In this edition of “Seen & Read,” Isabelle Graw discusses one exhibition and two books, with all three providing different yet related insights into recent history. The Katharina Wulff paintings recently shown at Galerie Neu in Berlin revisited the aesthetics of East Germany’s later years. Philipp Felsch’s book on Jürgen Habermas shines a light on the philosopher’s biography and work, but also on the intellectual life of West Germany. Dana von Suffrin’s new novel narrates a family history replete with multiperspectival memories of “modern Jewish life between Munich and Tel Aviv.”

While the first iterations of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’ biennial presented exhibits selected by a jury, the show quickly adopted a curator model. Since 1998, teams of international and Taiwanese curators have been sharing contemporary art with their audiences. With the last few editions in mind, Luise Mörke and Tobias Rosen notice a shift in the conceptual approach applied to the exhibition format: theory no longer seems to be the driving force. What holds “Small World” together instead becomes clear as they walk their readers through the show.

Unter dem schönen Pollesch’schen Titel „Schmeiß dein Ego weg und feier was du liebst – Für René“ gedenkt das Team der Volksbühne heute mit zahlreichen Gästen seinem unerwartet verstorbenen Intendanten. Die Veranstaltung wird mit einem Ballroom eröffnet, der eigentlich auf dem Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz hätte stattfinden sollen und nun wetterbedingt leider ins Sternfoyer verlegt wurde, das nicht annähernd all jene fassen kann, die gern dabei wären. Auch wir erinnern hier nochmal an René Pollesch – mit einem Nachruf der Bühnenbildnerin Nina von Mechow, die in einem kurzen Rückblick den langjährigen, gemeinschaftlichen Arbeitsprozess reflektiert.

Während sich unsere aktuelle Ausgabe zum Thema Restitution vor allem mit Rückgaben von Kulturgütern befasst, die in historischen kolonialen Kontexten geraubt wurden, gehören Plünderungen und Zerstörungen kultureller Stätten auch in aktuellen Kriegen zum Alltag. Die ukrainischen Filmemacher und Künstler Yarema Malashchuk und Roman Khimei haben die Folgen der russischen Angriffe auf das Heimatmuseum der Region Cherson festgehalten, die als Teil der andauernden Kämpfe eine klare Strategie verfolgen, wie Elisabeth Bauer in ihrer Rezension des Kurzfilms argumentiert. Letzterer ist im Rahmen der Kyiv Perenniale derzeit bei Between Bridges in Berlin zu sehen.

Everything is Everywhere: a seemingly all-encompassing alliteration that could have been the title of a Martin Kippenberger painting. Here, it is the subtitle of Chris Reitz’s book, the first scholarly monograph on the West German artist written in English, and it’s used to reference his system of reference: an artistic practice in which almost every one of Kippenberger’s projects seems to be linked to every other part of his hyperbolic art-making scheme. As Tom McDonough lays out in his book review, this system is expertly unpacked by Reitz and, moreover, related to a shifting art market and social world. Linking Kippenberger’s work to the emerging neoliberal order in the German Wirtschaftswunderland is, according to McDonough, an important break from previous interpretive paradigms made by those who were close to the artist.

The importance of sonic registers in restitution processes is emphasized in a roundtable with Memory Biwa, Bénédicte Savoy, Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, and Irene V. Small that forms part of our current issue. Like Biwa, Satch Hoyt explores the potentials of sound in a decolonial artistic approach and combines cultural-historical research with musical practice. Hoyt’s ongoing project Afro-Sonic Mapping is based on the reactivation of colonial sound archives. In its most recent iteration, he has now revived historical instruments in a performance at Hamburg’s MARKK, where he is showing a series of new works. Kathy-Ann Tan looks at the intervention – also against the backdrop of an ongoing tendency of western cultural institutions to invite artists to conduct critical inquiry into their collections of looted artefacts.

This latest edition of “Seen & Read” takes us from the artist and author Hans-Christian Dany’s overshadowed-by-guilt Hamburg childhood and youth to the tropics of Florida, where a current exhibition full of flickering screens sheds light on Nam June Paik’s Miami years. From the city airport, where Paik’s sculpture TV Miami was removed long ago, the journey continues via a travel bookstore before taking a rapid detour into the tense plot twists of Calla Henkel’s thriller Scrap.

The popularity of research-based art is often associated with the increase in doctoral programs in art education, which began in the early 1990s, particularly in Europe. The variety of approaches this practice encompasses has been growing steadily since, and Claire Bishop has been exploring this phenomenon for some time. In Milan, she recently took a close look at the exhibition “Calculating Empires” by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler and attended Hannah Hurtzig’s participatory performance Market for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge – two projects that investigate and intertwine theory and practice in very different ways as they both tackle the topics of data and knowledge production.