From New Institutionalism to New Constitutions: Annotating Instituent Practices

Following our workshop “Annotating Instituent Practices & Unbuilding Infrastructures” last November (organized by Institutions as a Way of Life at the Critical Media Lab IXDM/FHNW in Basel, Switzerland), we were invited to develop an informal Reader to consider what comes after ‘instituent practices.’ From New Institutionalism to New Constitutions: Annotating Instituent Practices is now available as a free PDF that traces a series of inquiries drawn from the final three years of publishing on Temporary Art Review. This reader engages the ways in which institutional thinking incubating in Europe and embodied practices in the United States are brought into productive tension, particularly in dialogue with Gerald Raunig’s writings on artistic and curatorial practices that “invent new forms of instituting.”

This reader, then, may be read equally as a critique and assessment of this present, as well as an exit – a “fleeing” in Raunig’s terms. The process of rigorous reflection, retrospection, and speculation that the arc of this reader represents, we now present to you at the closure of Temporary Art Review as a project and a planned opening into a new borderland – a “journal of art and strategy” – that intends to embody and extend these urgencies through a new publication platform we will be announcing next month. This pivot absorbs and refracts instituent practices’ most foundational appeal: to draft new terms of institution-building that are both a refusal and a reassertion to “[betray] the rules of the game through the act of flight.”

Sarrita Hunn and James McAnally, founders and editors
Temporary Art Review, February 2020

The entire Annotating, Institutions as a Way of Life reader series, convened by Bernhard Garnicnig, Jamie Allen, and Lucie Kolb, as well as introduction by curatorial editor Mela Dávila Freire, will be released in the coming weeks here: annotating.institutions.life

Image: Institutions as a Way of LIfe