Interfaces: Women/Autobiography/image/Performance

In this pocket publication Flanders Arts Institute examines new ways of working internationally in the arts. Joris Janssens collects insights and light bulb moments from the research & development trajectory (Re)framing the International.

Documents the work of fourteen performance artists who marked the personal and political resonances of the new Millennium in a series of site-specific actions. Contrasting with the epic, populist and homogenising nature of the official celebrations, these works focused on forgotten and ephemeral experiences, enacting small but significant interventions in the public sphere.

Yoko Ono is an artist who has made an indelible mark on contemporary culture and political activism through her radical and innovative practice. This remarkable and essential publication, developed n collaboration with Yoko Ono and her studio, traces in full the evolution of an artist whose visionary spirit has transcended boundaries and challenged conventions. In Music of the Mind, explore the world of Yoko Ono and discover the profound impact of her art on the collective consciousness of our time.

The function of the critic and the function of the artist have been traditionally divided; the artist’s concern was the production of the work and the critic’s was its evaluation and interpretation. During the past several years a group of young artists evolved the idiom of Conceptual Art, which eliminated this division. Conceptual artists take over the role of the critic in terms of framing their own propositions, ideas, and concepts.

An essential aspect of Conceptual Art is its self-reference; often the artists define the intentions of their work as part of their art. Thus, many Conceptual artists advance propositions or investigations. It is in keeping, then, with Conceptual Art that it is best explained through itself, i.e., through the examination of Conceptual Art, rather than through any assumptions outside of itself. In this sense, this book is not a “critical anthology” but a documentation of Conceptual Art and Statements.

Wait it Out is published in relation to the research and preparations made for Sandra Johnson’s solo exhibition at Project Arts Centre in 2019 with newly commissioned works. Through an extensive conversation between the artist and curator, editor Livia Paldi, and additional texts and visual documentation the book presents a rich trajectory and variety of reflections to relate to the exhibition and performance at Project, as well as the pre-history that undergirds the project with special focus on Johnson’s work in Dublin during the 1990s.

Before we begin to practice self-design, we find ourselves already designed by the gaze of others. That is why the practice of self-design mostly takes a critical and confrontational turn. We want to bring others to see us in the way we want to be seen – not only during our earthly life but also after our death. This is a complicated struggle, and the aim of this book is to describe and analyze it.

This book proposes a provocative interpretation of the relationship between the normative imagination defined as a cognitive mode characteristic of the era of affective capitalism. Porta analyzes gender, fashion, artistic creation, and surveillance from the perspective of a regulatory drive, a continuously renovated and imperative push for normalcy that now comes not from the state or mass media, but from citizens themselves. These, united in a spontaneous popular court, armed with smartphones, and driven by a juridical compulsion, become the axes of societies of control. In this way, the distinctive pathology of our times gives rise to a globalized game: normopathy for all.

A critical exploration of the creative practice, socio-historical context and cultural impact of multifaceted artist Leigh Bowery. Engaging with Bowery’s key looks and live art through a variety of disciplines and challenging research contexts, Sofia Vranou navigates costuming as a performative strategy that blurs the boundaries between art and life.

Thought-provoking and enlightening, the study investigates his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire as well as his fascination with extremity, hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language, establishing Bowery as a radical figure in contemporary perfromance and queer visual culture.

This book is in Italian.

“Italian Performance Art” embarks on the adventure of rendering the unspeakable in performance through text, the revelation of a tension of being in a discursive and communicative mode that is like putting into words Lucio Fontana’s Gesture on canvas or John Cage’s Silence in music. Structured with contributions from leading researchers (Brunelli, Fontana, Frangione, Lupieri, Rossini, Sullo) and a substantial historical and bibliographical apparatus (Fontana, Merega, Rossini), the work is the first publication to comprehensively address the situation of performance art in Italy, offering a comprehensive framework and tracing the main historical reference points. Starting with Futurism, through the action poetry of the twentieth-century neo-avant-garde and Body Art, it defines the most recent relationships between creative gesture and new technologies. The volume includes a collection of theoretical and critical essays and a section of color monographic notes illustrating the work of those artists continuously involved in the field of performance art.

This Workbook is the result of RESHAPE – REflect, SHAre, Practice, Experiment, a bottom-up, collaborative research and development project that brought together artists, art workers, and organisations from Europe and the southern Mediterranean to create alternative ways of working towards a fairer arts ecosystem. The project was a response to the challenges of the art sector, infusing its practices with fairness, solidarity, and sustainability and aligning them with with society and its evolutions. The authors – including artists, scholars, and critical thinkers – analyse and contextualise current challenges, thus outlining the spirit of our times that informs and inspires the prototypes.

What position does America occupy in the recent history of western philosophy?

At a time when the syntagm “America” has come to crystallize a certain understanding of the world order, interrogating the place that it occupies in our intellectual and haunted tradition is also a way to engage critically with the violence attached to it. America’s self-understanding involves violence, but this violence may well be different from what we imagined.

This book is a philosophical essay on the sun. It draws on Georges Bataille’s theories of the solar economy and solar violence and demonstrates their relevance to a world affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.

Taking a step from solar economy to solar politics, Timofeeva locates the grounds for it in solidarity with nature, treated neither as a master nor as a slave, but as a comrade.

The book will appeal to students, academics, artists, and other readers interested in the philosophy of nature, ecology, social and political theory, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and the humanities generally.