Issue 1
— Spring 2015

Judgement

Issue 1
— Spring 2015

Judgement
Magnus Bärtås, Miraklet i Tensta (Theoria), 2014

Editors -Henk SlagerIngrid ElamJohan Öberg

Ours is a time when all traditional forms of judgement and evaluation are put into question, into doubt, are subverted whether this be a matter of the judgements of experts, critics, of courts, Academia, the Churches, or simply “men” and “women”. Judgement is now seen as one more symbolic construct among others. It has been torn down from its “theoretical” position, and transformed into contested practice among other contested practices. But nonetheless it is practiced. Judgement is operative within the giddy violent flows of what is variously dubbed late modernity, liquid modernity, the contemporary, the era of globalization or mondialisation. Indeed, one of the seemingly unending agons of judgement is this very attempt to pronounce, upon the nature of the current historical moment, its boundaries and its valences. In framing the problematic of judgement, the following questions which indicate the problematic construction of “the now” were presented as possible points of departure: Where and when and by whom is judgement and evaluation actually taking place today? What is the value and the legitimacy of judgements today? Where, when and by whom are judgements made about those values?

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Issue 2
— Autumn 2015

The Value of Contemporary Art

Issue 2
— Autumn 2015

The Value of Contemporary Art
Linda Nylind, Gerhard Richter's Abstrakte Bild (809-4) Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2015

Editors -Andrea PhillipsJason E. BowmanSuhail Malik

How might contemporary art’s value be understood and analysed? What are the conditions that produce its value? What is the difference between the price of art and its value? These and other similar questions presuppose that art is, indeed, valuable — a sine qua non of art as such. But art’s value is a conglomeration of economic and historically-shaped symbolic factors, and these factors promote and prolong the global circulation of artefacts and at the same time profoundly shape the lives and working methods of those who participate in art – dealers, auction houses, galleries, museums, educators, curators and their often unrecognised assistants, philanthropists, and not least of all, artists themselves.

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Issue 3
— Summer 2016

Repetitions and Reneges

Issue 3
— Summer 2016

Repetitions and Reneges

Editors -Darla CrispinAnders HultqvistCecilia Lagerström

Repetition is in fact an obvious prerequisite in many art forms, and especially so in the performing arts. In these, it may even be considered a basic requirement for the creation of a piece as well as its performance; the concert or performance is carved out by being rehearsed, or repeated, over time, and it is presented for an audience time and again, night after night. And each time it must be recreated.

This specific condition of repetition may also be what constitutes the art form’s “problem” or dilemma. How can the performer recreate the pre-determined pattern “as if it were for the first time”, with new clarity and poignancy? What happens in the meeting between repetition—which represents a familiar past—and a new situation, an event—with its inevitable demand for the present moment? To encounter a familiar pattern or figure is also, for many artists, a way to create a confrontation between oneself and the pre-existing material on the one hand, with that which is not the same, with new meaning, on the other.

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Issue 4
— Autumn 2016

Times

Issue 4
— Autumn 2016

Times
Medium Earth (film still), 2013 by the Otolith Group. Courtesy and Copyright the artists.

Editors -Dave BeechIngrid ElamAnders HultqvistAndrea Phillips

What are the times? Such a question has multiple inflections. It refuses the commonplace, it locates both a historical and an epistemological concern. The time is out of joint, says Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the times are out of joint says Brecht’s Azdak in The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Derrida’s hauntology begins with this concept of time out of joint. Ontology becomes temporal and multiple: a hauntology is at least two points in time that coincide in some troubling way. If the time is out of joint, there are two or more times that do not sit well. In the conversation between Hanna Hallgren, Somaya El-Sousi and Jenny Tunedal in this issue, such out-of-jointness is rendered palpable. Writing between Europe and Gaza in the summer of 2014, talking through skype, they ask, what is the time of war? “Time to kill versus / Time to get killed or not.”

