With her minimalist works intended for mass reproduction, Charlotte Posenenske famously questioned not only the cult of uniqueness but also the value logic of the art market in a broader sense. The Archiv Charlotte Posenenske, which has been managed by Mehdi Chouakri for several years, recently exhibited a selection of her sculptures, supplemented by archival material, such as historical photos and plans. David Homewood takes the presentation as an opportunity to explore the extent to which Posenenske’s once-radical ideas have remained, highlighting, among other things, the paradox of pseudo-participation that Posenenske’s sculptures – like many other artworks originally designed to be physically interacted with – are now subject to for conservation reasons.

Lutz Bacher’s works draw on strategies of the objet trouvé, appropriation, and pop-cultural references while refusing the stabilizing effects of scholarly or formalist art -historical frameworks. Bacher worked under a male pseudonym throughout her career, and the posthumous retrospective in Oslo, which will travel to Brussels next year, accentuates the open-ended nature of the artist’s practice. As Matthew Rana notes in his review, the exhibition brackets Bacher’s more explicitly political pieces; what comes to the fore instead is the comedic charge of a position that through associative encounters with the viewer prompts questions about one’s own position within this play of signifiers.

In theorizing the climate crisis, Timothy Morton has developed the concept of the “hyperobject” – referring to those objects whose massive distribution across space and time means our experience of them is always a partial one. While this idea stems from a rejection of the Kantian idea that the ontological status of objects is ultimately grounded in human subjectivity, it takes on a far more concrete significance at a time when a warm and pleasant winter day also carries increasingly worrying connotations of impending ecological collapse. A recent exhibition by Grant Mooney gave tangible form to these ideas from object-oriented ontology while also complicating the relational mix, as Alex Bennett writes.

The way in which an exhibition is laid out says a lot not only about the collection policies of the responsible institution but also about the broader socioeconomic context in which the show is conceived. In Paris, where a particularly large number of private and corporate collections attract considerable crowds, the Fondation Cartier recently reopened in its new, freshly renovated Haussmann-era premises. With a seemingly random combination of artworks and a spatial configuration reminiscent of major art fairs or crowd-control systems at other commercial events, it seems to pursue its own distinct, decidedly non-museum exhibition model. Not exactly to the benefit of the visitor experience, as Arnaud Esquerre argues.

Beschreibt Paolo Virno in einem 2006 in dieser Zeitschrift veröffentlichten Interview den für postoperaistischen Marxismus so zentralen Begriff der Multitude als „eine Seinsweise des Möglichen […], in der sich aber auch die Mängel eines limitierten Umfelds zeigen“, klingt darin bereits die Ambivalenz an, die sein Denken zulässt und insbesondere für Künstler*innen so relevant macht. Virnos Theorie und sein Aktivismus bilden eine Brücke von den Arbeitskämpfen im Italien der 1970er Jahre zu den globalisierungskritischen Bewegungen der Nullerjahre, die Jens Kastner in seinem Nachruf auf den Anfang November verstorbenen Philosophen schlägt.

Founded in 1955, the annual DOK Leipzig documentary film festival has been accompanied by a retrospective program since 1960. This year’s edition presented a selection of films by US filmmakers and collectives, all of which were originally screened at the festival during the GDR period. The program threw light on the erstwhile socialist state’s ambivalent stance toward the United States: strongly opposed to US hegemony and imperialism while at the same time standing in solidarity with the country’s own marginalized and oppressed citizens. As this year’s retrospective demonstrated, the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements loomed particularly large in the festival’s history. Arindam Sen was in attendance and found an imperfect but hopeful gesture in the reconstruction of old solidarities.

Having studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the early 1980s, Andreas Gursky subsequently became one of the most prominent artists associated with the so-called Düsseldorf School of Photography. The Bechers’ influence on Gursky is clear in their shared interest in objectivism and industrial forms. But whereas the duo’s work was bound up with the cultural and political priorities of postwar Germany, Gursky’s work reaches into the present in depicting the increasing effects of technologization and globalization, often combining fascination with a looming sense of dread. Now, at a time when the political and ecological aftereffects of rapid industrial expansion and subsequent decline are explicitly threatening the relative stability of the postwar order in Germany as elsewhere, Gursky has created an exhibition with an oblique focus on his home state, the former industrial powerhouse of North Rhine-Westphalia. Freya Field-Donovan visited the show and found herself staring into the technological void.

Bekannt ist Sarah Schumann vor allem für ihre Rolle in der westdeutschen Frauenbewegung der 1970er Jahre. Ihre künstlerische Arbeit trat deshalb in den Hintergrund oder wurde lange Zeit im Sinne einer biografischen Lektüre des Œuvres der Autodidaktin Schumann in ein illustratives Verhältnis zu deren Leben gesetzt. Ihre sogenannten Schockcollagen und informellen Gemälde wurden jüngst in großer Zahl und mit einem begleitenden Katalog bei Meyer Riegger in Berlin gezeigt. Schumanns frühe künstlerische Arbeiten lassen bereits den kritischen Blick und die radikale Haltung erkennen, die sie später in Schrift und Aktivismus gegenüber der patriarchalen Gesellschaft der Nachkriegszeit einnehmen sollte, wie Astrid Mania in ihrer Rezension der Schau argumentiert.