Carolyn Christov Bakargiev

"'Thinking contemporary curating' is the first publication to comprehensively explore what is distinctive about contemporary curatorial thought. In five essays, art historian, critic, and theorist Terry Smith surveys the international landscape of current discourse; explores a number of exhibitions that show contemporaneity in present, recent, and post art; describes the enormous growth world-wide of exhibitionary infrastructure and the instability that haunts it; re-examines the phenomenon of artist-curators and curator-artists; and assesses a number of key tendencies in curating - such as the reimagined museum, the expanded exhibition, historicization and recuration, infrastructural activism, and engaged spectatorship - as responses to contemporary conditions." -- book cover.

A major figure in eighteenth-century Christianity, John Wesley sought to combine the essential elements of the Catholic and Evangelical traditions and to restore to the laity a vital role in church life. He began one of the most dynamic movements in the history of modern Protestantism, a movement which eventually produced the Methodist churches. This volume offers a representative selection of theological writings by Wesley and includes historically oriented introductions and footnotes which indicate Wesley's Anglican, patristic, and biblical sources.

Emotion with direct and raw energy.

This expanded second edition of Reclaiming Artistic Research explores artistic research in dialogue with 24 artists worldwide, reclaiming it from academic associations of the term. Embracing artists' dynamic engagement with other fields, it foregrounds the material, spatial, embodied, organizational, choreographic, and technological ways of knowing and unknowing specific to contemporary artistic inquiry. The second edition features a new text by the author and four new artist dialogues to reflect on the changing stakes of artistic research in the wake of the global pandemic, a widespread reckoning with social justice, the growing role of artificial intelligence, and the urgent reality of climate change. LUCY COTTER (*1973, Ireland) is a writer, curator, and artist. She was Curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, 2017, and Curator in Residence at Oregon Center for Contemporary Art 2021–22. The inaugural director of the Master Artistic Research, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, Cotter has lectured internationally, most recently at Portland State University. She holds a project residency at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation 2023-24.

"Thomas Ruff has created a substantial photographic oeuvre, in which he draws our attention to all fields of contemporary life: petit bourgeois homes ... modernist and current architectural arts; the ... faces of our fellow human beings ... outer space; studies of local neighborhoods by night; the news industry's non-stop invention of pictures [photographs from German-language newspapers reproduced and printed by Ruff with no words of explanation in order to find out what information was left when the picture was isolated from its function] ... our bodies; and modifications in perception through the pictorial explosion on the Internet"--Page 7.

In her Letter to a Friend, dOCUMENTA (13)'s artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev gives an insight into her working process, outlining some of the key issues around the 2012 exhibition. In shifting voices, such as storytelling, theoretical speculation, travel diary, press release, or critical reflection, she describes dOCUMENTA (13) as something more than an exhibition—for her it is a state of mind. It is a constellation of artistic acts and gestures that are already taking place as well as an exhibition that will open on June 6, 2012, and that will run for 100 days. Given the heterogeneity of the audience it addresses and the historical development of group exhibitions as "a non-commercial place to intensely aggregate," what can this exhibition be today? Opening the boundaries of disciplines and fields of knowledge and emphasizing the procedural questions, dOCUMENTA (13) is coming together by thinking through a number of composite entangled ontologies instead of following a defined curatorial concept. Language: German/English

"Now that we ‘curate’ even lunch, what happens to the role of the connoisseur in contemporary culture? ‘Curate’ is now a buzzword applied to everything from music festivals to artisanal cheese. Inside the art world, the curator reigns supreme, acting as the face of high-profile group shows and biennials in a way that can eclipse and assimilate the contributions of individual artists. At the same time, curatorial studies programs continue to grow in popularity, and businesses are increasingly adopting curation as a means of adding value to content and courting demographics. Everyone, it seems, is a now a curator. But what is a curator, exactly? And what does the explosive popularity of curating say about our culture’s relationship with taste, labour and the avant-garde? In this incisive and original study, critic David Balzer travels through art history and around the globe to explore the cult of curation – where it began, how it came to dominate museums and galleries, and how it was co-opted at the turn of the millennium as the dominant mode of organizing and giving value to content. At the centre of the book is a paradox: curation is institutionalized and expertise-driven like never before, yet the first independent curators were not formally trained, and any act of choosing has become ‘curating.’ Is the professional curator an oxymoron? Has curation reached a sort of endgame, where its widespread fetishization has led to its own demise? David Balzer has contributed to publications including the Believer, Modern Painters, Artforum.com, and The Globe and Mail, and is the author of Contrivances, a short-fiction collection. He is currently Associate Editor at Canadian Art magazine. Balzer was born in Winnipeg and currently resides in Toronto, where he makes a living as a critic, editor and teacher.

Edited by one of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject, Arte Povera is the most complete overview of this movement ever published.