The notion of “bad hombres” threatening the polis echoes a much older fear, that of bad blood threatening the body. Conflations like this, of the body-natural and the body-politic, are often called on through political rhetoric to leverage questionable policies. The rhetoric works well for two reasons: firstly, the two-body analogy is ingrained in the […]

Scene 1—International Airport, Departure area: the writer, the only black person in the scene, is waiting to board a plane to KL on her way to Melbourne. Two security officers, one black and one colored, approach her and ask for her passport, then ask what she was doing in Cape Town, she answers, they ask […]

A fleet of illegible and nameless specters haunts the political landscapes of early and mid-twentieth-century Southeast Asia. British Special Branch reports from this period tended to present its Communist enemies as faceless statistical digits, revealing few personal details about them. The abstraction of these reports is further exacerbated by the fact that the most frequent […]

Since 1991, when Rodney King’s beating was captured on video by a civilian named George Holliday, the medium’s use as legal evidence has increased immensely. Understanding the functions and consequences of this shift demands a deep consideration of video’s relationship to temporality and memory. For years, artists and media theorists have been pursuing this question. […]

It is far from coincidental that the authors of key early works of aesthetic philosophy, such as Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, also published major works on the philosophy of law. Modern philosophy tried to found itself on reason alone, on the subject as pure cogito; in the process, it cut itself off […]

Fractures can sometimes be identified As light falls on its aching path How do you see the cracks that appear? Would it be rough and irregular? Maybe shell like, smooth and curved? Or maybe jagged and sharp edged like broken metal Forming elongated splinters Breaking like clay or chalk?   Our future is to live […]

I am walking thus on the path of light, to become the living proof of truth I am sacrificing myself thus on the face of actuality All my brothers and sisters, young and old, living in misery and sorrow All people throughout the world who love freedom and peace And to you, tyrants of violence, […]

—Did you see her? —The lobby was full of people. Police, security, barriers. I realized how ridiculous the situation was. I pictured myself jumping on an Indo-Chinese woman, yelling: “Mama!” So I thought a miracle had to happen. I hoped one of the women would shout: “Etienne, my son!” I waited. A long time. Nothing […]

A Graphic 1994 All this wasn’t intended wasn’t clear amid the suspicion when we descended, with merchants and dead and survivors and memorizers and divers and wily characters of the night, on some winding dirt paths.   The lightning that lit up the hills sketched bending ghosts and heads of anxious animals   behind and […]

Pallavi Paul: “In the old days there were several ways of murdering a book,” he said. One of them was to publish it, but ensure that no one got a copy. It had to be known that there was a paper object somewhere, but not anyone who could claim to have seen it. Soon a […]

This is a slightly adapted version of a conversation that took place over e-mail in 2006 between art historian Els Roelandt and visual artist Ana Torfs, on the occasion of the first exhibition of Torfs’ installation Anatomy at daadgalerie in Berlin. Els Roelandt: Can you say something about the title you chose for this new […]

The year 2160 is the last year of the legacy-management activities under the Puerto Rico Power Authority and the now-defunct United States Atomic Energy Commission. The decommissioned reactor has been closed for fifty years. It was a model thermonuclear plant for seven years, between 1960 and 1967, but it required too many modifications to work […]

Plastic substances are now a ubiquitous planetary presence, far beyond the human places for which they were meant. At this point, 90 percent of global seabirds have probably ingested plastic fragments, while oceanographers write of the plastic debris teeming in the world’s oceans as a “plastisphere” habitat for microbial communities. For those who would identify the […]

Susanne M. Winterling: Technology seems to mystify the gap between nature and culture, body and object. On the one hand, it creates the illusion that none of it needs material or is material, but, on the other, only in the material does there seem to be possibility, sensuality, and interaction/communication. Is this not a contradiction? […]

Whilst sitting in the rare book division of the New York Public Library in Manhattan, awaiting the arrival of an original 1724 edition of Le Code Noir, I picked up another book: America, de Bry 1590-1634. As I moved through the pages, looking at Theodor de Bry’s coloured engravings, I was witnessing documents from history that reported apparent truths about the colonisation of the Americas […]

1. The Neues Palais in Potsdam houses a small panel painting by or after Peter Paul Rubens depicting a young man seated on a throne and closely surrounded by a dense group of figures, mainly soldiers and men in oriental dress. One of the bystanders seems to be taking what looks like a branch from […]

For Assembly (Hearings), Agency calls forth a selection from its list of things, speculating on the question: “How can non-human things become mutually included within artistic practices?”. For example Thing 001652 (Monkey’s Selfies) concerns a controversy between Naruto, a Sulawesi crested macaque, and David Slater, a wildlife photographer, around the selfies of Naruto.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a forensic audio analyst as well as an artist, and in 2014 he was asked to analyse audio files that recorded the shots that killed Nadeem Nawara and Mohamed Abu Daher in the West Bank of Palestine.[…]

In a set of short contributions Inhabitants will present a series of loose notes behind « an online channel for exploratory video and documentary reporting.” Inhabitants produces and streams short-form videos intended for online distribution, with each episode focusing on a different issue.

Dear Madame So-and-So,
I am writing in reference to your inquiries apropos of my letter (15 September 2015) in which I responded to your colleague in Lands, Planning and the Environment. As you may be aware, he wished to know the genre of the Karrabing Film Collective’s film, […]