Aru Kuxipa expresses the vision and dream of the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto and the Amazonian artists, plant masters, and pajés (shamans) of the thirty-seven Jordão Huni Kuin communities to co-create a place of transformation, a zone of encounter and expression, and a site of healing away from their ancestral lands. Includes documentation of the exhibition at TBA21-Augarten, Vienna, June 25 through October 25, 2015.
During its expansion from the Amazon jungle to Western societies, ayahuasca use has encountered different legal and cultural responses. Following on from the earlier edited collection, The Expanding World Ayahuasca Diaspora continues to explore how certain alternative global religious groups, shamanic tourism industries and recreational drug milieus grounded in the consumption of the traditionally Amazonian psychoactive drink ayahuasca embody various challenges associated with modern societies. Each contributor explores the symbolic effects of a "bureaucratization of enchantment" in religious practice, and the "sanitizing" of indigenous rituals for tourist markets. Chapters include ethnographic investigations of ritual practice, transnational religious ideology, the politics of healing and the invention of tradition. Larger questions on the commodification of ayahuasca and the categories of sacred and profane are also addressed. Exploring classic and contemporary issues in social science and the humanities, this book provides rich material on the bourgeoning expansion of ayahuasca use around the globe. As such, it will appeal to students and academics in religious studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, biology, ecology, law and conservation.
Green Light is a project initiated by artist Olafur eliasson in collaboration with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, vienna. Conceived as a field of production and mutual learning, Green Light works with refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and nGOs to fabricate an unlimited edition of fully functional lamps, which are geometric, stackable modules made from recyclable materials that are fitted with a welcoming green light. Providing fundraising and education opportunities, Green Light workshops first took place in vienna in 2016, and have since been hosted at the Moody Center for the Arts (Houston) and the 57th venice Biennale. The publication seeks to question and reflect on the project through testimonies, stories, and memories by the participants and founders as well as reflect on the relationship between culture and migration today. With more than twenty contributors including Atif Akin, Anas Aljajeh, Tarek Atoui, Tawab Baran, Ian Cion, Angela Dimitrakaki, and Olafur Green Light participants, among others.
Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi): Art, Anthropology and Mongol Futurism' brings together the work of five anthropologists and five artists/collectives researching and responding to the dramatic rise and fall of Mongolia's mineral economy. Launched in tandem with the eponymous exhibition at greengrassi and Corvi-Mora in London, the publication features visual documentation of multiple art-anthropology exchange processes, ethnographic texts, and further written contributions that introduce contemporary Mongolia as a dynamic site for conceptual and creative experimentation. In the essay section of this book, the Green Horse Society tells a history of art and culture newly untethered in post-Soviet Mongolia; an early style of ethnographic art known as 'One Day in Mongolia' painting provides a canvas for urgent environmental protest; Mongolian hip-hop and nationalist poetry become ciphers for thinking through deep time; and space is opened up for what Simon O'Sullivan terms the art-anthropology probe head to do its important work. Faced with questions that transcend geographies and act across various scales, Five Heads mounts an experiment in separation (research detached from author, material detached from method) and growth (through the contact space between disciplines) in order to call into being new subjectivities and imagine possible futures. Exhibition: greengrassi / Corvi-Mora, London, UK (01.-15.09.2018).
Empires, Nations, and Natives is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the interplay between the practice of anthropology and the politics of empires and nation-states in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. It brings together essays that demonstrate how the production of social-science knowledge about the “other” has been inextricably linked to the crafting of government policies. Subverting established boundaries between national and imperial anthropologies, the contributors explore the role of anthropology in the shifting categorizations of race in southern Africa, the identification of Indians in Brazil, the implementation of development plans in Africa and Latin America, the construction of Mexican and Portuguese nationalism, the genesis of “national character” studies in the United States during World War II, the modernizing efforts of the French colonial administration in Africa, and postcolonial architecture. The contributors—social and cultural anthropologists from the Americas and Europe—report on both historical and contemporary processes. Moving beyond controversies that cast the relationship between scholarship and politics in binary terms of complicity or autonomy, they bring into focus a dynamic process in which states, anthropological knowledge, and population groups themselves are mutually constructed. Such a reflexive endeavor is an essential contribution to a critical anthropological understanding of a changing world. Contributors: Alban Bensa, Marcio Goldman, Adam Kuper, Benoît de L’Estoile, Claudio Lomnitz, David Mills, Federico Neiburg, João Pacheco de Oliveira, Jorge Pantaleón, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Lygia Sigaud, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Florence Weber
"David Adjaye, a major international figure in architecture and design, transforms complex ideas into approachable, innovative structures. The book contains an introduction by Okwui Enwezor and Zèoe Ryan; an essay by Adjaye himself; analyses of his master plans, transnational architecture, monuments and memorials, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.; and portfolios of his work, grouped by theme"--
New spatial notational systems for protecting and regaining Indigenous lands in the United States. In The Language of Secret Proof, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik challenges the conditions under which Indigenous rights to protect and regain traditional lands are currently negotiated in United States legal frameworks. This tenth volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series responds to the urgent need for alternative modes of evidentiary production by introducing an innovative system of architectural drawing and notation. Kolowratnik focuses on the double bind in which Native Pueblo communities in the United States find themselves when they become involved in a legal effort to reclaim and protect ancestral lands; the process of producing evidence runs counter to their structural organization around oral history and cultural secrecy. The spatial notational systems developed by Kolowratnik with Hemish tribal members from northern New Mexico and presented in this volume are an attempt to produce evidentiary documentation that speaks Native truths while respecting demands on secrecy. These systems also attempt to instigate a dialogue where there currently is none, working to deconstruct the fixed opposition between secrecy and disclosure within Western legal systems.
'I am sculpture and think as sculpture' - Ernesto NetoNeto is internationally renowned for his frequently biomorphic-like sculptures that modify their surrounding space and invite the viewer to interact with them.This catalogue is conceived as a retrospective and offers new, comprehensive insights into Neto's biosculptural cosmos, which is made up of sensuousness, intimacy and interrelationships.Essays as well as an extensive section of images reveal not only the roots of his oeuvre in Brazil's art history, but offer multiple perspectives on his work that can be experienced with all the senses.This publication also documents the newly commissioned installation, Aru Kuxipa Sacred Secret. This new work addresses shamanic spiritual traditions and handed-down healing rituals of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, interweaving them with issues of anthropology, ceremonial and tradition, as well as forms of contemporary art-making.Published on the occaasion of the exhibitions at TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna (25 June 25 - October 2015), and at Kunsthalle Krems (19 July - 1 November 2015).English and German text.
