CULTURES OF THE CURATORIAL

Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff & Thomas Weski (Eds.)

The curatorial has developed as a field of overlapping and intertwining activities, tasks, and roles that formerly were more clearly attributed to different professions, institutions, and disciplines. This development has affected the notion of curating— principally an activity of putting together—and widened its scope beyond presenting to include enabling, making public, educating, analyzing, criticizing, theorizing, editing and staging. Embedded in the globalization of the art field, on the one hand, and the conditions of labor in the 21st century, on the other, the curatorial has also gained a specific socio-political relevance within contemporary society. Contributions from Beatrice von Bismarck, Gabriele Brandstetter, Helmut Draxler, among others.

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E-FLUX JOURNAL: HITO STEYERL

The Wretched of the Screen

In Hito Steyerl’s writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The  Wretched   of  the  Screen collects a number of Steyerl’s landmark essays in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image. Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information: on the formal shifts and distortions of accelerated capitalism; the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment;, structural and literal violence; enchantment and fun; and of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses.

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