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Arts

The Architecture of Disaster

How can the gap between images become a site of critical counter-reading rather than a symbol of erasure?

war
history of media
photographic images
History of photography
photography
forensic science

Fiction

Joachim hat ein ganz feines Gespür für Untertöne

»Sich auf eine ganz plane Zeitleiste legen, Aqua quasi, liquid timing, Nahleben, das Jetzt schauen, ver-stehst-du-mich?«

the absurd
avant-garde
satire
contemporary literature
short stories
laughter

Discourse

Matrices porteuses – Surrogacies

This issue explores practices of human and non-human substitution.

gender
contemporary art
motherhood
mother figure
body
poetry

Humanities

Hauke Branding (ed.), Julian Volz (ed.)

Theoretical perspectives in conversation with artistic perspectives on Queer liberation in a transnational context.

Postcolonial Studies
queer theory
desire
contemporary art
orientalism
contemporary art

Magazine

Surrogacies

Myths and visions of motherhood and fathering, brings together artistic and theoretical positions on reproduction and communication, gender and genus, addressing and conception.

contemporary art
feminism
mother figure
motherhood
body
aesthetics
gender
father figure
queer theory

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ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:<br>Art, Magazine, Books

ESPACE DIAPHANES Berlin:
Art, Magazine, Books

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New releases

Hauke Branding (ed.), Julian Volz (ed.): Radical Desires

Kevin B. Lee (ed.): The Future of Survival

Allison Grimaldi Donahue: The History of Breathing

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): Last Writings of Antonin Artaud

Anna Kipke (ed.), Iryna Kovalenko (ed.), ...: Drafts in Action

Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman: Before & After

Observing the Spectator

Article

Complicity in Spectatorship

The special case of lustful murdering soldiers of King Herod and the introduction of spectators on frescos by Giotto and pulpits by the Pisani are at the core of this contribution, which poses the question: How is cruelty visualized in Italy around 1300? The introduction of detached spectators in opposition...

Beate Fricke

Complicity in Spectatorship

Article

Condolence. Mourning Companions on Burgundian and other Sepulchers

Starting out from the two famous sepulchral monuments of the Dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold (d. 1404) and John the Fearless (d. 1419) in Dijon, this article examines the function of the anonymous companions of the funeral procession immortalized in stone, who are standing around the tomb, the so...

Henrike Haug

Anteilnahme

Article

The Relentlessness of Perspective. A Look at the Bystanders in 15th-Century Italian Painting

In the center of this article stands Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ. The enigmatic painting has been the object of innumerable interpretations; while for the most part, research has focused on the identification of the three prominent figures in the foreground, this article suggests that it is not the...

Urte Krass

Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit

Article

The Invented Beholder: Allegorical Powers of Persuasion as Visual Strategy

It is not just the painting that needs a beholder. The allegorical literature at the end of the Middle Ages is addressed to listeners as well as to spectators: the elaborated tableaux developed at the mind’s eye implicitly address a large audience. The prototypic description of paintings on the gardenwalls...

Cornelia Logemann

The Invented Audience

When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker going slow

In his photographs and texts, Calcutta-based Soham Gupta forces the tension that arises between fiction and real-life conditions in as yet unseen ways.

ABO DE FR

Current Texts

»This is not my blood.«

What is the problem with solutions? Blind or deaf? Which faith? What knowledge? Duchamp or Warhol? East or west?

OPEN
ACCESS

identity
performance art
Video art
human–animal communication

Current Texts

On Memory Atrophy

How can we remember the way we used to remember? OPEN
ACCESS

Malte Fabian Rauch

What Reena really wanted to know was why – in a night club, for example – do we chose, always and above all, that nothing happens?” ABO

Dan-el Padilla Peralta

it seemed like we’d just been in some horrible dream OPEN
ACCESS

Twenty-four hours in state of unconsciousness

Now this spectral city will become the site for execrations and lamentations, now time itself will disintegrate and void itself… ABO

Arts

Artaud’s Last Unpublished Work

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.)

Watchfiends and Rack Screams

Antonin Artaud’s last large-scale work, published in its complete form in English for the first time. Foreword by John Zorn.

I had a dream last night, scrambled, yes indeed, for a scrambled dream it sure was scrambled. But so meaningful on the other hand, so meaningful. Jean Dequeker was dragging himself along the earth with short and truncated legs, and he said: Am I a beast, a pebble, a branch or a meat stall? But after all what is a tree? What is a tree? Madame Dequeker was behind a cage with her stomach pressed against the flange of this...

avant-garde
poetry
literature
Modernism
autobiography

Arts

“Fuck that thing.” That’s all punk needs.

Donatien Grau, James Spooner

“The thing about punk is that you’re allowed to talk about anything. Kids can talk about whatever they want. There’s nobody saying, ‘No, you can’t do that, it’s not punk.’” OPEN
ACCESS

Tyler Coburn

However convincingly space agencies justify the enormous budgets, there’s one gratuitous expense: training astronauts for free fall. ABO

Jelili Atiku, Damian Christinger

The key to survival will lay in female hands. OPEN
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»Three hundred people left The House that Jack Built. I think that’s very good, and it wasn’t Cannes.« ABO DE

Arts

Artur Zmijewski

About ‘how we treat the others’

“There is something deeply humiliating in such a situation.”

OPEN
ACCESS DE

propaganda
National Socialism
concentration camp
gift
documenta
Poland
migration
political aesthetics
ethics
contemporary art

Arts

Dennis Cooper, Donatien Grau, ...

Sex creates love and love creates sex

“I don’t believe in progress, no.”

