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David Graeber's influential thinking was always at odds with the liberal and left-wing mainstream. Drawing on his huge theoretical and practical experience as an ethnologist and anthropologist, activist and anarchist, Graeber and his interlocutors develop a ramified genealogy of anarchist thought and possible perspectives for 21st-century politics. Diverging from the familiar lines of historical anarchism, and against the background of movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Gilets jaunes, the aim is to provide new political impulses that go beyond the usual schemata of unavoidableness. The spontaneous and swift-moving polylogue shows Graeber as a spirited, unorthodox thinker and radical activist for whom the group can always achieve more than the individual.

El Hadji Sy is one of the most significant figures in African contemporary art and an internationally recognized activist. This book places the artist's work in the context of activism in Senegal since the country gained independence from France in 1960.

A playful interweaving of connections between history and the present and between world regions and disciplines. Stretched between eight fingers and two thumbs, sometimes between teeth and toes, lengths of string make shapes. String figures can do many things: they tell stories, they pass the time, they make the unsayable showable, they connect people. Whatever else they may be, they have often been explored by artists, ethnologists, and theorists: as an aesthetic practice, as something to collect, and as a non-Western way of thinking. In recent years, string figures have gained prominence in cultural theory. Donna Haraway promotes string figures as a method of thinking and collaboration between both disciplines and species. Rather than the technicist and rigid metaphor of the network, Haraway's string figures provide a playful, process-oriented, embodied, performative (and non-Western) mode of thought in which responsibility and collaboration are foregrounded. Looking at ways of playing together on the ruins of our history, this book brings together different threads and weaves connections between world regions and disciplines. Works by Maya Deren, Harry Smith, Mulkun Wirrpanda, Nasser Mufti, Katrien Vermeire, Caroline Monnet, Toby Christian, Maureen Lander, and Andy Warhol and contributions by Paul Basu, Seraina Dür and Jonas Gillmann, Mareile Flitsch, Rainer Hatoum, Ines Kleesattel, Robyn McKenzie, Nasser Mufti, Mario Schulze, Rani Singh, Henry Adam Svec, Éric Vandendriessche, and Sarine Waltenspül, among others, are included. This project was developed by Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül in collaboration with the Museum Tinguely Basel, Switzerland.

An astonishing new narrative of Mandu Yenu, a throne from the ancient Kingdom of Bamum. "Most of the time, it is the power of men that we remember." With these words, which open Léonora Miano's text for Objects Talk Back, an astonishing new narrative unfurls around Mandu Yenu, a throne from the ancient Kingdom of Bamum (present day Cameroon). The Germans long claimed the object was a gift from King Njoya to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Miano reads "between the lines of beads and cowrie shells" to show the complex intricacies of colonial and gender relations. Dismissing all pretense of egalitarianism between colonizer and colonized, she hones in on the very nature of power--how and by whom it is defined-wielded-subverted. King Njoya said he "felt like a woman in his relationship with the Germans." Miano takes this as a prompt to examine contrasting cultural notions of femininity and thus reveals how central women are to the story of the throne. As the very name of the object suggests, it is the power of women we should remember.

A narrative of the early modern Indian sculpture known as the Mithuna couple. Meena Kandasamy writes about the Mithuna couple, a seventeenth-century ivory sculpture from Tamil Nadu, India, depicting lovers. Kandasamy unfurls a multi-layered, multi-directional narrative built from images, questions, and contradictions evoked by the sculpture. "How can we look at this work and not talk about who produced it?" Kandasamy asks and then examines how caste and class are carved into the object as indelibly as its physical details. Such knowledge complicates easy associations of love that may be evoked by the couple. Refusing any impulse to idealize or exoticize, Kandasamy connects the carving to personal and political stories that expose painful realities of who gets to love whom, and how. She sets the intimate alongside the institutional to interrogate terms such as decolonize, restitution, and preservation. Through an astonishing stylistic mix, including Twitter, academic discourse, poetry, and memoir, she talks back, forward, and sideways with the object.

A reflection on the reconstruction of the Berlin Palace and its contradictory use as an ethnological museum. Having recently accepted German citizenship, writer and activist Priya Basil explores the Humboldt Forum from a deeply personal perspective. She delves into the question of what such a building, such a project, means for an understanding of the past and for belonging in the present. This much disputed, contested, celebrated monument now exists--but what exactly does it monumentalize? Basil writes, "In German, the word Schloss means a palace, and also a lock. The central question: Can a lock also be a key?"

