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This month in Artforum: Venice Biennale: Eight distinguished contributors—Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Lynne Cooke, Thomas Crow, Pamela M. Lee, Claire Bishop, Okwui Enwezor, Daniel Birnbaum, and Negar Azimi—weigh in on the biggest show of the summer.
· “High Risk: Art, Environment, Crisis“:
Rising seas and bursting bubbles: Today, events both wildly unpredictable and apparently inexorable confront us at every turn. We live in a world defined by new and unprecedented risk—environmental, economic, technological, geopolitical. This special section of Artforum aims to address these tumultuous conditions, focusing on environmental crisis and its inseparability from spheres of culture, finance, science, violence, and power.
· Architects Guy Nordenson and Catherine Seavitt on climate change, rising sea levels, and risk assessment:
“As much a cultural construction as a scientific one, risk is all too easily manipulated.”
—Guy Nordenson and Catherine Seavitt
· Pritzker Prize–winning architect Toyo Ito talks to Julian Rose about design in the wake of natural disaster:
“My goal is not to reestablish the way of life that existed before the 2011 tsunami hit Japan; it is to create a new social life for the next generation in the aftermath of the catastrophe.”
—Toyo Ito
· Felicity Scott ventures into MoMA’s Rain Room and immersive environments of control and contingency, spectacle and failure:
“Rain Room’s visitors are not, of course, walking into a cloud of rain. Rather, they are entering into and interacting with a field of data.”
—Felicity Scott
· Renowned philosopher of science Michel Serres gives a rare interview to art historian Paul Galvez on nature, crisis, and knowledge:
“Not only can nature be considered a subject of law, but it should be considered as a subject, period: It is full of information and we must listen to it.”
—Michel Serres
· And: Artist Nils Norman presents a project exploring contemporary architectures of security and play; philosopher Vilém Flusser‘s “Cows,” an exclusive excerpt from the new, posthumous translation of his book Natural:Mind; photographer Iwan Baan debuts a portfolio of urban planning and disaster infrastructures in Tokyo; and five “Close-Ups” focus on artworks by Martin Beck, Willie Doherty, Rosa Barba, Liz Larner, Frank Gillette, and Paul Ryan.
· Also: Michael Hardt on Jonathan Crary‘s 24/7; Chris Kraus on Channa Horwitz; Richard Meyer on Joan Semmel‘s painting and photography; Alison M. Gingeras on Jeff Koons; J. Hoberman on Our Nixon; Molly Warnock on Simon Hantaï at the Centre Pompidou; and Mark Aerial Waller reveals his Top Ten.
· Plus: FALL PREVIEW. Artforum looks ahead to fifty exhibitions opening worldwide between September and December.
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