Editorial meeting – A Gathering Towards a Critique of the Contemporary
Art and culture are exposed to immense challenges due to various populistic agendas. This has an immediate effect on contemporary art and its complex habitat between the local, national and international. When publishing spaces are becoming more restricted in favour of ideological and market-driven communication – there is an urgency for expanding critical conversations, formats and languages. With utmost integrity, we aspire to modify ways on how to relate to art and the world at large. Through the function of art, aesthetics and the art world, can we further understand how the development of the democratic nation-state that emerged out of modernity – is deeply rooted in colonialism and capitalism?
2020 was a year dominated as much by uprisings, as the repression of these, a crisis of social reproduction and health, and various forms of nationalist, logistic-economic and socio-physical reconsiderations. Since the early spring, Paletten Art Journal has gathered writers from various perspectives, under the headline “Editorial meeting.” The emphasis on the notion of the ‘editorial’ was first meant to physically gather people in open editorial meetings, to discuss, determine and propose alternative methods for future work. While these meetings had to be cancelled due to the pandemic, the conversation between editors and invited contributors continued, fuelled by critical reflections on the distribution of resources, concepts of care, a rising wave of populism and conspiracy theories, and the role of editorial work and writing, in relation to various forms of political organising.
One of the planned meetings was supposed to take place at, and in collaboration with, Mint – an independent art space whose critical strivings also has been a great source of motivation during the development process of this editorial project. It is, therefore, a joy to also close this chapter at Mint – hopefully not to only make full circle, but to emphasise on future alliances and trajectories. Celebrating the publication of this compilation of texts, Frida Sandström meets the contributing writers, Ana Teixeira Pinto and Jakob Jakobsen, to discuss matters of future work: what is to be done, and what are we preparing for?
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The resulting texts, recorded conversations and multimedia montages form attempts to examine practical possibilities of art criticism today. They are available at paletten.net.
Image caption; Leap into the Work (2002 – ) by Farid Fairuz