Reaching back to a statement uttered by curator Scott Watson in the 1980s, “Art is not a general concern,” the recent wave of environmental art actions are examined within a history of art vandalisms, representation in media and popular culture, and their potential for political agency (or lack thereof).

In 2020, a combination of the pandemic, the police, and public events allowed me to recover my dissociated experience of being abused via the portal of key photographs. It’s a cautionary tale, not a redemptive one. The power of abuse always comes as a surprise. Trigger warnings for sexual abuse, rape, and violence.

Much of the debate around documenta fifteen forgets that political change and cultural change might not work in tandem, that denaturalising power relations might be easier than denaturalising gender relations and entrenched racial prejudices, or that the merits or demerits of political artworks, many of which come laden with harrowing backstories, cannot be measured against the yardstick of semiotic theory.

Documenting the lower Mississippi River as an acoustic space reveals already existing power dimensions at play before they become fully legible as symptoms of extractive dispossession. Analysing the politics of vibration, emission sources, and bandwidth use inequalities can reveal much about the colonial regime of extractive infrastructures by exposing the disassembled temporalities of the extractive event.

Co-editors of the 2016 themed issue on Visual Activism reflect back on it in light of recent events.

Themed "May You Live In Interesting Times," the 58th Biennale proceeds from the idea of multivalency, inviting complexity, ambiguity and contradiction, and constituting a point of departure rather than a conclusion.