INTRODUCTION29sumption, and a thoroughly nonanthropocentric determination to
reconfigure past notions of identity, gender, and race. But most impor-
tantly, artistic parameters are also being shifted in the light of the unde-
niable awareness that contemporary art offers a unique opportunity to
unhinge anthropocentric certainties within a productive, experimental,
and inclusive space, one that transcends the limitations imposed by dis-
ciplinary boundaries.
These tendencies have become more visible since the 2012 edition of
the quinquennial, trendsetting contemporary art exhibition dOCUMENTA,
which placed speculative realism, new materialism, and object-oriented
ontology on the arts map. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s curatorial ap-
proach was largely shaped by these new philosophical waves, and the re-
verberation of her influence through the international contemporary
scene has been undeniably substantial. Although closely associated with
speculative realism, object-oriented ontology predates it and is charac-
terized by a more defined ontological derailment of object relations.
Graham Harman’s conception of objects in object-oriented ontology es-
sentially rejects the Kantian gap between the subject and the material
world, or what commonly goes by the name of correlationism—it ac-
knowledges objects as autonomous realities while recognizing in them
the presence of turbulent, ambiguous, hidden depths—an object is an
infinite recess.^49
The “call of things,” or the acknowledgment that objects constitute
more than passive tools at the periphery of anthropocentrism, had al-
ready been placed on the map in 1988 by the collection The Social Life of
Things, the effort of sociocultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai.^50
Thereafter, in 2001, Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory,” with its appropriation
of Heidegger’s distinction between objects (tools that work) and things
(tools that no longer function), pointed more directly at the socially en-
coded values and networks of relationships that shape our coexistence
with them.^51 And it is this very Heideggerian “thread of the broken ob-
ject,” the one that troubles the continuity of our expectations, that con-
stitutes Harman’s foundation of object-oriented ontology.^52 This new
awareness of what we normally take for granted brings us to rethink our
experience of the world, the constructed centrality of the point of view of
the subject, and, along with it, most of the foundation of western philos-
ophy, at least since Descartes.