Art Workers: Material Conditions and Labour Struggles in Contemporary Art Practice (2015)

“The Art Workers book presents case studies from the local art contexts of Estonia, Finland and Sweden, collects artist-testimonies, discusses activist practices and maps out contemporary and historical forms of organising within the international art field.

The Art Workers identity typography is a grotesk, a typeface originating from industrialism, combined with the digitally manipulated DIY aesthetics of our time. The typography reflects the urgency of handmade signage made for protesting, and nods towards the working class movement in the beginning of industralisation.”

With contributions by Corina L. Apostol, Michael Baers, Fokus Grupa, Minna Heikinaho, Vladan Jeremić, Elina Juopperi, Jussi Kivi, Barbora Kleinhamplová, Jussi Koitela, Raakel Kuukka, Marge Monko, Zoran Popović, Precarious Workers Brigade, Taaniel Raudsepp & Sigrid Viir, Krisdy Shindler, Tereza Stejskalová, Lotta Tenhunen.

Edited by Minna Henriksson, Erik Krikortz and Airi Triisberg
Publisher Konst-ig, Stockholm, 2015
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license
ISBN 9789163779466
232 pages

Project website
WorldCat

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GIFs

Wu Hung (ed.): Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (2010)

This sourcebook and anthology is “a collection of selected texts that includes artists’ manifestos, exhibition catalogue texts, essays by critics, and interviews with key artists, many of them available in English translation for the first time. Arranged in chronological order and framed by contextual explanations, these documents guide readers through the developments in the Chinese art scene from the late 1970s to the 2000s.”

Edited with the assistance of Peggy Wang
Publisher Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010
ISBN 9780822349433, 0822349434
xvi+455 pages

Reviews: Bloomer (China J 2011), Winterton (Taipei Times 2011), Pearlman (Leonardo 2011), Dal Lago (ARTmargins 2014).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (21 MB, updated on 2023-9-19)
Additional texts (PDFs)

Les Promesses du passé: une histoire discontinue de l’art dans l’ex-Europe de l’Est (2010) [French]

“Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Les Promesses du passé [Promises of the Past] questions the former opposition between Eastern and Western Europe by reinterpreting the history of the communist block countries. To draw this discontinuous history of art in Former East, this transnational and transgenerational project features works by more than fifty artists from Central and Eastern Europe but also from other European Countries (to name a few: Marina Abramovic, Yael Bartana, Tacita Dean, Liam Gillick, Sanja Ivekovic, Július Koller, Jiri Kovanda, David Maljkovic, Marjetica Potrc and Monika Sosnowska).

Gathering together newly commissioned essays, art documentation, artists’ pages, unpublished documents and an anthology of historical texts by authors such as Slavoj Zizek, the late Igor Zabel and Svetlana Boym, this volume is an invaluable survey of the Eastern European art scene of the last decades—a scene which is gradually shifting from the periphery to the centre of current art-historical debates. ”

Published as catalogue of the exhibition Promises of the Past. A Discontinuous History of Art in Former Eastern Europe held at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 14 April – 19 July 2010, curated by Joanna Mytkowska and Christine Macel.

Edited by Christine Macel and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez
Publisher Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2010
ISBN 9782844264411, 2844264417
255 pages
via Gioni

Exh. reviews: Mateusz Kapustka (Kunsttexte 2011, DE), Ana Bogdanovic (ArtHist 2013, EN).
Curator’s commentary: Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez (aprior 2011, EN).

Exhibition
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (39 MB)