Are you interested in the concepts that MOED works with, do you want to read more about what you’ve seen, or do you want to feel inspired? In our library section you can find suggestions for further reading. Scroll down to explore texts suggested by our partners.
All the texts presented on this page are easily available online unless stated otherwise. If you do encounter any trouble accessing them, please let us know.
Catalogus ‘What is Left Unseen’
Buikema, Rosemarie, Layal Ftouni, Nancy Jouwe, Bart Rutten, Rolando Vázquez and Rosa Wevers. What is Left Unseen. Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2019.
Download the digital version of the catalogue What is Left Unseen here, which was developed by the MOED team as part of the exhibition ‘MOED: What is Left Unseen’ at Centraal Museum, Utrecht.
Can art amend history?, TED talk from 2017 by artist Titus Kaphar. Kaphar makes paintings and sculptures that wrestle with the struggles of the past while speaking to the diversity and advances of the present. In this talk, Kaphar takes a brush full of white paint to a replica of a 17th-century Frans Hals painting, obscuring parts of the composition and bringing its hidden story into view. There’s a narrative coded in art like this, Kaphar says. What happens when we shift our focus and confront unspoken truths?
One is not enough, a video by the Guerrilla Girls from 2017 in which they argue how the representation of one female artist in exhibitions and museums (in this case the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam) is not enough.
For more information on this, see “The position of women artists in four art disciplines in The Netherlands”. January 2019. A report for Mama Cash by Astrid Kerchman & Pauline Salet.
New to the subject of art, gender and difference? Explore these texts to get you started.
Buikema, Rosemarie L. and Liedeke Plate, red. Handboek genderstudies in de media, kunst en cultuur. Bussum: Coutinho, 2015.
An all-round introduction into the field of Gender Studies. It provides you with varied and up to date insights into Gender Studies as a discipline, within the larger context of Culture Studies in the Netherlands. Both canonical texts and ideas are discussed, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”, as well as more recent phenomena emerging from digitalisation, globalisation and neoliberalism.
Buikema, Rosemarie L. Revolts in Cultural Critique. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020.
From Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf, to Marlene van Niekerk and William Kentridge, artists and intellectuals have tried to address the question: How to deal with the legacy of exclusion and oppression? Via substantive works of art, this book examines some of the answers that have emerged to this question, to show how art can put into motion something new and how it can transform social and cultural relations in a sustainable way. In this way, art can function as an effective form of cultural critique.
Henning, Michelle, Museums, media and cultural theory, Stuart Allan. Open University Press, 2006.
This work investigates the cultural signification of museums and exhibitions. In doing so, Henning approaches museums from an experiential and performative angle as museums influence our sensual experiences.
Kuoni, Karin and Chelsea Haines, eds. Entry points: The Vera List Center field guide on art and social justice no. 1. Durham: Duke University Press.
This book captures some of the most significant worldwide examples of art and social justice and introduces an interested audience of artists, policy makers, scholars, and writers to new ways of thinking about how justice is defined, advanced, and practiced through the arts.
Lidchie, Henrietta. “The poetics and the politics of exhibiting other cultures.” In Representation, Stuart Hall, Jessica Evans and Sean Nixon, 120-211. London: Sage, 2013.
This chapter examines how so called “ethnographic objects” acquire their meaning. Central to this exploration is a critical engagement with ethnographic institutes, such as museums, whose representational practices exhibit these objects of so called “other cultures”. In this way, this text critically examines how “the west” represents and classifies non-western cultures.
Dig Deeper
Belia, Vasiliki, Rosemarie Buikema, Margriet Schavemaker and Rosa Wevers, eds. “Towards a Museum of Mutuality,” Stedelijk Studies, Spring 2019.
Buikema, Rosemarie and Maaike Meijer, eds. Kunsten in beweging, 1900-1980 & 1980-2000 in de reeks Cultuur en migratie in Nederland. Den Haag: SDU Uitgevers, 2003-2004.
This work offers the first two parts of a larger series on “Culture and Migration in the Netherlands”. It emphasizes the multiplicity of Dutch culture and examines how immigration and immigrant art, has influenced Dutch art, ways of living, styles and ways of thinking and how these interactions are reflected in our material, cultural, and social environments. It also maps the varied ways in which immigrant art was received in Dutch culture. (in Dutch)
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, et al., eds. All the monuments must fall: A syllabus. New York City: New York University, 2017.