The book "Movements of Air" reprints the breathtaking pictures of Étienne-Jules Marey, that he took between 1899 and 1901 during his scientific experiments with moving air and smoke, and complements them with two essays of Georges Didi-Huberman and Laurent Mannoni. Laurent Mannoni accurately reflects Marey's experimental approach. As the founder of the "graphic method," Marey is also the developer of an aerodynamic wind tunnel. His experiments' photographs in fluid motion introduce us to a whole world of movements, turbulences and fluids. The resulting images influenced generations of scientists and artists alike. Georges Didi-Huberman expands on the philosophical debates surrounding these aesthetically and technically instructive images. He makes Bergson the main interlocutor and even the secret commentator of the scientist's experiments. Even though the scientist's main interest was graphic information, Huberman shows us how the flow of all things draws the ingenious experimenter to a photographic practice that creates drags, streaks, expansions, and visual dances. Marey's wind tunnel photographs were therefore themselves causes of turbulence in the history of images. The two artists Florian Dombois and Christoph Oeschger explore the "graphical" vortices of the last 120 years and provide at the end of the book a collage from historical and contemporary material interlaced with their own image making in Dombois's wind tunnel at the Zurich University of the Arts. The book was published originally in French on the occasion of the exhibition "Mouvements de l'air" at the Musee d'Orsay. The texts are now available for the first time as an English translation.

Digitale Zeichnungen grundieren das vielschichtige, zwischen Skulptur und Bewegtbild changierende Werk des Schweizer Künstlers Yves Netzhammer seit seinen Anfängen. In den gravitationslosen Raum gezogene Linien setzen ein figuratives Denken ins Bild, das zu bizarren, komischen, unheimlichen Assoziationen verführt. Netzhammers ebenso raffinierte wie präzise Bildrhetorik eröffnet ein subtiles Spiel, das dem Betrachter eine Vielzahl an Deutungen erlaubt und sich im trügerischen Moment der Eindeutigkeit stets von neuem entzieht. So entstehen Kippbilder, in denen je nach Blickwinkel Komplexität und Leichtigkeit, formale Strenge oder gedankliches Wuchern in den Vordergrund treten. »Convex Thoughts« ist ein komplementär zu seinem Vorgänger »Concave Thoughts« konzipierter Buchraum - ein Vademecum für Träumer und Sinnierer, ein unendliches Storyboard einer Kunst auf der Höhe und in den Untiefen ihrer Zeit. Ausgabe mit 32 verschiedenen Covern.

There is a new quality of idiocy today. While the old idiot derived knowledge from isolation, the new idiot refuses all understanding of the world. A figure of systematic incompetence, the new idiot is impacting global culture and politics alike, giving rise to surprising, often absurd competences. Yesterday's "fake news" or "post-truths" can be read today as evidence of an ongoing transformation of self-politics in which the idiotic impulse is redefining our experience of the world. Despite talk of global awareness, the isolated self of the many is all the more effective. It brings about a culture of happy singletons strolling towards a black hole that has become their substitute for society.Zoran Terzic's wide-ranging essay takes up the figure of the idiot and follows its numerous appearances throughout intellectual history in an examination of the "art of the idiotic" that both reflects and transcends the freneticism of the present.

A personal take on French Theory by one of the people who invented it.

A blend of theory and stories from an extraordinary life by a leading cultural figure.

How to teach art? What kind of knowledge should artists absorb? How might an ordinary person become a creature addicted to the creative process; a non-artist become an artist? Such programmatic questions articulated by the acclaimed Polish artist Artur Zmijewski were at the heart of the workshop "How to Teach Art?" Between April and July 2018, Zmijewski invited a group of graduate and PhD students from three Zurich universities-the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), the UZH (University of Zurich), and the ZHdK (Zurich University of the Arts)-to collectively reflect on their artistic practices. Over the course of four months, the group met several times a week for hourlong sessions, following individual and collective exercises devised by Zmijewski himself.This book retraces the workshop and its process by means of inconclusive, fragmentary results between theory and practice:. It presents drawings, videos, photographs, 16mm films, and accompanying reflections on the central premise, "How to Teach Art?"