Soft and weak like water

The 14th Gwangju Biennale 7 April – 9 July 2023 The 14th Gwangju Biennale proposes to imagine our shared planet as a site of resistance, coexistence, solidarity and care by thinking through the transformative and restorative potential of water as a metaphor, a force, and a method. Soft and weak like water celebrates an aqueous …

Walking on Thorns – Thoughts on the Art World Today

As consumers, capitalism grooms us to live in the present. Contemporary electoral politics — especially as practiced in the United States — and contemporary twenty-four-hour news media also try and trap our imagination in the present. The past and future, history and long-term imagination, are all obliterated or obscured — crushed by short-term thinking. William …

Siren Song: The Death of Poetry and Commodified Singing

What has always fascinated me about Sirens, whether written of by Euripides, Homer, Ovid or Hesiod, is that no one writes about Siren’s Song. (Todorov, 2010)It is the hour of the discrete siren who refuses in advance to disseminate and cause to vanish truths that are still only in the state of ‘scales or chord …

Rethinking Realism in times of Trauma and Capitalism

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? 2009 Author: Mark FisherThe book analyses the development and principal features of capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. Traumatic Realism 2000 Author: Michael RothbergAnalyzes the impact of historical …

On Poetry, Art, and Elitism

Writing about poetry is at the same time a difficult and interesting endeavour because it requires complete freedom from the constraints of both form and methodology. Following the rules of traditional theoretical research, writing within the field of poetics often seems pretentious and somehow forced, similar to how aesthetic writing about music, dance or theatrical arts usually considers it impossible to penetrate the unknown ‘creative zone’ and to translate that moment even into simple language, let alone into an academic explanation of something that does not have the power or desire to directly address and contemplate the inexplicable.