ARTMargins Online

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Monthly Archive: September 2026

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Ahmet Furkan Inan ·

The Absent Question Mark: How Have We Got Here?

Vasıf Kortun and Sezin Romi, How Did We Get Here: Reading Vasıf Kortun. Edited by Sezin Romi. Berlin: Archive Books, 2026. 288 pp.

Few curatorial practices are as intimately bound up with the development of contemporary art in their geography as Vasıf Kortun’s. Any attempt to think through the trajectory of art practices in Turkey in the last thirty years must inevitably contend with the interventions he staged through the exhibitions he curated, texts he authored, and institutions he founded. In March 2017, he stepped down from his directorship at SALT, the interdisciplinary research and cultural institution he founded … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Raluca Oancea ·

The Venice Biennial: On Black Seas, Dead Waters, and Ghostly Archives

Art projects built on shock and sexuality, such as those presented by Austria or Denmark, have generated extraordinary buzz in the coverage of the 61st Venice Biennial. These projects do not, in my view, fully engage with what Koyo Kouoh, the late Cameroonian curator trained in Switzerland and known for her decolonial approach, defines as the “minor key.” Rather, a posthumanist perspective that rethinks human and nonhuman relations beyond anthropocentric and Eurocentric frameworks lies closest to Kouoh’s curatorial program, which was informed by references to writers Édouard Glissant and Toni Morrison and structured around metaphors such as “the archipelago,” “the … Read more