Perpetual Slavery

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.

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.

A manifesto against the current moralizing trend in the arts.

Should art be determined by political ideals? In recent decades art institutions have sought to embody liberal values of universal equality and social justice. This move toward greater inclusivity has borne witness to a countervailing trend: artworks are increasingly scrutinized for their political implications, and artists must take care not to transgress particular moral fault lines.

Examining contemporary exhibitions as well as works of art and film, and the broader cultural reactions to them, Rosanna McLaughlin investigates the consequences of this moralizing approach to creative work. She invites us to rethink the connection between political values and art—and to ask whether a relationship between them should exist at all. In arguing against morality in the arts, McLaughlin lays the groundwork for a more expansive concept of difference in twenty-first-century art making.

"What if ambivalences were seen as productive, and not a danger to erase? Would we not begin to know ourselves better? What is it that we are so afraid of finding out? Art is a testing ground for ideas, a means of reaching. What a shame, if we use the space it offers to destroy it entirely."

Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer based in East Sussex and the author of Double-Tracking: Studies in Duplicity (2019) and Sinkhole (2023). Her writing on art and culture has featured in ArtReview, Frieze, Granta, The Guardian, and The White Review, among other publications. Between 2021 and 2023 she was co-editor of The White Review.

Composed of stories, fragmentary essays, and even press releases Stagg has been commissioned to write, Artless captures the media landscape lived and generated in New York during the past half decade. Since the 2016 publication of her debut novel Surveys, Stagg has positioned herself as an in-demand expert on, and critic of, the psychic experience of self-mythology within the cruelly optimistic metaverse of infinite branding. Part voyeur and part participant, Stagg continues her exploration of the branded identity and its elusive, bottomless desire for authenticity.

Natasha Stagg is the author of a novel, Surveys, and a collection, Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019. Her essays have appeared in the books Excellences and Perfections, Link in Bio: Art After Social Media, You Had To Be There: Rape Jokes, Intersubjectivity Vol. II: Scripting the Human, and 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art: The Present in Drag, among others.

The success of new far-right movements cannot be explained by fear or rage alone – the pleasures of aggression and violence are just as essential. As such, racism is particularly intense when it is erotically charged, migration presenting as a sexual threat to white women being one of many examples. Germany’s strikingly successful right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland is, according to the historian Dagmar Herzog, characterized by this “sexy racism,” with its second main feature being that of an obsessive antidisability hostility—both elements resonating strongly with Nazism. In The New Fascist Body, Herzog connects her analysis of fascism’s libidinous energy with its animus against bodies perceived as imperfect. Only by studying the emotional and intellectual worlds of past fascisms can we understand and combat their current manifestations.

The book features an afterword by Alberto Toscano, author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso 2023).

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.

A manuscript shortlisted for the inaugural edition of the Prototype Prize, 2024, a eulogy to the sonic influence and cultural inferences of the sound of the cicada. A train of thought on the multiform significations and significance of the cicada’s buzz and hum; a dissection and deconstruction of the insect as emblem; a wild and associative suite of fragments on the evocations of background noise when brought to the fore.

Milo Thesiger Meacham’s Audible Heat is a rich, meditative ecotone of ideas; a nimble and associative work of essayism that aims to map a reticulated cultural biography of the sound of the cicada. Equal parts academic argument, travelogue, and critical collage, this synthesis of ideas pulls upon a wide-ranging bibliography of materials to examine the omnipresent sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ throughout human history and culture. Herein, this climatic sound acts as a conduit between ecology, identity and mortality, and the cicada’s sonic inference emerges as a codification of the unknown and unfamiliar—as a spiritual weathervane in desert settings—and as a means of teasing out the sensorial limits of human understanding.

Thesiger-Meacham sits himself in a field of enquiry and in dialogue with voices various, ancient, and modern, such as Douglas Yanega of the University of California, folk musician Matthias Loibner, and Gene Kritsky, developer of Cicada Safari, a public app which tracks the mass emergence of periodical cicadas across North America, in a transversal network of interlinked, informational nodes.

Herein, we’ve the sonic-induced anxieties of 17th, 18th and 19th-century colonists in Northeastern America—notably the largely unknown career of entomologist Margaretta Morris—and the apocalyptic premonitions of the indigenous Wampanoag; Greek tongue twisters; the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby; African American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock; Socrates' fear of dehydration; the geopolitical tensions embedded in Southern Spain as Al-Andalus (سُلَدْنَألا); Plato’s Phaedrus; a history of the hurdy-gurdy; Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy; contemporary and historical entomologies; the slurred, slow body language of Clint Eastwood; insects on the film sets of Sergio Leone's Spanish Westerns; squinting; tanning; metamorphosis; acts of violence in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); military reenactments of the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE); the botanist Donald C. Peattie’s existential dread; ancient cooking implements; riverside trees hills, and their symmetric reflections in still water…

All ideas emanating from the acoustical atmospherics inherent to the cicada’s song.

What can we know, and what remains beyond our reach? 

In 1979, Annie Dillard witnessed the solar eclipse in Yakima, Washington. In Total Eclipse this celestial event becomes a metaphysical reckoning. With lyrical precision and eerie clarity, Dillard unforgettably evokes the strangeness of the shifting sky and the psychic dislocation that descends with the shadow. 

The quiet yet epic unravelling of the familiar becomes revelation: a rupture in time, a confrontation with mortality and a brush with the sublime. Juxtaposing the cosmic and the mundane, Total Eclipse meditates on the limits of perception and language, entering the surreal intensity of the phenomenon to emerge with the brief, blazing clarity offered by darkness. 

Foreword by Himali Singh Soin
Images by Mark Lowe