Few cities embody such a heady mix of dance music, hedonism, and LGBTQ+ subculture quite as New York does. While techno has its roots in Detroit, and house in Chicago, it was the disco clubs of 1970s Manhattan that paved the way for the development of modern club culture. And while the days of warehouse raves in lower Manhattan might be long gone, the city’s underground party scene is alive and well, now relocated to Brooklyn and charged with a renewed sense of radicality after dance music rediscovered or reclaimed its Black origins. The drugs and music might have changed, but the sense of commonality experienced on the dancefloor remains as powerful as ever, inspiring a new generation of ravers to think differently about the world outside the party. Casting an eye back to his own youth in the clubs of downtown, Tavia Nyong’o offers a highly personal take on an exhilarating and poignant anthology of essays on New York’s current rave scene.

Die erste von vier Poetikvorlesungen, die Monika Rinck vor gut zehn Jahren zum Antritt ihrer Dozentur an der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität in Münster hielt, widmete sie dem Schwimmen – und damit einem Thema, das in ihrem Werk mindestens so stetig wiederkehrt wie im Kalenderjahr die Badesaison. In der Münsteraner Vorlesung ließ Rinck Gedanken zur Kunst des Schwimmens mit solchen zur eigenen Schreibpraxis zusammenfließen und betonte die lockere Spannung, die in beiden Disziplinen den Flow begünstigt. Zum Auftakt unserer Sportausgabe, der zufällig mit dem Saisonende zahlreicher Berliner Freibäder zusammenfällt, haben wir sie gebeten, einige Aspekte ihrer Technik in einem kurzen künstlerischen Beitrag mit uns zu teilen.

If everything had gone according to plan for the Sea Ranch – a famed planned community and interdisciplinary group of creatives conceived of and first established in the early 1960s on the California coast – its decidedly inclusive community spirit would have remained at the project’s center. But as is so often the case in capitalist systems, economic interests got in the way. Focusing on the formative impulses that Anna and Lawrence Halprin contributed to the settlement, the artist duo Mario Asef and Kirstin Burckhardt are currently examining the Sea Ranch’s structural and ideological concepts in a series of exhibitions. Sabeth Buchmann visited the second iteration, in Gorzów Wielkopolski. Here she reviews a mimetic-critical engagement to which Asef and Burckhardt subject the Halprin legacy while they, at the same time, render it relevant again through an astute reversal of perspectives.

Nach dem deutschen Verschollenheitsgesetz kann eine Person, die bei einer Fahrt auf See, insbesondere infolge eines Schiffsuntergangs, verschollen ist, bereits nach sechs Monaten für tot erklärt werden. Dass im Zusammenhang mit der Rezeption des Werkes von Bas Jan Ader, der 1975 zu einer Atlantiküberquerung aufbrach, von der er nicht zurückkehrte, dennoch (und trotz vergleichbarer internationaler Gesetzgebungen) meist von dessen „Verschwinden“ die Rede ist, passt zum mythologisierten Framing, das den Künstler als mysteriösen Einzelgänger darstellt. Wie Alicja Schindler mit Blick auf die gerade zu Ende gegangene Retrospektive des Künstlers feststellt, leistete auch diese Schau dem Mythos um Ader und dessen jäh verkürztes Leben Vorschub, anstatt sich näher mit dem kunsthistorischen Kontext, den Produktionsbedingungen und formalen Kriterien zu befassen, aus denen Aders Œuvre seine Bedeutung bezieht.

When it comes to repression against the exhibition sector, the world’s attention is currently focused primarily on the United States. The Trump administration’s explicit pressure on museums is alarming – which makes it all the more important to keep in mind that cultural practitioners elsewhere have long been dealing with the repressive tactics of authoritarian regimes. In the final online text commissioned in conjunction with our “Exhibition Politics” issue, we turn our attention to Georgia, where the ruling party, Georgian Dream, following its questionable election victory last fall, has bluntly adapted the Russian strategy of arbitrarily classifying democratic media outlets, organizations, and cultural projects as “foreign agents.” Elene Pasuri works as an art manager, curator, author, and activist in Tbilisi. Here she sheds light on the current situation of the country’s cultural workers, against the backdrop of Georgia’s specific political history. Drawing on personal observations and reflections, her text provides insight into the challenges that artists, curators, and exhibition spaces have increasingly faced since the change of government – and sheds light on ways of dealing with them.

Rita Ackermann made waves in New York when she moved to the city from her native Hungary in the early 1990s, quickly establishing herself in both its art scene and subculture. Her subsequent practice has often blurred the borders between supposed dichotomies such as original and copy or low and high culture, aligning it – as Aodhan Madden proposes – with the work of artist contemporaries such as Christopher Wool and Wade Guyton, while also accompanying or even prefiguring the unstoppable rise of digital image cultures and technologies. Here, Madden offers a psychoanalytically informed reading of a recent exhibition of Ackermann’s in Paris, drawing on Freud’s notion of the doppelgänger as a source or expression of the uncanny and its potential implications for contemporary (artistic) subjecthood.

Last week, Annette Weisser’s first letter to Bruce Hainley marked the beginning of our new online column, in which two pen pals – our self-proclaimed “Supertramps” – will, over the coming months, exchange observations and musings about the not-so-simple present. Like Weisser’s first message, Hainley’s reply has been penned during the holiday season, which he spent in Paris, adapting his routine quotidienne to the summer heat. Sweating like a dim sum, he reconsiders the “injustice under the sun” – which Alfred Döblin once borrowed from the Bible, and which Rainer Werner Fassbinder recited in a voice-over for his series adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz – in the context of the advanced climate crisis. Then again, he finds himself beguiled by the fragrance of flowers at the Jardin des Tuileries and reflects on a visit to Demna Gvasalia’s pop-up survey, on the aftermath of Fashion Week, and, last but not least, on the state of art and its (formidable!) future.

Travel is a recurring motif in Chantal Akerman’s work, as is the tension between proximity and distance. This is evident not just in the works documenting her many journeys, but also in her depiction of her close but complicated relationship with her mother, whose experiences of trauma and displacement ultimately remained beyond the artist’s reach. A retrospective focusing on this thematic thread in Akerman’s work opened in Brussels last year before moving to Paris. Rainer Bellenbaum recently visited Lisbon to view the exhibition’s final leg, which invites visitors to take a tour of Akerman’s life and pioneering practice through a range of works and archival materials.