Since the Velvet Revolution in 1989 the Czech art scene has undergone a number of changes and upheavals, but a collective endeavour to create an art scene for both local and foreign spectators has been lacking...

'Does realism have any native counterpart in Asian aesthetics?' With this question the Thailand-based curators Gridthiya Gaweewong and David Teh opened their thematic programme 'Unreal Asia' at the Oberhausen film festival last May...

The recent group exhibition 'Après Crépuscule' ('After Twilight') at the Cologne Kunstverein revealed the hermetic world of the chic Belgian record label Les Disques du Crépuscule. Like its British counterpart Factory Records...

Less a theme and more a mood, uncertainty seems to be the unlikely anchor of the nomadic group exhibition "suddenly: where we live now" at the Pomona College Museum of Art in Claremont, California...

In 1937 Kurt Schwitters fled Germany, fearing arrest by the Gestapo, and travelled to the northwest coast of Norway. He lived there for the next three years in a small hut on the island of Hjertøya, opposite the town of Molde, overlooked by snowy mountains...

'Beton Belvedere', the first retrospective of Cyprien Gaillard's work in the Netherlands, groups together a selection of the artist's works from the past four years that illustrate his interest in Modernist ruins...

Some claim that art historians and curators, like fashion designers in search of fresh inspiration, pillage the past chronologically...

For Barbara Bloom, the mere idea of a retrospective is reprehensible. Her installations have always been time- and site-specific, and she refuses to have her work showcased in any manner suggestive of coherence or chronology...

It is impossible to ignore the catastrophic - to do so would discredit our humanity, or at least our perception of it...

'By chance, in 1980, I was struck by a scene in a TV documentary about republican prisoners in the H blocks... [a] film was shown of men "on the blanket"... It was a strange image of human dignity in the midst of self-created squalor and it was endowed with the mythic power most often associated with art...

Wild Combination is director Matt Wolf's self-described filmic 'portrait' of Arthur Russell, the cellist, composer and songwriter whose music - which traversed the spectrum from minimalist avant-garde to disco - has recently provoked a frenzy of interest and praise after a lifetime of obscurity...

'Art should be familiar and enigmatic, just as human beings themselves', wrote Allen Ruppersberg in his 1985 Fifty Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday...

Roger M. Buergel, artistic director of documenta 12, has done what no one else has yet realised on such a scale: he has returned to the bombed Kassel, left in ruins (the polis) and devastation (the human species) following World War II, and investigated the foundations of an art exhibition that was unexpectedly successful in its first edition in 1955...

Two recently resurrected films from the fringes of early 1960s American independent cinema put forth stark black and white visions of a broken America sadly contemporary in its social divisiveness...

The Rafani collective is one of a handful of activist art groups in the Czech Republic who effect a social and political critique through works that exist primarily in the public sphere...

In Cold Cuts, the California Conceptualist John Knight addresses the history of illegal American interventions since the 1950s. By Pedro de Llano...

In 1985 a Lebanese communist called Jamal Satti made three attempts to record a final video testimony, to be broadcast on television, before blowing himself up at the Israeli Army headquarters in Hasbayya. Fifteen years later, the uncut videos were adapted by the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué

On Saturday 14 June 2008, the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London was filled with intense, pulsating sounds, coming from an amplified motor and a drill boring holes into a roll of 16mm film...

Although his influence cannot be overstated, with Doug Aitken, Douglas Gordon, and Steve McQueen amongst his admirers, the contemporary significance of James Coleman's work derives less from this position as precursor than for the rigour with which it interrogates its medium...

In Lis Rhodes's expanded cinema piece Light Music (1973) two beams of light, thrown by two projectors sitting on the floor facing each other, are made visible by fog created in the room. The patterns they project on the wall - stripes running up and across, white squares, quick flickers - are legible in the throw...

Anyone who has heard the sound made by marmots is unlikely to forget it. To say it is a whistle is to say too little: it sounds mechanical, as if steam driven. And alarming for that reason. The fear that these little animals must have felt since time immemorial has frozen in their throats...

It is hard to define whether the photograph of Julius Koeller's action of demarcating a tennis court in Time/space Definition of the Psychophysical Activity of Matter 1, 2 (Anti-Happening) (1968) is an artwork, a document of an artwork or a mere event...

Bill Burns's exhibition at the ICA put a full supply of nature rescue gear on display. From January to February earlier this year, visitors to the Institute's digital studio could investigate the varied contents of Burns's Safety Gear for Small Animals, the 'largest museum of safety gear for small animals in the world'...

Lucy Skaer's recent exhibition 'The Siege' (2008) at the Chisenhale Gallery in London presents a siege-scape in which the positions of victim and victor are legible and clearly defined...