About
Undoing Property?
Edited by Marysia Lewandowska and Laurel Ptak
Launch: Tuesday 25 June 2013, 6:308.30pm
Marysia Lewandowska in conversation with Claire Pentacost and Marilyn Strathern, with performance by the Open Music Archive.
Undoing Property? examines complex relationships of ownership that exist inside art, culture, political economy, immaterial production, and the public realm today. In its pages artists and writers address aspects of computing, curating, economy, ecology, gentrification, music, publishing, piracy, and much more.
Property shapes all social relations. Its invisible lines force separations and create power relations felt through the unequal distribution of what otherwise is collectively produced value. Over the last few years the precise question of what should be privately owned and publicly shared in society has animated intense political struggles and social movements around the world.
In this shadow the publication's critical texts, interviews and artistic interventions offer models of practice and interrogate diverse sites, from the body, to the courtroom, to the server, to the museum. The book asks why propertisation itself has changed so fundamentally over the last few decades and what might be done to challenge this.
The book is a result of a four-year collaboration between London-based artist Marysia Lewandowska and New York-based curator Laurel Ptak. It is produced by Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht, and The Showroom and published by Sternberg Press.
For the London book launch, the editors and The Showroom have invited some of the book's contributors to discuss their engagements and concerns around property relations:
Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern and artist Claire Pentecost will be in conversation, moderated by Marysia Lewandowska . Eileen Simpson and Ben White of Open Music Archive will play a selection of the music gleaned from the edges of the public domain.
Undoing Property?
Edited by Marysia Lewandowska, Laurel Ptak
Contributions by: Agency, David Berry, Nils Bohlin, Sean Dockray, Rasmus Fleischer, Antonia Hirsch, David Horvitz, Mattin, Open Music Archive, Matteo Pasquinelli, Claire Pentecost, Florian Schneider, Matthew Stadler, Marilyn Strathern, Kuba Szreder, Marina Vishmidt.
Design by Konst & Teknik
Published by Sternberg Press
169 x 239 mm, 256 pages, 30 b/w illustrations, library-bound hardcover
ISBN 978-3-943365-68-9
Undoing Property? is produced in the context of the programme COHAB, a two-year collaboration between Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, and The Showroom. COHAB is supported by a Cooperation Measures grant from the European Commission Culture Programme (2007-2013).
