Shells: the power of oceanic memories. The carcasses of animals. The origins of plants. A beehive. An axe. Needle and string. Toward a new museology.
Today we celebrate the 2450th birthday of Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching. In 2016 the book inspired the use of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) to genetically modify the “plastic-munching microbe,” Ideonella sakaiensis, isolating enzymes responsible for dissolving polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Now we depend on these scientifically engineered creatures to […]
Dear Yervant, This will be my last post to and for you. As I reach this point in tomorrow’s presentation to the audience of the Italian Cinema(s) Abroad conference, I am sure that I will be running out of time and the moderator will either have already or be about to hold up the ‘5 […]
Dear Yervant, I know it would be easier to follow-up on yesterday’s post about how Pays Barbare and its documenting of a ‘horrible normalcy’, itself and as part of the KEIMENA Public TV program, by directly addressing the question of fascism – then and now. In fact, you do so yourself in your voice-over, when […]
Dear Yervant, I am going to try to keep this post short, not only for our future audience at the Italian Cinema(s) Abroad conference, but also because I am grappling with some difficult news and my head is elsewhere right now. As promised yesterday, I will try to contextualize Pays Barbare within other films shown […]
Dear Yervant, I hope this finds you well. I realized that I was somewhat vague in yesterday’s post when I wrote about what would constitute a more “nuanced understanding of audience” for your contributions to documenta 14, specifically the screening of Pays Barbare as part of the Public TV program KEIMENA. Allow me to spend […]
Dear Yervant Gianikian, I hope this finds you well and you don’t mind me writing out of the blue. I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at Ohio State University and I write this blog, Minus Plato as part of my research into the 2017 exhibition documenta 14, […]
While waiting at the Dubai International Airport after three whirlwind days at the opening of Sharjah Biennial 14 (hereafter SB14), I found myself idly looking back over my Instagram posts from the exhibition. Even though I had taken hundreds of photographs, videos and audio recordings of my experience at the exhibition, I had only shared […]
It is official, the next Documenta, to be held in 2022, has a new Artistic Director (or directors): the Indonesian artistic collective ruangrupa. (See here for the reports from ART News, Artforum and The Art Newspaper). This exciting announcement has a transformative effect on my ongoing project to examine the legacies of documenta 14 and […]
This coming Friday, February 22nd 2019, the Artistic Director for Documenta 15 (scheduled for 2022) will be announced (for more details – in German – go here). In preparation, let us look back to November 22nd 2013, to the moment that Adam Szymczyk was appointed Artistic Director for documenta 14. You can read the official […]