On Discourse and the Curatorial

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.

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.

Excerpts from Caren Beilin’s 2019 essay/memoir about reproductive health and the IUD, gendered illness, medical gaslighting, and activism in the chronic illness community.

“The moon is hollow. The moon is hollow says a certain contingent of people, because of aliens (and, also, the moon has experienced bangs on its surface that have apparently made it ring just like a bell).
These people are conspiracy theorists. Paranoid, conclusive, certain. Too certain. They connect the dots with their eager, enormous chalk. They want something to be true. They want, I think, something new to be true, and they are taken (as I am) with the moon being like a bell, two phonemes, moon, bell, beautiful and struck across each other’s false armor, mutable and beautiful.
The moon is a bell, as the theorist Georges Bataille, in 1931, said, ‘The sun is an anus.’ He was arguing about the beauty – the absolute energy – of the copula.

‘The verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy,’ he wrote, the year that Benjamin unpacked his library, alone. The moon is a bell, and I believe this absolutely, sure. The IUD is the RA. The sexual force of the verb, is, to be, of my verbacious being, will knock any noun into the moon and beyond. Everything is a parody, can be anything. The moon is hollow and made of muleskin. The moon is hollow, insofar as it is coated with the agglutinate, the shining coat, of a limit. I cannot go into the moon with my eyesight. I can’t enter my womb from that time (in November 2015) and sit crosslegged by the device, at the base of its suspending embedding, in the oaty red fist of my uterus, and watch the metal loam off its rigid cross-branch – and leech into tissues and activate, or reanimate, flare, or push over my problem. I can’t spy the center of the inception or the core of my being. I only know the timing. My health deteriorated rapidly after it was in, and I know how horrible it is, to cease planning for trips, outings, applications, or children, waiting and watching for how bad and how soon, and that the moon is hollow

This pamphlet excerpts from Blackfishing the IUD, published in 2019 by Wolfman Books, Oakland. With thanks to Caren Beilin, Jacob Kahn, and Justin Carder.

A rigorous and mind-blowing account of the dynamics of capitalism today through an in-depth exposition of software, speculative finance, and the highest scales of arbitrage.

At the centre of Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo's argument is the idea that capital does not belong to humans, it belongs to—and is governed by—itself. Traditional economic theory struggles to keep up with the rapid rate of acceleration, and this book steps in to address this:

"The critical orthodoxy is slowing; it's tired, it's not especially good at the internet, it's probably never manned a Starbucks counter or an anonymous cubicle. Its younger adepts—though digitally native—are chronically underemployed, unavailable, drowning in the student debt (or student opportunity cost) required for entry into the critical apparatus. Few have any patience for the numbing slop-speak of the LinkedIn economy, the libertarian enclave of forex and HFT and memecoins, the quarter-zip depravity of employment at the charnel houses of McKinsey or Deloitte or Accenture, the blazingly random mood-swings of venture capital that lubricate all of the above. This impatience is—in the parlance of the above—a blocker: it means that the critical apparatus underestimates the power of the software economy, struggles to articulate the morphological density of digitally-realized capitalism, comprehensively ignores the functional death of labor, and doesn't understand scale."

Introduction by Charles Mudede.
Afterword by Alex Quicho.

"A masterpiece... Nick Land for adults."
— 0nty

A collection of twenty-six abécédaire missives by Sharon Kivland, written and sent daily to the editors (MS & AWL) between Friday 7 February and Tuesday 4 March 2025. Interjected with melancholic ‘Mes horizons’ postcard erasures and an insert of abcedminded replies by Matthew Stuart titled ‘A Letter Always Suggests a Word’, this publication is both a standalone edition and precursor to BFTK#8, which focuses on letters (alphabets) and letters (correspondence). 

‘These are Addressed to You’ addresses what it means to be addressed and to address, to write with love and scorn, to seal with a kiss and conceal impressions and hair within a letter’s folds, to inscribe with ink and thread, to speak with and to those we admire. Drawing on / from Freud and Lacan, Joyce and Carringdon, Camille Corot and many more, these letters are about writing and reading, about language falling and bumping you on the head.

Before making his first films in the 1950s, Chris Marker was a regular contributor to the Paris-based magazine Esprit from 1946 to 1952. Unbound by genre or form, Marker's pieces range from short stories, essays, poems, and reviews to fabricated reportage and invented news affairs, all gemmed with the hallmarks of his style: a blurring of reality and imagination, a wry sense of humor, a sustained political engagement, and, of course, a limitless curiosity for animal life.

Eternal current events marks the first time these exemplary works are available in English, published in an adapted facsimile of the original periodical. In these short selections, what one encounters is less a past life before his turn toward cinema than a preamble to his celebrated body of work. Moving images did not replace Marker’s production as a writer but were incorporated into it. Before the “imaginary films” there were “imaginary current events”; before the travels through time in La Jetée there was a bulletin rethinking the psychogeography of the around-the-world trip; and before the musings on a Japanese temple consecrated to cats in Sans Soleil, there was a summary report on the theological implications of the 1952 Parisian Cat Fair. Marker did not just begin his career as a writer, he remained one throughout his life.

Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins offers an in-depth look at nearly two decades of artistic output by the Palestinian artist and filmmaker Basma al-Sharif. Retracing her practice from recent works back to her earliest experiments, the book provides an original overview of how her visual language and conceptual concerns have evolved over time.

Basma al-Sharif's films and installations navigate the unstable terrains of displacement, colonialism, and representation—often shaped by the ongoing reality of the occupation of Palestine. Through a rich selection of images and curatorial essays, the monograph highlights the layered political and cinematic frameworks within which her works are embedded.

Also included are two newly commissioned literary contributions: a fictional piece by Karim Kattan that resonates with the themes of place and estrangement, and a conversation between al-Sharif and the artist Diego Marcon, in which they reflect on shared affinities, artistic processes, and their long-standing dialogue. Blurring the personal and the political, the real and the imagined, Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins captures the complexity and urgency of al-Sharif's artistic journey.

Texts by Basma al-Sharif, Karim Kattan, Diego Marcon, et al.

Basma al-Sharif (born 1983 in Koweit) is a Palestinian artist working in cinema and installation. She developed her practice nomadically between the Middle East, Europe, and North America and is currently based in Berlin. Her practice looks at cyclical political conflicts and confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.