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Issue 5
— Spring 2017

Management

Issue 5
— Spring 2017

Management
Sheldon Adelson Casino, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. Christopher Newfield

Editors -Henric BeneschAndrea PhillipsErling Björgvinsson

Management is usually treated as a separate domain to the field of contemporary creative practice in the sense that those employed to manage and administrate institutions and those who supply the “content” to or in those institutions (be they artists, musicians, performers or, perhaps to a lesser extent, designers) are separated not simply through the virtues of culture, but also logistically, financially, spatially, in terms of rights and freedoms. How does such a political and social separation of the tasks of “making” and “managing” inhere to an isolationist mechanism, in which management is seen as both an oppressive and lower status form of “doing”? Histories of modernism suggest that the artist/ performer/ crafter/ designer/ actor/ composer/ musician/ writer is managed and at the same time resists – or refuses to take responsibility for – their own management. Is this refusal and/or resistance a survival mechanism, and a performative critique of the governmentalisation and privatisation of the cultural industries? Or is it a naive calling upon art’s possessive autonomy – a resistance in fact to the responsibility of care of the self within an administered world? Conceptualising management as troublesome and uncreative allows us to externalise the rhythms and protocols of macro-politics against our own (mythologised, personalised) micro-politics. But, in fact, and increasingly within the gig economy, many of us spend most of our time managing our administrative as well as aesthetic relations to the world. Cultural processes and productions are situations that not only require personal management, but also depend upon cooperation, coproduction, delegation and various collective efforts.

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Issue 6
— Autumn 2017

Secularity

Issue 6
— Autumn 2017

Secularity
Santiago Mostyn

Editors -Nav HaqAndrea PhillipsOla Sigurdson

This issue of PARSE Journal, developed in collaboration with Nav Haq (Curator) and Stina Edblom (Artistic Director) of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2017 (GIBCA 2017), comes at a critical time for European social and political attitudes within a global context, in which many attitudes and principles are fundamentally being challenged. In particular, the very European truce between secular humanism and religious traditions has come under increasing scrutiny, challenged both from within and without. While there may certainly be good reasons to challenge any particular societal configuration, the question inevitably arises how human beings of different beliefs, or no particular belief and of different modes of life should be able to live together in peace and with a sense of equality, rights and freedom. This is the question of secularity. The subject for this issue of PARSE is taken directly from Nav Haq’s curatorial thematic for GIBCA 2017 that he has been developing throughout 2016 and 2017, titled WheredoIendandyoubegin—On Secularity, and is launched to coincide with the opening of the biennial to act as part-catalogue, part-contextual (re)source and part-imaginative interpolation in tandem with events that will be held throughout the biennial.

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Issue 7
— Autumn 2017

Speculation

Issue 7
— Autumn 2017

Speculation
New World Assembly, Rojava, 2016

Editors -Dave BeechAnders HultqvistValérie Pihet

When we take a chance as individuals in everyday life—quitting a job before you’ve lined up something better, falling in love, deciding to read this journal rather than going for a walk—we establish a relationship to the future. We speculate. Speculation, therefore, is a necessary component of human agency. This is why the opponents of speculation appear to be captured by speculation insofar as they hope for a world after the reign of speculation. Utopias and dystopias are speculative designs that are rooted in the very world from which they exit. So, the empirical world is not cut off from numberless speculative futures, but is shaped by all those futures that are presently hoped for, invested in, banked on, planned for and insured against. The future is not remote, but immanent in what is done now in order to bring about change, maintain the status quo or surrender to fate.

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Issue 8
— Autumn 2018

Exclusion

Issue 8
— Autumn 2018

Exclusion
Border Field State Park / Imperial Beach, San Diego, California. Photo via Tony Webster of Wikimedia Commons.

Editors -Dave BeechErling BjörgvinssonKristina Hagström-Ståhl

Exclusion continues to blight a global world system ostensibly liberated from twentieth-century restrictions on liberty, movement, trade, knowledge, opportunity and communication. There is no doubt a greater volume of financial and informational exchange today than at any time in history; simultaneously, however, our epoch is defined by the mushrooming of crippling individualised debt as well as the monetisation and weaponisation of data by an elite. Rising levels of migration across continents has been met with escalating deportation regimes, and the formal equalities won by the civil rights movement in the second half of the twentieth century have come up against stubborn resistance within institutions that have not been desegregated, as well as the rise of the alt-right.

