GULSEN, B.A.L., 2017.

Open Systems: READER: Tomorrow is not Promised!

The READER: Tomorrow is not Promised! explores the impact of historical account of the emergence of new curatorial discourses as well as the current discussions on what comes after critique in outlining the curatorial strategies from "exhibition making" to the new models of curatorial positions in which criticality becomes crucial.

See link for a review: http://thirdtext.org/review-open-systems-appignanesi

Extract from Review: A book review is normally a matter of critically appreciative reception or not. To my mind, this book invites other response than the promise of a 'reader' qualified by that name might otherwise receive. Certainly, it is a reader in the compendious sense, offering an apparent miscellany of pointedly brief contributions, several pages each, of essays, dialogues, interviews, conference papers and workshops; but the whole, arranged in seven composite sections, is curatorially orchestrated into something more ambitiously far reaching than its parts. Each of the seven sections enjoys its own autonomously appointed guest editors who have assigned an assembly of contributing writers to their specified areas of investigation. The book outspans its specifications. I would rightly name it a textual mode of exhibition, an initiative which in aftermath calls on its visitors for the furtherance of controversy, and thereby opening the portal to the dissemination of creative criticism. I anticipate one of the book's authors who speaks of 'turning the art of criticism into an artform in itself', a nod acknowledging T.W. Adorno's paratactical method. Something about this book urges me to conclude that the time has come for a reckoning of the contemporary guising of art. [...] There are three categorical implications therein, aesthetical, historical and ethical, though whichever way, apocalypse has become art's familiar. And those wearied by its familiarity, while being nevertheless advocates of art's persevering endurance, will argue remedially for the 'potency of critique within art' - quoting the reader's presenting editor Gülsen Bal in her opening words (p.11) - which sustains hope in its advancement from the mire.