In the context of gentrification and its rapid transfigurations of urban space, where, or how, do we carve out a place for ourselves? The case of New York is exemplary in this regard, with its massive overhauls under the euphemistic moniker of “urban renewal.” With whole neighborhoods, local haunts, and even entire populations either disappearing or being displaced, how do we measure the lasting damage of these changes on the very constitution of oneself, the apparent expendable in the gentrification equation? Curator Josephine Graf considers the work of Win McCarthy with an eye toward these and other effects in the case of Lower Manhattan.

Even the great institutions of modern and contemporary art are not immune from the rush to periodize the recent past, hurried by the ever-increasing development of new technologies and digital platforms. How, then, can one effectively perdioze the very decade in which we still find ourselves, the 2010s? Drawing exclusively from their own collections, MoMA curator Michelle Kuo attempted just such a feat, and Jakob Schillinger here weighs in on the challenges and successes of the resulting exhibition, “New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century,” which closed last month in New York. With MoMA slated to open its new expansion in October, the engagement with the recent past will no doubt have a lasting impact on how we see, hear, and understand our relationship to the technologies of the present.

In der Ausgabe 114 zu "The Sea" gingen die Autor*innen Franziska Brons und Bernhard Siegert bereits auf die Tradition der Seestücke im 19. Jahrhundert und deren medienhistorische Bedeutung ein. Die Kunsthistorikerin und ehemalige Redakteurin von Texte zur Kunst, Hanna Magauer, führt Brons` und Siegerts Gedanken weiter, um sich einem zeitgenössischeren Beispiel zu widmen: Der Künstler Philippe Thomas nutzte in seinen Arbeiten immer wieder das Bild des Meeres in seiner Eigenschaft und Metaphorik als verbindendes Element und Projektionsfläche der Gesellschaft.

The Queer Archives Institute is an artist-run organization founded in 2015 by Karol Radziszewski, whose own practice as an artist led directly to an awareness that there was a profound lack of material related to the history of queer culture in Central and Eastern Europe. The QAI is now a multi-platform initiative that partners with artists, scholars, and those active in the community to provide a space and archive material for continued research and future projects. The Schwules Museum in Berlin is currently host to the most recent exhibition of the holdings of the QAI, and Berlin-based historian and gender studies scholar Vojin Saša Vukadinović recently sat down with Raziszewski to discuss the current exhibition and the motivation behind the founding of the QAI.

One can never be sure what anyone will say or write about oneself when we each are gone. This is an experience faced by every living one.