In Germany, “Erinnerungskultur” refers to the individual and social grappling with the nation’s past and its history, establishing and maintaining a collective memory. This practice manifests most visibly and publicly in the form of memorials and monuments, however, what gets memorialized – and how – is, of course, political. The history of Sol LeWitt’s contribution to the 1987 Skulptur Projekte, which art historian Joseph Henry recounts here, is a revealing example of the politics involved. LeWitt’s work constituted the starting point for artist virgil b/g taylor’s exhibition at Artists Space. As Henry writes, taylor’s installation set out to revive the politically committed quality of LeWitt’s oeuvre while also interrogating the German counter-monument within current disputes of historical commemoration, whether those involving the United States’ white supremacist legacy or Germany’s extremely belated colonial reckoning.

Seit den frühen 1980er Jahren verwandelt Jac Leirner Abfallprodukte wie Plastiktüten, Kugelschreiber oder Zigarettenschachteln in raumgreifende Installationen. Die Berliner Galerie Esther Schipper präsentierte kürzlich vier neue Arbeiten der brasilianischen Künstlerin, die sich als konsequente Weiterführung ihrer mehr als 30-jährigen künstlerischen Praxis erwiesen. Zwar liegt der Fokus von Leirners Arbeiten auf deren Farbgebung und räumlich-formaler Umsetzung. Allerdings klang in der titelgebenden Installation der Ausstellung, „Us Horizon“, auch ein traditioneller Kritikpunkt der Institutionskritik an, wie unsere Bild- und Onlineredakteurin Anna Sinofzik argumentiert: Die Kommerzialisierung des Ausstellungswesens, die in Brasilien eine sehr spezifische Geschichte hat.

Romy Golan’s recent book on Italian art in the 1960s arrived concurrently with renewed international attention to figures from Italy’s postwar scene such as Carla Lonzi and Laura Grisi. Rigorously engaging the archive, Golan constructs an original rereading of artistic production in this moment in Italy; as art historian and critic Tom Donough characterizes it here, the book is an immersion into the historical strata of images that constitute something like a social archive of Italian visual memory. Golan is an expert diver, Donough writes, bringing unexpected associations and resonances back to the surface and exposing the persistence of various historical pasts in what many had taken to be our perpetual present.

The notion of the autonomous artistic genius has long sustained an art world intimately embedded in the economy. In their latest survey in Oxford, Berlin–based artist Jesse Darling – who has exhibited widely throughout Europe – rubs up against this notion of institutionally affirmed, market-aligned “success.” The exhibition is informed by a resistance to the progress narratives of conventional career-surveys, writes critic Alice Blackhurst, exploring instead the more recursive and disjointed practice of artmaking. Privileging torqued and awkward shapes and working with widely available, humble materials, Darling asks how art might foster a political aesthetics of vulnerability without succumbing to the easy thrills of biography, or straightforward confession.

The artist-as-curator is a relatively new phenomenon. It can be argued to be a symptom of an increasingly deskilled profession – everyone, it seems, is a curator these days. However, an artist often offers a perspective no professional curator could – not necessarily because the professional curator couldn’t, but because the institutional rules fall away, at least somewhat, for the artist-curator. In a current exhibition in Basel, Jenny Holzer assumed the role of curator to Louise Bourgeois in what the museum declares “an unprecedented encounter between two giants of American art.” Art historian and critic Jules Pelta Feldman visited the exhibition and assesses this artistic exchange.

The appropriation of legal proceedings in the realm of art has become a recurring tactic in practices that fall under the now-trite umbrella of “socially engaged.” Take, for instance, the “Model Court” project initiated in 2009 by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, and others, or the assembly convened in 2015 for Milo Rau’s “The Congo Tribunal.” In relation to the latter, Sven Lütticken termed this type of artistic endeavor “para-legal performance” – its efficacy resides in publicity, rather than in the legally binding speech act of a judge or jury. Another such project, “Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes,” recently unfolded in Amsterdam. Writer and researcher Tobias Dias reports on its agenda here and considers questions around its formal and theoretical premises.