This online syllabus consists of a collection of texts that relate to Confederate and white-supremacists monuments within the US. This ongoing project was initiated by the anti-fascism protests in Charlottesville Va, in August 2017. This online syllabus wishes to contribute to the ongoing resistance against historical monuments that glorify exclusion and racism.
Stanley, Liz. “Remaking memory: On statues and memorials,” 2020.
This annotated reading list offers material connected with issues of the politics of remembering, memorials, commemoration and statuary located in public space.
Vázquez, Rolando. “From globalizing towards decolonizing: Art history and the politics of time – Interview with Rolando Vázquez.” Kunstlicht 29, no. 1. (2018): 98-105.
An interview in which Rolando Vázquez answers questions surrounding de-colonial thought with a focus on the political implications of our modern temporality in which the “contemporary/now” occupies the norm.
Vázquez, Rolando. Vistas of modernity: Decolonial aesthesis and the end of the contemporary. Prinsenbeek: Jap Sam Books, 2020.
Cultural and educational institutions are confronted with the responsibility to provide tools and spaces for critical reflection, for engagement, and, more fundamentally, for meeting and recognizing each other in our differences. In this decolonial essay Rolando Vázquez introduces his critique which offers an option for thinking and doing beyond the dominant paradigms.
Vázquez, Rolando and Walter Mignolo. “Decolonial aestheSis: Colonial wounds/decolonial healings,” 2013.
An online dossier covering decolonial wounds and healing by two of the most renowned scholars in the field.
The following document offers our selection of staple texts in the field of Gender Studies, either as a result of their innovative research methods, the heavily anticipated and needed inclusion and recognition of its subject matter or because of the wide debates the text initiated due to its provocative statements. List incomplete? Do not hesitate to let us know.
Atria, Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History forms a national knowledge institute that focuses on collecting, managing and sharing the heritage of women. On the basis of research and facts, Atria promotes equal treatment of women and men in all diversity. Atria offers a library and archive and organizes events around these topics. Atria offers a comprehensive collection of texts on Dutch women’s suffrage. Discover below a selection of works in their archive on this subject.
Terra Critica is an international and interdisciplinary research network in the critical humanities. The network was founded by dr. Birgit Mara Kaiser and dr. Kathrin Thiele in 2012, with a group of core members and a wider circle of participants. Terra Critica aims to re-examine critical theory and practice under the conditions of the 21st century, in light of our existences that are globally entangled across flows of capital, people, and ideas.
Given the persistent need to decolonize knowledge and institutional practice, as well as the fact that we are living in interdependent ecological and economic systems with growing inequalities, Terra Critica believes that critical vocabularies and practices also have to be refined and revised.
See here for Terra Critica’s library suggestions, based on four ReadingRoom sessions that took place in Utrecht, organized by Terra Critica in collaboration with Casco Art Institute.
What is the relation between algorithms, hypersea and zombies? They were brought together under the same cover, in the Posthuman Glossary (Bloomsbury, 2018).
The Posthuman Glossary is a multi-layered and diverse collection of both critical and creative terms selected from the contemporary debate surrounding the posthuman turn and jointly edited by prof. dr. Rosi Braidotti (Utrecht University and senior advisor to BAK basis voor actuele kunst) and Maria Hlavajova (director of BAK basis voor actuele kunst). Braidotti explains:
“Two main points of our praxis during the production of the book were that it would be a collaboration between artists and academics and that the format would be non-linear, unlike traditional academic edited volumes. In fact, the glossary is not strictly academic, and it deliberately took the risk of falling into what critics dismissively call ‘activist research’. But we both found it important to highlight how much innovative thinking has been done in these hybrid fields. Our focus was on the creativity, energy and inventiveness of on-going developments in the Humanities, which so many people describe—wrongly, as it turns out—as being in a crisis … In some ways the operative model became that of a curatorial practice. While we did exercise quality control—the pieces had to be legible, scientifically accurate and verifiable— they were also allowed to be experimental in both form and content.”
In this interview with Rosi Braidotti, conducted especially for MOED by Lauren Hoogen Stoevenbeld, Braidotti reflects on the editorial and curatorial work she shared with Hlavajova during the editing of this volume. For the MOED library, Braidotti highlights three selected entries from the glossary, which have been made available here: “The Pregnant Posthuman” by Rodante van der Waal, “The (Posthuman Icon) Pill” by Anneke Smelik and Elisa Flore, and “Placenta Politics” by Braidotti herself. Click on the link below to open the interview, in which Braidotti explains why she chose these entries for MOED:
Posthuman Glossary entries: