Digital space has changed processes of self-formation: it has expanded the limits of identity and access, but it has also enabled their heightened surveillance and policing. Martine Syms’s most recent exhibition at Bridget Donahue – with videos and sculptural collages that traverse the autobiographical while remaining firmly grounded in an invented world – lands squarely in the middle of the dilemma of the digital, argues art historian Adela Kim. As Kim observes, Syms suggests that while technological mediation beguiles us into believing that it is cordoned away within our screens, it reaches far into our offline lives. Between investigations into presence and absence, identity and technology, the show ultimately produces a ghostly aura of desire and loss that cuts through the chaos of the images.

Isabel Waidner’s latest novel has been praised as being unlike any other work of literature. Packed with saturated imagery and forays into the autofictional adorned in fantastical trappings, Waidner illustrates a world not unlike our own – one marked by state violence against those made vulnerable through the intersections of gender, race, and class – and explores tactics invested in better futures. Artist and writer Ian Wooldridge takes us through the book’s movements, describing how, in Waidner’s narrative, encryption and transient spatial conditions merge fiction with iconography and actuality.

Envy is a projection, an intrapsychic relational affect with a social dimension: I lack what others have. As the production of scarcity is one of the defining prerequisites of capital and financial market dynamism, the processes of capitalist exploitation add fuel to my desire for what someone else possesses. “Texte zur Kunst” publisher Isabelle Graw and the cultural theorist Joseph Vogl discuss this primal scene of nascent resentment with a view to the sphere of art auctions as well as contemporary forms of online communication. The question of whether and how capitalist market dynamics can occupy, integrate, and commercialize artistic and emancipatory-activist practices is a constant concern in their conversation.

The seemingly unending string of severe and devastating weather events this summer have again underscored the unsettling data about climate change that continues to confirm what we should already know by now: unless we dramatically and collectively change how we inhabit the planet, things will only get worse. It remains a question, however, what those changes will or should look like. An exhibition at silent green this summer explored one aspect of this dilemma, examining new modes for existing with animals in urban space. Art historian Lisa Moravec reports here on the questions involved and how artists attempt to deal with them in their practices.

Weißes Nichts. Zeitgenössische Kommentare auf konzeptuelle Kunstpraktiken aus Osteuropa nehmen häufig Bezug auf Figuren aus dem Westen wie Ad Reinhardt und Piero Manzoni. Ein kürzlich erschienener Sammelband der Manifeste und Schriften von drei der einflussreichsten Vertreter der osteuropäischen Neo-Avantgarde – Stano Filko, Miloš Laky und Ján Zavarský – zeigt jedoch, dass die Bedingungen der künstlerischen, politischen und philosophischen Auseinandersetzung jeweils andere sind. In Essays, Interviews und Kommentaren huldigt das Buch der avantgardistischen Lust am Streit, liefert aber vor allem, wie Jan Verwoert argumentiert, Stoff für eine Debatte über die Notwendigkeit, die Vorzeichen künstlerischer Kritik (bezogen auf ihre Ausgangs- und Angriffspunkte) in ihrer Besonderheit zu begreifen.

Anne Imhof – best known for large-scale performances with troupes of collaborators – responded to the Palais de Tokyo’s carte blanche invitation without engaging a single live body. In her current exhibition, Imhof reminds visitors that she is a painter first, creating an exhibition that treats the space as an all-encompassing stage. Including a wealth of artistic references – art historical predecessors, teachers, friends – and artifacts from performances past, the exhibition gives new meaning and use value to words, works, surfaces, architectures, in favor of staging a directly effective artwork, argues editor and writer Catherine Chevalier.

Räume des Lernens. Die kürzlich im Berliner Haus der Kulturen der Welt zu Ende gegangene Ausstellung „Bildungsschock: Lernen, Politik und Architektur in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren“ war ein Gemeinschaftsprojekt von Kurator Tom Holert mit verschiedenen Künstler*innen, Wissenschaftler*innen und Architekt*innen. Die im Titel angesprochenen 1960er und 1970er Jahre stellten den zeitlichen Rahmen dar, der hier als Ausgangpunkt für aktuelle Debatten rund um das Thema Bildung diente. Umso dringlicher erscheint diese Anschlussfähigkeit an die Gegenwart unter dem Eindruck einer Pandemie, die nicht nur infrastrukturelle Lücken im Bildungssektor sichtbar werden lässt, sondern auch dafür sorgt, dass reformpädagogische Ideen einmal mehr im Modus der Krise, der Katastrophe und des Mangels diskutiert werden, wie die Medien- und Kulturwissenschaftlerin Marietta Kesting argumentiert.