Art & Education Field Notes is a new series of reviews from the next generation of art critics. Featuring texts on the 59th Venice Biennale and Documenta 15 contributed by students and recent graduates, Field Notes makes original connections between the work and the world and takes a closer look at what other observers might have missed.
Field Notes are published each week. To keep up with reviews from Venice and Kassel and the global discussion of contemporary art education, follow @artandeducation on Instagram and sign up for announcements at artandeducation.net/subscribe.
The first four Field Notes focus on particular works within and beyond these exhibitions, situating them within colonial, environmental, and technological discourses of contemporary art.
Leo Cocar on Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill in The Milk of Dreams, Venice
“What Hill’s work hints at is the way the settler state is fundamentally indebted to Indigenous knowledge, an exchange that occurs through violent forms of institutional legitimization or delegitimization.”
Sara Garzón on Black Quantum Futurism and Más Arte Más Acción, Documenta 15
“Evoking the urgency for racial, environmental, and temporal justice, Black Quantum Futurism’s stories, time capsules, and soundscapes constituted an explicit expression of all the possible worlds beyond the one upheld by a chronology of domination.”
Mateusz Sapija on The Question of Funding, Eltiqa, and Sada [Regroup], Documenta 15
“Departing from the phenomenon of NGOization that created a new form of colonial control and economic dependency on the Global North in Palestine, The Question of Funding proposed a model of re-embedding cultural practice into local communities and microeconomies … and created Dayra, a blockchain technology for circulating, storing, and exchanging communal resources.”
May Makki on Penumbra, Fondazione In Between Art Film, Venice
“The exhibition’s title provides a loose framework. Referring to the zone of partial illumination between shadow and light, it generates associations with both the light reflected from a film screen in a dark theater and the shadows cast by celestial bodies during an eclipse. The presentation accentuates film’s potential for perceptual play, drawing on the worlds contained in them, the physical viewing spaces, and the space between.”
Does a pavilion or project in Venice or Kassel merit further consideration? Read the Field Notes open call and write to fieldnotes [at] artandeducation.net.
Art & Education is a collaboration between Artforum and e-flux highlighting important exhibitions, programs, and events in art academia.
