Issue 50 / June 2021
ed. Hadas Kedar

Extreme

Extreme exposes art and curating cultivated through unique modes of production and creation in the margins of the globe, reflecting a dynamic developed through ongoing colonial realities. The issue is a compendium of partial, situated knowledges, originating from the four corners of the globe that, when combined, create a pluriverse of visions and a hopefully a momentary community that sustains contradictions inherent in the joining of a variety of vantage points.

The issue deals with such pertinent issues such as: the colonization of knowledge as a driving force that abandons experimental and open-ended forms of knowledge; cross-cultural collaboration between non-binary identities and indigenous people in Taiwan; techno-ecological inquiries that re-imagine the potential of communicating through queer sensibilities; the first Islamic arts institution in the Philippines revitalizing curatorial ideas based in Western thought; a Slovenian art group that created interventions in nature in the 1960s and collectively left the art world to operate through an esoteric and ecological approach; the border zone of USA/Mexico as a constitutive body of possibilities of contact; a Spanish artist that over the last fifteen years has invested in acquiring underground iron ore deposits in order to prevent large companies from mining the land; curating in an errant mode from domestic settings to geographical extremes as demonstrated in the biennale of Antarctica; soft-power art initiatives that widen the social imagination developed in Israel/Palestine; three missed encounters that demonstrate the current global state of exhaustion including a curious friendship between Georges Bataille and Walter Benjamin, an exploration into the cave keeper’s daily control of Lascaux and the exploration of artistic representation in the case of the Freedom Theatre of Jenin; the temporary opening of the Sami Art Museum based in the closed Kunstmuseum in Tromsø imagining a future of the display of local, indigenous art; dissident and subversive artistic practices in Russia assuming extreme performances; the challenges of creative anti-capitalist approaches that make use of extreme methodologies including hacking and DIY and an artwork produced through machine learning that provides a thought experiment in how truthfulness is determined in the extreme state of the post-truth era.

Please find the recording of the launch event here.