Annette Weisser

In a novel set against a transforming Berlin, an artist confronts a diagnosis of breast cancer. Going to openings and parties, setting up a studio and breaking up with her longtime boyfriend, Noora is living the post–art school life in Berlin when, in 2005, she's diagnosed with breast cancer. Vaguely restless, until now she's been neither happy nor unhappy, but her entry into what she calls “Cancerland” forces her to question the assumptions by which she lived her life so far. Uneasily, she realizes that the “relationships of the soul” she and her friends value over everything else might not be as indelible as family, after all. In this sharp and picaresque first novel, conceptual artist Annette Weisser depicts the transformation of Berlin from the frontier city of the cold war to an international art hub as an analog and backdrop to the chaotic, corporeal transformation Noora undergoes through cancer and its treatments. Written in the casual, associative style of a female coming-of-age novel, Mycelium examines German trauma, art school dramas, and the inevitable parsing into winners and losers that her generation undergoes as they enter their mid-thirties.

Mycelium

Jason E. Smith

Jacques Rancière (born 1940) is one of the few living French philosophers to have established a significant dialogue with contemporary art. Rancière unites a politicized perspective on art's ability to rupture everyday life with his influential theorizations of education ("The Ignorant Schoolmaster") and politics ("The Nights of Labor"). His profile has ascended dramatically in the U.S. over the past decade, and this volume considers the continuity of his work across aesthetics, politics and education. With essays by Evan Calder Williams, Arne de Boever, Claire Fontaine, Peter Friedl, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Maria Muhle, Frank Ruda, Jason E. Smith, Jan Voelker and Rancière himself, this volume asks the question: how might a new model of aesthetic education transform our concepts of art, politics and pedagogy?

Annette Weisser

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