Cet essai examine le rôle de la recherche et de la production de savoirs dans l'art contemporain et l'importance croissante,
dans les pratiques curatoriales et institutionnelles
actuelles, du rôle de l'art lui-même en tant que vecteur de connaissances.
What is the role and function of contemporary art in economic and political systems that increasingly manage data and affect? Knowledge Beside
Itself delves into the peculiar emphasis placed in recent years,
curatorially and institutionally, on notions such as "research" and
"knowledge production." Considered as a specific, expansive mode of the
culture industry, contemporary art is viewed here as a strategic bet on the
social distinctions and value extractions made possible by claiming a
different, novel access to "knowledge." Contemporary art's various liaisons
with the humanities and the social and natural sciences, as well as its
practitioners' frequent embeddedness within transdisciplinary research
environments and educational settings, have created a sense of
epistemo-aesthetic departure, which concurs with the growing relevance of
art as conduit or catalyst of knowledge.
Discussing the practice of artists such as Christine Borland, Tony Chakar,
Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Adelita Husni-Bey, Jakob Jakobsen, Claire
Pentecost, and Pilvi Takala, writer and curator Tom Holert submits the
gambit of conceptualizing contemporary art as an agent of epistemic politics
to a genealogical analysis of its political-economic underpinnings in these
times of cognitive capitalism, machine learning, and a renewed urgency of
epistemological disobedience.
Tom Holert est un écrivain et commissaire d'exposition. En 2015, il
cofonde le
Harun Farocki Institut de
Berlin, une plateforme de recherche et de production inspiré par
l'héritage du réalisateur et intellectuel allemand. Il a notamment
organisé en 2018, avec Anselm Franke, l'exposition «
Neolithic
Childhood: Art in a False Present, c. 1930 » à la Haus
der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
