On October 29, 2025, Annette and Sofia opened the conference on infrastructural critique. What follows is an extract from their introduction:
It is our great pleasure to welcome you all here today!
We are thrilled and honored to host and organize the conference “What Is Infrastructural Critique?” for the celebration of the life and work of Marina Vishmidt.
My name is A.K., and next to me is S.B., we are the Heads of the Department of Art and Communication Practices that hosts the conference within the Angewandte. Our department is located at the Institute of Studies in Art and Art Education, where Marina worked as a Professor for Art Theory. The wonderful program of the Conference today and the next two days is curated by Danny Hayward (χέηγαρντ) and Rose-Anne Gush (γκας). Thanks a lot, both of you, for bringing together such an amazing lineup of speakers who will gradually be introduced during the upcoming two days. Thank you to all speakers and the audience for following our invitation in such large numbers. It is exciting to have you all here with us for these three days.
We are coming together tonight and in the coming days to discuss a specific part of Marina's thinking with which she expanded, shifted, and derailed the notion and legacy of institutional critique towards what she called infrastructural critique. Infrastructural critique in former Western art and cultural institutions is like looking under the carpet, opening the storage of white institutions and looking for food supplies, and recording the repetition of the capitalist cruelty inherent in the ways of communication, administration, and distribution of labor in the arts. However, Marina pushes it beyond just looking or recording.
In her words: ‘...[T]he point [of infrastructural critique] is to move from a standpoint that takes the institution as its horizon to one which takes the institution as a historical and contingent nexus of material conditions, amenable to rearrangement through struggle and different forms of inhabitation and dispersal.’
Together with Marina, we ask: what do institutional processes enable, and what do they prohibit?
Marina has been a beloved friend, a precious colleague, a brilliant and witty thinker, and a person of direct action within and beyond art institutional contexts. Since her arrival at the Angewandte in Autumn 2023, she has been involved in numerous educational activities. And she soon co-organized with a bigger group of colleagues and students the Movie Nights. The Movie Nights are an ongoing series of screenings acting against the continuous repressions of academic freedom within institutional structures—especially in German-speaking countries, although certainly not restricted to them. Until now, the Movie Nights have provided a space for coming together, discussing, and mourning in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Thank you, Marina, for your courage, for your affection, for your positioning, and comradeship.
Shortly after Marina passed away, I wrote a poem as an obituary that I would like to share with you. The title is: “We Lose”
we leave behind
the restorative sleep
the Agrimonia
the garden of uncanny blesses
the waters of joy
we lose our bodies, our breasts
our hair
our thoughtful work
we lose our nightmares, our wounds
our beloved spoken word
our botanical epithets in our hearts
we leave behind
our curse against the masters
our anger towards injustice
the main theme in our life’s fugue (φιούγκ)
we lose our brains
our salve (σάελβ) of world activation
we lose wearing gloves, skirts, thick coats
we lose dialectics
we lose phonetics
we lost Marina.
Vienna, April 27, 2024
When we built our introduction, I knew that this bridging would be a difficult one.
So bear with me. We lost Marina, and yet she is with us today, in our hearts, in our struggles and thoughts. And as Marina was never too tired to emphasize, whatever we do, we do it as many, and so has been the work towards this conference.
This conference could not have taken place without the labor of many people. So we take time and thank these people for their generous support and resources:
Once again, we thank Danny and Rose-Anne, who did an incredible job in bringing together all these wonderful people. We thank our colleagues at the departments of the Institute of Studies in Art and Art Education; the moderators (Alexi Kukuljevic, Amanda Holmes, and Nanna Heidenreich); the technicians and videographers (Fine Freiberg, Tatia Skhirtladze, Thomas Mitterböck, Maximilian Maitz); the Administration and Facility and Event Management (Martina Dragschnitz, Alexandra Frank, Shirley Thurner); and the student assistants from Angewandte and TU Graz (Meret Caderas, James Elsey, Marija Jančić, Edo Katavic, Valentina Santner, Anna Schoissengeyer, Ronja Wolf). And thank you to Rosen Eveleigh (εβελέη) for their design of the poster and leaflet cover.
What follows is a brief, partial glossary of some of the terms that came up most often during the three days of the conference. Not definitions, but means of orientation, heatmaps of a terrain.
The quotes come from Marina’s forthcoming Infrastructural Critique: Contemporary Art between Reproduction and Abolition (Verso, 2026).
Glossary
infrastructure
The “conditions” of an artistic field or form of activity—everything that needs to exist in order for that field or activity to exist.
“At a fundamental level, infrastructural critique begins from the assumption that it is possible to completely sidestep all the handwringing over the limits of the institution and instead acknowledge what resources are there, how they can be repurposed, which ones cannot and which ones are needed.”
institution
Structures in which some of us are enfranchised and others excluded.
