To my pleasant surprise an artwork in the Museum of Modern Art incorporates a quote from one of my articles on nostalgia. The artist is Dorit Margreiter, and you can see the image and the whole installation on her site: http://www.doritmargreiter.net/projects/zentrum3.html

The piece is called “zentrum” and the exhibit is “Performing Histories (1)” at MoMA, on show through March 11, 2013: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1312

This is her description of the piece (from her website):

zentrum

“zentrum renders a report on work in progress exploring the socialist architecture of the ‘Bruehlzentrum’ in Leipzig. The housing block constructed in the 1960s serves as an exemplary starting point for a critical engagement with the ways in which modernist aesthetic strategies were deployed to support social and political concepts.

Dorit Margreiter analyzes the soon to be demolished urban intervention and its typographical designs as documents of a process of social reform. Her artistic treatment of this theme preserves the memory of the expressive forms of a moral system, which failed and thus is in the process of disappearing.”

See commentary from me and others about “infrastructure” in this special curated collection from Cultural Anthropology.

Image: “Shenzhen: Boom!” exhibit curated by Mary Ann O’Donnell, Shenzhen/Hong Kong Architecture and Urbanism Biennial, December, 2012 (photo by Jonathan Bach)

New essay: “Shenzhen: Constructing the City, Reconstructing Subjects” on Open Democracy’s Cities in Conflict Series.

(Image: photo of an advertisement detail taken in Shenzhen, December 2011 by Jonathan Bach)

(Image: Sabine Würich: Der neue Osten)

New article: Memory Landscapes and the Labor of the Negative in Berlin in theInternational Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, March 2013.

See my article on Modernity and the Urban Imagination in Economic Zones in the September 2011 issue of the journal Theory, Culture & Society.

Click this image for the best writing on Shenzhen by the anthropologist and artist Mary Ann O’Donnell. This image of “squatter remains” is taken by Mary Ann in 2002 in Houhai, Shenzhen.

“They Come in Peasants and Leave Citizens”: Urban Villages and the Making of Shenzhen, China
Jonathan Bach
Cultural Anthropology August 2010, Vol. 25, No. 3: 421-458

“Power, Secrecy and Paranoia: Technologies of Governance and the Structure of Rule”

Jonathan Bach

in Cultural Politics Vol. 6, No. 3, November 2010 

This image: Yevgeniy Fiks, Song of Russia #25, 2005, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Winkleman Gallery, New York. In Cultural Politics, Vol.6, Number 2, July 2010.