Sabeth Buchmann is an art historian and critic. She is Professor of Modern and Postmodern Art and head of the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Together with Helmut Draxler, Clemens Krümmel, and Susanne Leeb she co-edits PoLyPen, a series on art criticism and political theory, published by b books, Berlin. Recent publications include: Putting Rehearsals to the Test. Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film. Theater, Theory, and Politics (ed. with Ilse Lafer and Constanze Ruhm, 2016), Textile Theorien der Moderne. Alois Riegl in der Kunstkritik (ed. with Rike Frank, 2015), Hélio Oiticica, Neville D’Almeida and others: Block-Experiments in Cosmococa (ed. with Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, 2013), Film Avantgarde Biopolitik (ed. with Helmut Draxler and Stephan Geene, 2009), Denken gegen das Denken. Produktion – Technologie – Subjektivität bei Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer und Hélio Oiticica (2007), Art After Conceptual Art (ed. with Alexander Alberrro, 2006).
eser
Research, exhibition, publication, audio talk
2014
The 500-page strong publication eser is an artist monograph comprising Berlin-based artist Judith Raum’s works, installations and lecture performance scripts from 2011 – 2014. It is at the same time a theoretical reader and material collection on the semi-colonial advance of German entrepreneurs and bankers into the Ottoman Empire before World War One, which happened in connection with the construction of the Anatolian Railway and the Baghdad Railway. In realizing a railway network, the logics of capitalism and geopolitical interests connected engineers’ tasks with less obvious objectives: to get hold of the archaeology, agriculture and working conditions of the territory crossed. Raum’s art works and texts take her research on site and in archives as a starting point, while insisting on an autonomous aesthetic dimension — more so, that is, than a functional dimension — and as such suggest an alternative approach to artistic research.
With contributions by Sabeth Buchmann, Alexander Garcia Düttman, Suzanne Marchand, Iz Öztat, design: HIT, Berlin, published by Archive Books, Berlin, 2015.
