Tom Holert, "Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art's Epistemic Politics" (Sternberg Press, 2020)

Jan 12, 2021

Knowledge Beside Itself

Contemporary Art's Epistemic Politics

Tom Holert

Hosted by Pierre d'Alancaisez

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Summary

What is the role and function of contemporary art in economic and political systems that increasingly manage data and affect? Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art's Epistemic Politics (Sternberg Press, 2020) delves into the peculiar emphasis placed in recent years, curatorially and institutionally, on notions such as “research” and “knowledge production.”

Tom Holert, author of Knowledge Beside Itself, speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the history of art's fraught relationship with knowledge and its opposition to scientific notions of epistemology, as well as about art's complicity in the "epistemic mammoth" of the knowledge economy.

Holert discusses the work of Natascha Sadr Haghighian and 'The Trainee' by Pilvi Takala which is available to view on Vimeo.

Tom Holert is a writer and curator. In 2015 he cofounded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin, a platform for research and production departing from the example set by Farocki. With Anselm Franke he curated the 2018 exhibition “Neolithic Childhood: Art in a False Present, c. 1930” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. “Education Shock,” a research and exhibition project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt on the spatial politics of education in the global 1960s and 1970s will take place in 2021.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemprary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.