Broken Relations: Infrastructure, Aesthetics, and Critique

Broken Relations: Infrastructure, Aesthetic, and Critique is a symptom and an outcome of a collectively experienced crisis — one that has produced a new, widespread sensorium for often invisible and overlooked infrastructures and highlighted their importance for all aspects of life, including politics, both local and global, and art and curatorial practices and their systemic analysis. The reader views infrastructures not only as material phenomena and physical networks but also as immaterial relations and symbolic actions, which, in visible and invisible ways, form our present and, hence, our horizon of aesthetic perception. The interplay between the material and ideological conditions of production, distribution, and presentation directs our gaze, schooled as it is in institutional critique, onto real and symbolic orders, sites, and economies. The book is based on a cooperation between the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna: this started in Leipzig in 2021 with the lecture series and exhibition Broken Relations: Infrastructure and Interruption and continued in Vienna in 2022 with the exhibition Conditions and Frameworks: Infrastructure as Form and Medium and the conference Broken Relations: Infrastructure, Aesthetics, and Critique.