A study on the role of research and knowledge production in today's
contemporary art, and the growing relevance of art as conduit of
knowledge.
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.
