The renowned Polish contemporary artist is known for his participatory art projects, figurative sculptures and performative self-portraits. In the Lentos he showed a large-scale installation that was created in collaboration with international artists, based on a landscape inspired by the Dogon culture. Pawel Althamer relies on social cooperation and the inclusion of his environment and the people close to him. With his projects he questions social structures and networks in order to not seldomly inscribe himself into them in a new way. In the great hall of the Lentos, in collaboration with Bruno Althamer, Youssouf Dara, Jonathan Dellago, Józef Galazka, Piotr Grzegorek, Camille Holowka, Eva Höll, Robert Sosnowski and Rafal Zurek, he created such landscape dominated by earth, clay and wood. Exhibition shots and analytical texts by Massimiliano Gioni and Walter Seidl throw additional light on Althamer's approach. A supplementary photo documentation focuses both on the genesis of the exhibition and on the afterlife and relaunch of the sculptures from Linz for the exhibition titled "Unerwartet" at neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

The specific role of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the later nation of Austria within the formation of regional art histories in East Central Europe has received little attention in art historical research so far. Taking into account the era of the Dual Monarchy as well as the period after 1989, the contributions analyze and critically scrutinize the imperial legacies, transnational transfer processes and cultural hierarchies in art historiographies, artistic practices and institutional histories. Consisting of 17 texts, with new commissions and one reprint, case studies, monographic essays and interviews grouped thematically into two sections, the anthology proposes a pluriversal narrative on regional, cultural and political contexts.

Published to accompany the acclaimed summer 2008 After Nature exhibition at New York's New Museum, this unique catalogue pays tribute to the work of W.G. Sebald by repurposing existing copies of his 1988 three-part prose poem, from which the show borrowed its title. Called an arresting gesture by The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl, the catalogue consists of the original book, enriched with images that have been hand-placed between the pages, and a new fold-out dust jacket. The result is a singular hybrid that is part appropriation, part recycled material--informed by the artistic tradition of the found object. Conceived as an homage, the catalogue features an essay by the New Museum's Massimiliano Gioni, a complete checklist and 25 color images by each of the featured artists, who include Pawel Althamer, Huma Bhabha, Maurizio Cattelan, William Christenberry, Nathalie Djurberg, Werner Herzog, Zoe Leonard, Klara Liden, Dana Schutz and Tino Sehgal, among others.

Against the Anthropocene scrutinizes the proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch regarding climate change. In this slender but dense volume, cultural theorist T.J. Demos analyzes the biases within contemporary visual culturepopular science websites, remote sensing and SatNav imagery, eco-activist mobilizations, and experimental artistic projectsdemonstrating that it does not merely describe a geologic period, but actively supports the neoliberal financialization of nature, anthropocentric political economy, and endorsement of geo-engineering as a preferred method of approaching climate change. To develop creative alternatives, Demos argues we need to carefully consider the underlying motives the Anthropocene thesis. T.J. Demos is Professor of Art and Visual Culture and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at UC Santa Cruz. Past publications with Sternberg Press include Decolonizing Nature and Return To The Postcolony.

Twenty-first-century Kandinsky: a reappraisal of the Russian abstractionist's art, life and thought through the extraordinary collection of the iconic museum One of the foremost artistic innovators of abstraction in the 20th century, Vasily Kandinsky sought to liberate painting from its ties to the natural world and promote the spiritual in art. This richly illustrated publication looks at Kandinsky anew, through a critical lens, reframing our understanding of this vital figure of European modernism, who was also a prolific aesthetic theorist and writer. A series of thematic essays considers his engagement with avant-garde artistic communities including the Bauhaus, his relationship to improvisation and music, his travels in Europe and Russia, and the influences behind his self-declared anarchist mode of abstraction, among other topics. Tracing Kandinsky's life and work through his years in Moscow, several cities in Germany, and Paris, the texts offer striking new insights into an artist whose creative production and style were intimately tied to a sense of place--and displacement--and evolved amid the political and social upheavals catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and World Wars I and II. Kandinsky's history is closely linked to that of the Guggenheim Museum. Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting the artist's work in 1929; a year later, they met at the Bauhaus, in Dessau. This book features more than half of the museum's deep holdings of works by Kandinsky, presenting the full arc of his artistic development and career. Included are paintings in oil and oil with sand, reverse-glass paintings, as well as woodcuts, watercolors and drawings on paper. An illustrated chronicle of Kandinsky's life and career, including selected exhibitions and publications, rounds out the volume.

Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawe? Althamer and Paul Chan. Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.