“As we investigated the ‘exceptionality’ of artistic labor—the idea that such labor is constitutively distinct from labor of other kinds, including wage labor—our conversations would often return to the conditions of the field: its infrastructure. And, over time, these discussions compelled a shift in my thinking, from a notion of critique that called on a certain discourse or performance of citizenship—what we could call, essentially, a discourse of institutional accountability—to one that took a more ‘immanent’ view on the means of production of the institution or its conditions of possibility: a shift from institutional to infrastructural critique.”
gaps
Relational possibilities within infrastructures, as that which both makes possible and impossible:
“But I would suggest that this heavily caveated micro-history of form involves a mis- or non-recognition of another means, a path of errancy when it comes to form and its wavering possibilities. This could be called the metamorphosis of gaps. Gaps rather than voids, for instance, because a void already hypostatises its emptiness as completeness, whereas a gap subsists in relation. A void is thus always aspiring to the status of an object, whereas a gap is cut into time, or language. It’s a spacing that telescopes in and out of an (infra)structure, and may give an impetus for connecting beyond it.”
reproduction
An infrastructure is not just a thing—the infrastructural conditions have to be reproduced, with all the usual implications in terms of gendered and devalued labor.
“By thinking the [institutional/aesthetic] frame as a location in a contested social field, along with the resources this makes available, the frame can be demystified, not just ideologically but materially. This has been an undertaking that has long proved central to feminist organising and theory, in whose Marxist variants the question of ‘conditions’ was always connected to the conditions of reproduction, that is to say, the work that is involved (gendered, unwaged, ‘abject’ or devalued) in creating the conditions in which other work (waged work, artwork) can appear and acquire value.”
abolition
What needs to be done away with? By whom? How? Who decides? What comes out the other side?
“The limits of what the institution is able to incorporate or include are also the points at which institutional critique passes into the key of abolition, disclosing the infrastructural neutrality of the great majority of critical artistic practices as always and only a weapon of the propertied.”
transversality
How to build connections in the gaps, new relations and alliances, both between different groups but also between different forms of practice (art, nonart, the political, the social etc.).
“Throughout all of my work, I have always wanted to know the conditions of legibility for practices to register in a field even when they might originate from elsewhere, and how practices originating in that field can work transversally or away from its demarcated boundaries.”
negation
How to make our acts of negation active? For a generative, generous negation, without sterility, without nihilism.
“[The] direction of travel is, as already noted, that of negation, but negation as a process that is constantly differentiating itself and creating other possibilities. How to draw the boundary between this restless negativity as a guiding rope for emancipation and the hopeless mutability of a society committing suicide-by-commodity remains an enormous array of questions for another day—a day that cannot be postponed.”
repetition
“infrastructure is that which repeats”—but how to make repetition into a form of possibility?
“[R]epetition is normalized into everyday routine, and, when it stops functioning, an aperture is cut into its artifice—through which history and power relations can be seen. Think of the global financial crisis; think of the water disasters in Flint or Detroit. The transcendental repetition is abstract (capitalism, class contempt, anti-Black racism) and the infrastructural repetition is found in the material conditions of possibility (captive regulations, lead pipes, privatized governance) that sustain social relations in a particular shape over time.”
speculation
Speculation can be “open” (possibility, nonidentity) and “closed” (the endless expansion of the same, as we see with financial instruments, for example).
“From being hypothetically separate from the economy, the artist becomes a creative tasked with diligently optimizing their quantified self, an increasingly abject and coercive situation, and the two senses of speculation—artistic thinking and financial operations—converge, something we have observed not just in the more familiar critical descriptions of the artist as entrepreneurial subject par excellence, but also in more recent developments such as crypto-art and NFTs, where the moments of artistic creation and market valorization can no longer be kept apart, and neither can coercion and speculation in a stagnant, crisis-prone economy (freedom of finance, subjugation of labor).”
recursion
How to make sure that all terms in a relation act on one another, that nothing is final?
“This reflexivity about the conditions of the artist’s participation in culture as a market agent, an instigator and delegator of various types of canny, brand-building action, and the resistance to separating this embedding from the histories and actualities staged by the work, is recursive. In its many-sided thoroughness, [Cameron] Rowland’s approach puts you in mind of a crystal drill, if there is such an appliance. It creates sightlines by means of cutting through (language, provenances, histories) but the cutting apparatus is already a prism.”
critique
How do we take critique back from the museum, the traditions of European modernism? How do we disappropriate it?
“The resources necessary to flesh out this other practice of critique, in an apparent paradox, owe substantially to contemporary debates around ‘identity politics’, since those debates can also show the salience of a relational non-identity and negativity for any notion of critique that would make claims on the infrastructure that provides it with its conditions—that is to say, with the material possibilities of critique as well as its object.”
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- Cover Image:
Mariuccia Secol, Anche l’amore è lavoro domestico, Gruppo femminista Immagine di Varese (Silvia Cibaldi, Milli Gandini, Clemen Parrocchetti, Mariuccia Secol e Mariagrazia Sironi), manifestazione, 1975.
