Vivian Ziherl Read Bio Collapse
Vivian Ziherl is a curator, critic, and researcher working between Brisbane and Amsterdam. She is the founder of the Frontier Imaginaries foundation, and is a PhD candidate at the Monash faculty of Art Design and Architecture.
TOXIC ASSETS: Frontier Imaginaries Ed.No3 at e-flux and Columbia University
e-flux lectures: Vivian Ziherl in discussion with Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Articulation Value”
What formalism at, or on, the frontier does is to rotate or reorchestrate the point of view of the classical world. What is radical in the center may not be so from the periphery. The frontier is an artifact of modernity that most concerns its modes of contact. The frontier is the place where the soaring ideals of the Enlightenment touch down and slow to a grind against the earthly contingency of global expansion. In this morphology of touch, exposure, and exchange, the frontier signifies how modernity’s outside is produced, exploited, and policed. From this formal view of the frontier—as demonstrated by artists working at, and on, the frontier—it is possible to chart a fourfold articulation. That is, the cosmology of time, being, and belonging produced through the fourfold categories of the natural, the female, the racial, and the prior.