What is the role and function of contemporary art in economic and political systems that increasingly manage data and affect? Knowledge Beside Itself delves into the peculiar emphasis placed in recent years, curatorially and institutionally, on notions such as “research” and “knowledge production.”

Pierre d’Alancaisez speaks with Tom Holert, author of Knowledge Beside Itself about the history of art’s fraught relationship with knowledge and its opposition to scientific notions of epistemology, as well as about art’s complicity in the “epistemic mammoth” of the knowledge economy.

Holert discusses the work of Natascha Sadr Haghighian and The Trainee by Pilvi Takala.