HEARINGS:
A READER
CONTOUR
BIENNALE 8

Edited by Natasha Ginwala
Published by Sternberg Press
English
248 pages, 15 x 22 cm
ISBN 978-3-95679-297-7

Price: 95 lei


The Contour Biennale 8, “Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium,” curated by Natasha Ginwala, brings together twenty-five international and local artists and art collectives working in lens-based media, sound, performance, drawing, and installation. Taking place in Mechelen, Belgium, “Polyphonic Worlds” embraces the communal spirit of biennale by including the many-sided voices that assemble in collective formations as well as discrete, individual creative positions.

This reader proposes a series of beginnings—it is a polyphonic approach that borrows from juridical and musical spheres. Hearings comprises texts orginally published on the eponymous online journal that traces the artistic processes, conceptual methods, and historical research through textual as well as image and video-based contributions from a range of artists, writers, poets, anthropologists, and filmmakers. It is not a traditional exhibition catalogue but instead complements what is in the biennale, engages with current ideas and discourses, and reorients relationships around the artwork as a site of evidence and as a testimonial record.

Featuring texts and illustrated contributions by Agency, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Eric Baudelaire, Rossella Biscotti, Hunter Braithwaite and Trevor Paglen, Filipa César, Cooking Sections, Council, T. J. Demos, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Rana Hamadeh, Louis Henderson, Adelita Husni-Bey, Ho Tzu Nyen, inhabitants, Arvo Leo, Sven Lütticken, Basir Mahmood, Samuel Mareel, Dirk de Meyer, Otobong Nkanga, Pallavi Paul and Anish Ahluwalia, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Judy Radul, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, Madonna Staunton, Ana Torfs, Trinh Thi Nguyen, Susanne M. Winterling and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ghassan Zaqtan.