Decolonize art?
Essential pamphlet from Bolivian German philosopher and curator Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz. Available at Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair, 2025.
KIRKI QHAÑI – Container of Andean Poetics
Elvira Espejo Ayca
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KIRKI QHAÑI – Container of Andean Poetics by Elvira Espejo Ayca is a collection of essays and poems/songs situating Aymara ancestrality and Andean Poetics within the ongoing decolonization project. The book is a beautiful archive of Andean traditions and a powerful call to address urgent futures. KIRKI QHAÑI is in itself a bag of diverging moments and temporalities, a collection of innumerable voices, a container of Andean poetics.
With introductions by Bolivian-German writer, curator and philosopher, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz; professor in the Department of Literature at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Miguel Rocha Vivas; and INCA Press founders Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas.
Elvira Espejo Ayca is one of the most emblematic Bolivian poets of her generation. But there is more than Elvira Espejo’s poetry: she is also a visual artist, a storyteller, a singer, a weaver, a philosopher, a museum director, a teacher, a lecturer, and finally, she is also a binational Aymara-Quechua woman from the Ayllu of Qaqachaka, in the southern Oruro province, in the Central Andes – embracing millenary ancestral tradition, and making contemporary Bolivian culture shine internationally. For her outstanding commitment and engagement in culture in 2020 she was invested with the Goethe Medaille, the most prestigious distinction in culture awarded by the Federal Republic of Germany; in 2024 she was nominated Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture; she has shown her art and represented Bolivia at some of the most prestigious international venues, such as the Venice Biennale, the Mercosul Biennale in Porto Alegre, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the House of World Cultures HKW Berlin; she won many prizes at Latin American poetry and literature festivals, in Bolivia, in Chile, in Cuba, in Venezuela; she held keynote addresses at international conferences and academic symposiums such as the CIMAM Annual Conference in Buenos Aires and the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at UNAM in Mexico City; and last but not least, for almost twelve years now she has been directing the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore (MUSEF) in La Paz, where she has not only established the museum as the most impressive contemporary site of cultural and knowledge production –publishing over 40 books, including eleven collection catalogues with over 500 pages each, conference readers, audio-visual documentaries and an educational animation series that has been widely critically acclaimed and broadcasted on international TV channels– after entirely redesigning the museography she has also made the MUSEF become the most visited museum in Bolivia for several years in a row.
CONTRA EL bien general
Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas
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The book consists of one chapter appropriated from Karl Marx’s 1893 text Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy) and USDA photos, 100 pages printed with Pantone “Old Money Green”.
In this artists’ book, Bergman and Salinas build links between a chapter of Das Kapital outlining the early capitalist expropriation of farmers from common held lands with public domain photos of the United States Department of Agriculture research office.
This book was edited by Laurel V. McLaughlin and was co-published by Artspace New Haven and INCA Press.
INcalculable loss
manuel arturo abreu
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Incalculable Loss is the debut collection of critical prose from artist and poet manuel arturo abreu. In their own words, the text “orbits the topics of art, race, tech, and feelings,” gathering writing from 2014 to 2018 and presenting a kind of paean to the critical position, which is often maligned as parasitic or paradoxical. With a sense of casual rigor and flippancy, the included texts tackle themes from the problems of theorizing cannibalism, the violence of modernism in art via theft of Black and brown aesthetics, the commodification of identity, and the ways in which Big Data makes all of “us” newly complicit in the death and violence that powers the global system. Originally titled Against Theory — as in both anti-theory and rubbing up on its surface — abreu’s text offers various modes of recalibrating one’s own thinking, showing that if one truly loves knowledge, one must let it go.
manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is a poet and artist from the Bronx. Currently living and working out of a garage in southeast Portland, they received their BA in Linguistics (Reed College, 2014). They work with text, ephemeral sculpture, and photography in a process of magical thinking with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics. abreu recently exhibited and programmed with the Art Gym (Marylhurst, OR), Paragon Gallery (Portland, OR), Open Signal (Portland, OR), MoMA PS1 (NYC), Rhizome and the New Museum (online), and Veronica (Seattle, WA). They recently published at Rhizome, Art in America, AQNB, and SFMoMA Open Space. abreu wrote List of Consonants (Bottlecap Press, 2015) and transtrender (Quimérica Books, 2016),abreu co-facilitates home school, a free pop-up art school in Portland that creates welcoming contexts for critical engagement with contemporary art, as well as black apotrope, a living multimedia anthology of Black queer tendencies and processes.
Telepathy 传心术
Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas
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Telepathy 传心术 is a collection of essays of art in neoliberalism. The hyper-competition of neoliberalism is a construction that is sold as a fact of nature, purely a matter of biology, genetics, basic psychology, and particle physics, etc. The priests of advanced neoliberal capitalism credit all human advancements to competition.
Fields such as art, science, and education are antithetical to the goals of neoliberal quantification, gamification, and resulting private appropriation of everything. However, even these fields are forced to comply and compete, to great detriment of the independent goals of these fields, through coerced competition for resources via constant demands for performance metrics. For most of us it is impossible to step outside the legislated competitions of neoliberalism and so individuals must be well adjusted within the system, enabled by realist-conformist postures.