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Issue 9
— Spring 2019

Work

Issue 9
— Spring 2019

Work
The Happy Ending of.., Beagles and Ramsay, 2019

Editors -Benjamin FallonDave BeechKirsteen MacdonaldMarina Vishmidt

Recent debates on work have increasingly incorporated the figure of the artist and forms of political engagement in art. Creative labour has occupied a central place in the critical re-assessment of work, since the publication in 1999 of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s sociological study of the transformation of work via the analysis of the recuperation of avant-garde values into management discourse. Concurrently, artists and other art workers have increasingly embedded the politics of art and the critique of art’s institutions in the strategies of worker activism such as the withdrawal of labour, demands for wages and employment rights. The editors hope that this collection will enrich debates at the intersection between art and work and prompt further discussion of what is at stake – both practically and theoretically – when considering art and the politics of work as central to how we think about the contemporary world and how we can change it.

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Issue 10
— Spring 2020

Migration

Issue 10
— Spring 2020

Migration
Tintin Wulia, Fallen (still), 2011. Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist.

Editors -Erling BjörgvinssonNicholas De GenovaMahmoud KeshavarzTintin Wulia

The PARSE journal issue on Migration inquires into the embodied, affective, performative, material, visual, and spatial politics of cross-border human mobilities, through arts/design as well as other disciplines and practices. It concerns all the actors involved in these mobilities: the remarkable proliferation over recent years of heterogeneous human migration formations, including labour migrants and people seeking asylum, the border enforcement infrastructures that arise in response to these mobilities, as well as how these infrastructures incorporate market-based migration industry actors.

The journal issue is an encounter between artists and migration scholars as we believe that both address and struggle with a crisis of representation when it comes to migration, which should not be confused with over-simplified discourse regarding a “crisis” of borders and migration. We believe that both fields can have a vital role to play in counter-narrating and counter-visualizing dominant discourses and forms of representation of migration.

 

 

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Issue 11
— Summer 2020

Intersections

Issue 11
— Summer 2020

Intersections
"Knowledge" (cropped) © Nina Mangalanayagam.

Editors -Kristina Hagström-StåhlJyoti MistryJessica Hemmings

This issue of PARSE journal concludes the theme of “Intersectional Engagements in Politics and Art”, first initiated as a research arc within PARSE in 2018. Under this theme, artists, scholars and students, as well as a wider public have gathered to share a critical exploration of the nexus of race, coloniality, gender and sexuality in contemporary art-making, scholarship and artistic research. Focusing on socially engaged practices related to memory, history, embodiment and alterity, the journal issue offers yet another set of considerations that brings together research by practitioners and scholars from a wide range of fields, disciplines and contexts.

The theme began as a way to address and explore interest within arts research about the notion of intersectionality as a mode of creative practice, as well as a form of critical analysis. This interest, arguably following a turn towards the intersectional in feminist artistic practice and pedagogy, came as scholars in the humanities and social sciences were already debating the various appropriations and reifications that had seemingly made intersectionality into “a grand theory of everything”, to use Kimberlé Crenshaw’s words, with the effect of positioning intersectionality as a deeply contested, seemingly overdetermined concept.1

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Issue 12
— Autumn 2020

Human

Issue 12
— Autumn 2020

Human
Scene 7.2 from Barbara- A Tale of Transformation by Garðar Eyjólfsson, illustration Janosch Bela Kratz, edited

Editors -Jyoti MistryRose Brander

The 2019 PARSE conference “HUMAN” invited contributions to “reimagine, remake, expose and expand the human vis-à-vis notions of the nonhuman, inhuman, subhuman, post-human and inhumane.”

Dave Beech, Erling Björgvinsson and Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, who conceived the conference posed the following questions in their call for submissions:

How can we rethink the conditions for a political imaginary capable of structural transformation and justice for human and nonhuman alike? What is at the heart of current debates on the human? What political imaginaries have enabled the current wave of xenophobic and neo-colonial dehumanisation? How can the arts respond to what may be termed a crisis in humanity?

The conference programme subsequently included cross-disciplinary art practices—music, theatre, film, fine arts and more—coupled with conceptual and theoretical considerations on the expansive conceptions of the *human condition. Participants and delegates from varied and disparate research propositions considered the past and current state of the human condition, and speculated on human futurity in the context of current geo-political, economic and environmental urgencies.

