a newly generated algorithmic art(ificial) critic (Vol II). Together they serve to document, excoriate, and theorise an art world which is simultaneously hegemonic and precarious, complicit and constructive, driven by values, yet fed by extraction, all filtered through Kherbek’s precise, aphoristic, acerbic, lens.

The publications include contextual contributions from both Josie Thaddeus-Johns, writer for the New York Times, The Financial Times, Frieze; and Rozsa Farkas, director of London-based gallery Arcadia Missa.