The rhetoric of competition has been cleverly transferred to a general system of governance, and forms relations between people, and between people and their professions. In this way, competition serves both as a discourse of legitimation, and as legal framework of extreme control. It takes armies of technocrats working tirelessly, endlessly, in order to enforce the myth of competition and thus hardly “natural” in the way it is marketed.
Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas are artists. They have lived in Detroit, Toronto, New York, London, La Rioja, Barcelona, Gothenburg, Oslo, Seattle, Portland, and Columbia, Missouri. Bergman was professor at the Oslo National Academy of Fine Art and the University of Washington, and Salinas taught at the University of Washington, University of Michigan and is currently professor at the University of Missouri. The duo co-founded and co-directed Lucky Kitchen, Institute for New Connotative Action, and INCA Press.
Their work has circulated internationally in institutions such as the 4th Athens Biennale; 1st Bergen Assembly Triennial; Turku Biennale; Struer Tracks Sound Art Biennial; Steirischer Herbst, Graz; Fundação de Serralves, Porto; Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; ICC Tokyo; IASPIS, Stockholm; Centre George Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris; Dundee Contemporary Art; MOCA Novi Sad; Taipei Fine Art Museum; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen; Henie Onstad Art Center, Kunstnernes Hus and 0047 in Oslo; MUDAM Luxembourg; The Luminary, St. Louis; The Ski Club, Milwaukee; Poor Farm, Wisconsin; Artspace New Haven, and Artpace San Antonio, among many others.
Free as in free…
Free as in Free…
Published on the occasion of the 11th Gwangju Biennale.
Printed by Publication Studio, Portland.
Don Mee Choi, Daisuke Kosugi & Ina Hagen, Cia Rinne, Talena Lashelle Queen, OEI, Klara Glosova, Rae Armantrout, Aeron Bergman & Alejandra Salinas, Mikko Kuorinki, manuel arturo abreu, Matthew Offenbacher, Jacob Wren, US English, Hami Bahadori, Justen Waterhouse.
To Make a Public: Temporary Art Review 2011-2016
To Make a Public: Temporary Art Review 2011-2016 is a selected anthology of the first five years of online publication Temporary Art Review and a catalogue of the related exhibition Document V celebrating the same benchmark. Edited by Temporary Art Review founders Sarrita Hunn and James McAnally, To Make A Public offers a singular lens into broader eruptions in artists’ publishing and artistic practice over the past five years as a primary document of our moment through the collected writings of artists, curators, activists and critics.
Arising out of a history of artists’ publications from self-published pamphlets at the earliest Salons through to the seminal magazines of the 1960’s, To Make a Public maps the return of the alternative space movement alongside social and political upheavals since 2011 through commissioned essays, interviews and first-person accounts from many of those directly involved.
To Make a Public includes contributions from Shannon Stratton, Steven Cottingham, Plug Projects, Good Weather, Transformazium, Kareem Reid, Anya Ventura, Matthew Fluharty (Art of the Rural), Cameron Shaw and Amanda Brinkman (Pelican Bomb), Taylor Renee and Jessica Lynne (ARTS.BLACK), contemptorary, Ryan Wong, Rihanna Jade Parker, Rozsa Zita Farkas, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Gretchen Coombs, ACRE, The Black Artists Retreat, Signal Fire, Lauren Frances Adams with Occupy Museums, Mary Coyne, Sam Gould, Abigail Satinsky, Anthony Romero, Sarrita Hunn with Jonas Staal and many others.
Forms of Education: Couldn’t Get a Sense of It
“Three years ago, during a talk at a university, a student asked me, “What is the relationship between your work and your teaching?” I realized then that
there was none. I might teach experimental forms and aesthetic vernaculars, but the way I taught it looked like any other art class from Mumbai to New
York, part of that dominant sameness that is global art education. Also, my work happens neither in the studio nor through “research”, but in ways that I could not quite name back then. I usually would describe it, and sometimes still do, as “looking like ethnography from the outside” with important differences in purpose and method, observational, and then, Boalian
or rooted in experimental histories of theater and film. It struck me that I could not teach all of this, in practice and in a way that encompassed all the
surprise, boredom, hesitation, fear, improvisation and pleasure that the process can produce. I resolved to change the form and spirit of what and how I taught.”
-Beatriz Santiago Munoz excerpt from her text The Third Teacher.
With texts, essays, and art by:
Gregory Sholette, Eunsong Kim, Pablo Helguera, Duba Sambolec, MFA no MFA, Shelly Asquith, Roee Rosen, Aurora Harris, Ted Heibert, Mohamed Ali Fadlabi, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Marjetica Potrč, Escuela de Garaje, Vancouver Institute for Social Research, Judy Chicago, Bisan Hussam Abu-Eisheh, Diego Bruno, Clare Butcher, Chus Martinez, Sezgin Boynik, Audun Mortensen, Aeron Bergman & Alejandra Salinas, Irena Boric, Sondra Perry & Nicole Maloof, Robert Paul Wolff, Chris Kraus, Martha Rosler, Tadej Pogačar, and Walid Raad.
Editors: Aeron Bergman, Alejandra Salinas, Irena Borić
Advisor: Gregory Laynor
Copy-editing: Justen Waterhouse
Design by: Rafaela Dražić