OPEN
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music
philology

Authors

Books

Sabine Gebhardt Fink (ed.), Andrej Mircev (ed.): Revolving Documents—Narrations of Beginnings, Recent Methods and Cross-Mappings of Performance Art

Jens Andermann (ed.), Lisa Blackmore (ed.), ...: Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Fotoarchiv

Liliana Gómez (ed.): Performing Human Rights

Sami Khatib (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Critique: The Stakes of Form

Kieran Aarons (ed.), Reiner Schürmann, ...: The Place of the Symbolic

Fiction

Empty Diagonal

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Antoine d’Agata

Diagonale du vide

A ghostly France: Emptiness and explosiveness behind the lines.

“If there is an artist capable of making these vacuums speak, it is d’Agata. To show what is not visible, to make present what can not be represented. There is a visual 'spectralism' about Antoine. It is about recording the spasms of humanity that is committing suicide, which has access to all the information needed to know what it is doing, and yet does nothing to revert the trend. We documented this suicide during a week of shared driving, of...

France
community
contemporary art
photography
revolution

Fiction

Diane Williams

How about some string?

I said “Would you like a rope? You know that haul you have is not secured properly.” ABO DE

The abandonment of the centrality of the subject

Donatien Grau

Philology keeps it possible to open a space for the minority. OPEN
ACCESS FR

Jochen Thermann

I really should not have hired him…

Waldemar—well, that was not actually his name… ABO DE FR

Jean-Luc Nancy

Ζένοι και Zah και Zuh

αποξενωμένοι αποκλίνοντες από ποιο αόρατο οικείο; OPEN
ACCESS FR FA DE

Fiction

Dodie Bellamy

All that pent up terror and rage

A stupid tweet by a nobody, meant as a parody, somehow goes viral and the internet offers up death threats.

OPEN
ACCESS

Fiction

A. L. Kennedy

Upending meanings and rewriting sanity

When it all burns you’ll know – a writer was there at the first…

ABO DE FR

Authors

Books

Antonin Artaud, Stephen Barber (ed.): A Sinister Assassin

Yann Le Bras, Jean Paul Mongin: The Death of Socrates

Discourse

Digital disrupture

Dieter Mersch

Digital Criticism

The machine remains alien to any mechanical limitation.

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result...

OPEN
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Discourse

Jurij Pavlovich Annenkov

We rehearsed the crowd scenes in the Winter Palace, in the Throne Room and the Armorial Hall. ABO

Black Panther is an American, not an African story

A.K. Kaiza

In another era, the mish-mash presentation of Africa would have been the focal point of criticism. But this is not the age for facts. OPEN
ACCESS DE

Ute Holl

“Communism will be when we understand something of love.” OPEN
ACCESS

Would communication beyond the semiosphere be conceivable? OPEN
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Discourse

Sina Dell’Anno

The Disobedience of the Word

“He always read Priam instead of ‘prime’.”

OPEN
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Discourse

Clémentine Deliss

A coffin to bury the statues of the ancestors

I was initially slightly sceptical of the ramifications and undertones of Renzo Martens’ project in central Congo…

OPEN
ACCESS

Africa
museum
colonialism
sculpture
colonial history
contemporary art

Authors

Books

Sebastián Eduardo Dávila (ed.), Rebecca Hanna John (ed.), ...: On Withdrawal—Scenes of Refusal, Disappearance, and Resilience in Art and Cultural Practices

Maria Zinfert (ed.): Kracauer. Photographic Archive

Mathias Denecke (ed.), Holger Kuhn (ed.), ...: Liquidity, Flows, Circulation

Elisabeth Bronfen: Mad Men, Death and the American Dream

Gertrud Koch: Breaking Bad, Breaking Out, Breaking Even

Humanities

Only art has the power of a form. Mathematics is an exercise for monks.

Alain Badiou

Art and Mathematics

After all, the history of modern and contemporary art can be read as the progressive inclusion of a growing part of the formless into apparatuses.

We all know that the relationship between mathematical activity and artistic creation is a very old one. We know that for a start the Pythagoreans tied the science of number not merely to the movements of the stars but to musical modes. We know that Babylonian and Egyptian architecture presupposed elaborate geometrical knowledge, even if the notion of demonstration had still not been won. Further back still, we find formal, or abstract, outlines mixed in with animal representations, in the...

ABO

art criticism
poetry
aesthetics
contemporary art
art

Humanities

Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Philippe Sollers

Like no other journal, Tel Quel was an outstanding arena of literary innovation and intellectual revolution. In this conversation its founder and publisher, Philippe Sollers, provides intimate insight and polemical hindsight into some of the most important milestones of its still-resonating era. ABO DE

Sandra Frimmel

What does it mean? ABO DE

Barbara Basting

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s closeness to fascism has put him in a dubious light. Barbara Basting tells of her personal fascination with futurism and her dehabituation from its aura and central figure. ABO DE

Mengia Tschalaer

“The sexual asylum story is everything,” OPEN
ACCESS DE

Humanities

Maria Filomena Molder

So many egoists call themselves artists…

Words are human things; a great obscurity saturates them…

“So many egoists call themselves artists,” Rimbaud wrote to Paul Demeny on May 15, 1871. Even though that is not always obvious, ‘I’, the first person, is the most unknown person, a mystery that is constantly moving towards the other two, the second and third persons, a series of unfoldings and smatterings that eventually gelled as ‘Je est un autre’. That is why ‘apocryphal’ is a literarily irrelevant concept and ‘pseudo’ a symptom, the very proof that life, writing, is made up of echoes, which means that intrusions and thefts (Borges also discusses them) will always be the daily bread of those who write.

Words from others, words taken out of place and mutilated: here are the alms of time, that squanderer’s sole kindness. And so many others, mostly others who wrote, and many other pages, all of them apocryphal, all of them echoes, reflections. All this flows together into—two centuries...

OPEN
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Humanities