Interstices

Reviews / Votes

"The book reconsiders the art of marginalised, subjugated and colonised people within the context of neoliberal globalisation. It is an 'interstitial perspective,' attentive to displacement, diaspora, stereotyping, migrancy and appropriation across various borderlands: post-apartheid South Africa, the Mediterranean, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Viceroyalty of Peru and Potosi in Bolivia. The works that Alberro discusses resist Western cultural hegemony by being contingent, unruly, difficult, defaced, disastrous and otherwise disruptive. . . . Above all, it is a book about the politics of attention: how and where we look, how we are seen, what is withheld, what we hide to ourselves and who, ultimately, controls the means of expression. . . . Like Alberro, we must cast our attention beyond the frame, the boundary, and the border - or risk finding ourselves, too, adrift." * Burlington Contemporary * "Alberro shows that 'global contemporary art' is a North Atlantic fiction, pervasive and insidious, that acts as a massive provincializing machine. Offering acute accounts of wide range of examples, Alberro traces how artists-especially art collectives-in many parts of the world are negotiating new modes of transcultural exchange at the margins, while at the same time enriching the independence of local cultures. This mix anticipates the worlds, and the art, to come." -- Terry Smith, author of "Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art" "With his compelling account of art at the margins, Alberro contributes powerfully to the growing voices of those who see clearly that, as colonial racial capitalism is threatening life on a global scale, to decolonize nature, end the violence of extraction, and enact creative worldbuilding otherwise is today more than ever urgent." -- T. J. Demos, author of "Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice to Come" "A most timely investigation of the freedoms and prohibitions on artists to cross borders. What does it mean, if it can or should still mean anything, for "the West" to stand or not to stand at the gates of entry to the artworld? How are the visible and invisible lines drawn, and in how many directions do they flow, in a world that claims globalization? Alberro's new book is a great contribution to thinking about these and many more questions." -- Lydia Goehr, Fred and Fannie Mack Professor of Humanities, Department of Philosophy, Columbia University