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The essays collected in this volume were selected from Transform, a three-year (2005-8) research project of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp). Following up on the eipcp’s previous Republicart project (2002-5), Transform supported a wide range of activities, research and exchanges focused on investigating political and artistic practices of ‘institutional critique’. These included exhibitions, conferences and the publication of the web journal transversal, in which all of the following essays appeared.

For the Transform project, artists, activists, writers, theorists and researchers were encouraged to interrogate the history of the relations between ‘institutions’ and ‘critique’ and to consider the present and future possibilities for the theory and practice of institutional critique along three related but still distinct lines of inquiry. These lines were sketched as follows at the beginning of the project, in the summer of 2005:

1. The line of art production. The thesis here is that following the two phases of institutional critique in the 1970s and 1990s, now a new phase of critique is emerging, which goes beyond the two earlier phases, particularly as a combination of social critique, institutional critique and self-critique.

2. The line of art institutions. Here questions will be raised about the development of radical positions taken by critical art institutions, not only against the background that open, socially critical art associations, museums and initiatives are increasingly under pressure, partly from authoritarian repressive cultural policies, partly Art and Contemporary Critical Practice xiv from neo-liberal populist cultural policies. Beyond this defensive figure and the question of counter-strategies, new forms of the organization of critical art institutions are to be reflected on.

3. The line of the relationship of institution and critique as movement: at this most general level the question of the mutual interrelationship of institution and movement, machines and state apparatuses, is to be addressed, and how this relationship can be made productive in the sense of emancipatory policies and beyond the abrupt demarcation between the two poles.

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