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Issue 13
— Spring/Summer/Autumn 2021

On the Question of Exhibition

Issue 14
— Spring 2022

Krabstadt Education Center: Conflated Places

KEC, The Admissions Game, 2022 © Krabstadt Education Center

Editors -Ewa EinhornJeuno JE KimKarolin Meunier

Krabstadt is a small town located somewhere in the Arctic where the Nordic Countries send their unwanted people and problems. It’s populated by the long-term unemployed, asylum seekers, immigrants, and those with too many over­due bills.

Recently, Krabstadt has absorbed an influx of unemployed artists with PhDs, burned-out artist-teachers/teacher-artists, and institutionally stuck creatures. The local Krabstadt government seized this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and opened an Education Center to push Krabstadt to the forefront of education. The journal and subsequent events linked to KEC seek to establish webworks that conflate online with onsite to create platforms for learning, real and imagined.

But how does one start a school? What constitutes a “school” and how does one “start”, given that the whole endeavor takes place in the context of a fictional framework, the animated city of Krabstadt? We decided to use methods and objects specific to animation, where fiction, farce, and fantasy are negotiated to both challenge and make sense of lived experiences. Consequently, rehabilitated volcanoes on anger management programs are teachers at KEC, while students are broadly recruited to include flora, fauna, and fungi.

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Issue 15
— Autumn 2022

Violence

Issue 16
— Spring 2023

Conviviality and Contamination

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash.com

Editors -Lucy Cathcart FrödénOscar Hemer

This collaborative project, with “conviviality” and “contamination” as inspirational but not delimiting concepts, has been carried out by an international group of twelve artists and academics, writers and researchers, who came together in the autumn of 2022 to generate the body of work presented here. Before introducing their individual contributions, the co-editors briefly discuss the project’s themes and process.

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Issue 17
— Autumn 2023

Citations

Issue 17
— Autumn 2023

Citations
Installation image of chaos clay, Octavial Scape (2020), lyrics from Light Asylum, The End of Day. Photo by James Bantone. Courtesy of the artist.

Editors -Marie-Louise RichardsCathryn Klasto

This issue on citations and its politics seeks to reimagine spaces for knowledge production. McKittrick’s citational and spatial thinking has been one of the cornerstones for this issue. Centring on the reimagining of spatial practice has become an experiment to not only think of citations as means of making space, but also as an environment for showing the processes of sharing ideas. The peer-review process has been central to this experiment; in asking contributors to develop a relation with and understanding of each other’s work, we sought to reclaim the word “peer”, which we feel has been largely lost within institutional frameworks. This aspect has been very valuable and together with the contributors we have gained a deeper understanding on how to build on the knowledge we built together in this initial experiment. In addition to the peer review process, we hosted a series of workshops, which have been just as crucial in rethinking how to share knowledge, with the intention of engaging directly with some of our contributors’ citational practices.

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Issue 18
— Spring 2024

Thinking in Motion

Issue 18
— Spring 2024

Thinking in Motion
Liz Collins, Knitting Nation Phase 15: Weaving Walls (detail), 2016, rayon and polyester jersey fabric, knitting machines, screen printed jumpsuits, white doc Martens, at the Museum of Art & Design, New York with Kristine Woods. Image courtesy the artist. Photographer Eric Scott.

Editor -Jessica Hemmings

PARSE Journal issue 18 explores the thinking that occurs when bodies are in motion. Six contributors from the fields of psychology, aesthetics, sports history, performance, craft and literature consider the ways our solitary bodies in motion think differently than our social and sedentary selves. The eclectic, rather than esoteric, reflections gathered here draw attention to the various ways movement can influence, and at times unlock, otherwise fixed patterns of thinking. While often invisible in the workplace, these activities provide crucial lessons for the long-term cultivation of creative thinking. Dance, the field Robinson so passionately advocated for, is perhaps the most acute form of thinking in motion. But instead of an emphasis on motion that informs motion (dancing to understand dance), contributors’ examples include the familiar experience of walking—but also running, cycling, rock climbing and motorcycle riding—that influence decision-making elsewhere in life.

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