When visiting documenta fifteen in early August 2022, with an awareness of the vehement criticism directed at the event, it was the project of a lumbung member, the *foundationClass*collective that seemed to echo most clearly the structural contradictions, which also surrounded the mega-exhibition. Summarizing the […]
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I have never been to Indonesia but one of my strongest desires is to visit it one day. And I am honestly incredibly grateful to ruangrupa art collective for planting this thought in my head and organizing this “paint the town red 100-day long museum” […]
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documenta, the largest and most influential event of the art world beside the Venice Biennale, has always been surrounded by local and international scandal. d15 seems to have fulfilled an extreme agenda. In this thematic issue, we ask each contributor about their personal experiences at d15. Our questions were: What could be learnt at d15? Did it manage to change the perspective of Western visitors? What was the experience of non-Western artists and cultural practitioners? What did they teach and what could they learn as part of one of the most influential legitimizing and canonizing machine of the art world? To what extent did ruangrupa’s lumbung concept manage to change the power structures of the art world?
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Art after activism? This question was the prompt of a debate at the 3rd Next 5 Minutes tactical media conference in 1999.[1] The debate addressed political activists’ skepticism about the potential and usefulness of art in activism. The proposal written by David Garcia posits that […]
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Dr. Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, teacher, and activist whose forthcoming book, The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art (Lund Humphries) joins Dark Matter, Delirium and Resistance, and Art as Social Activism to focus on issues of collective cultural labor, activist art, and counter-historical representation. He is […]
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PART ONE O Sister, Where Art Thou? You are walking through Budapest. The city is hot and stinky. The urine smell merges with the stench from trash bins and car smog. You are crossing a square. The grass is sunburned. A lot of homeless people […]
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According to Mexico’s Ministry of Public Safety and Civil Protection, on average more than 10 women were killed every day in the first half of 2021.[1] Out of the 1,899 crimes, only 508 were considered a feminicide and yet,[2] the rate went up compared to […]
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The government of Hungary has been working on restructuring the framework of public higher education for years now, a thing they call remodeling or model-shift. This means that the majority of the universities which have been public universities are now functioning under the aegis of […]
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In Belarus, the presidential elections of 2020 and the following protests provoked an unprecedented boom in art activism. The violation of political and human rights did not start in 2020, but they reached a new intensity that year. Unwilling to use violence in response to […]
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Project EATS, founded by artist Linda Goode Bryant, is a network of urban food systems that uses empty lots and rooftops in partnership with landowners and long-term renters throughout New York City to create community-based farms to sustainably grow organic food that is distributed to […]
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An Introduction to Issue #10 Mezosfera’s thematic issue, Write or Be Written Off includes contributions on publishing in the fields of art and culture, initiatives and publications whose mission was or is to challenge the establishment (be it professional or political), bring about (social) change, […]
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In the book, Tuğrul Eryılmaz: 68’li ve Gazeteci (Tuğrul Eryılmaz: A member of the ‘68 generation and a Journalist), Eryılmaz, the editor-in-chief of Sokak magazine, declares “Although we aimed to be mainstream, Sokak is considered the alternative media of the time (the 1980s). Honestly, we […]
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In the 1970s, a young woman, in the bustling capital city of Delhi, India, appeared for a job interview at a renowned publishing house. While her credentials were suitable for the position, the interview board also expressed their hesitation in hiring her asking “In our […]
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African literature has gained ground in the 1950s[1] which has served as a revolutionary means to decolonize European writing about Africa and Africans. Western literary works about Africa were often stereotyped projections that portrayed the African continent as a place of darkness, where humans lived […]
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A Conversation Between Yanelys Nuñez Leyva and Iliana Álvarez González For the past few months, whenever Cuban activists made a complaint on social media, the first comments have always had the hashtag #PatriayVida attached to them. The song that made the phrase popular premiered on […]
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Recurrently, cultural programs on Roma people in the media and on news platforms are either marginalized or portray Roma in an exoticized, poverty-related or criminalizing manner. Either way, the representation of Roma people is construed by the ‘white gaze’, and they have little room for […]
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In the Fall of 2020, Palgrave published a book by a Hungarian communication studies scholar who set out to prove that even though many still believe in the meritocratic nature of academia, where talent and hard work is the prime condition of success, this is […]
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Back in 2017, increasingly worryingly, a most pressing theme was completely missing from the literary and art discourse in Budapest. There was very limited reflection upon the challenges of climate change or the much debated notion of the Anthropocene, and even if there were artists […]
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