A few nights ago, I was doomscrolling through my Instagram feed when I came across an artist’s statement:
“There is something obscene in the way we consume war now.”
These are not just words—they are a call to attention. A warning.
War now arrives as a fleeting image between an influencer’s breakfast and an ad for the latest electric car. The crying child, the severed limb, the ghostly dust cloud—all real, all stripped of context. Violence without memory. Suffering without history.
What is our role here, beyond being mere vessels for content—nodes in data streams that only aim to amplify and accelerate the extraction of data, measuring, indexing, and positioning users into abstractions of political affiliations to be used by future regimes?
The tragedy is real for those who endure it. Unreal for those who consume it.
This week, I visited Basel for the art fairs. Even in the museums and institutions I found a clear detachment from what is happening in the world right now. The reports and reviews—perhaps to my surprise—were no different. The focus remained on numbers, trends, and the familiar rotation of people meeting again and again.
What does this say about the world we inhabit?
What does it say about the role of art—and the role of art critique?
For over a decade, we have seen the art world’s discursive shift toward a rhetoric of care, collectivity, and interdependence. But what has truly changed?
Not much, I am afraid. Perhaps, nothing at all.
The primary reason is that discourse alone does not birth transformation.
We are experiencing a loss—not only of language, but of democracy, and of our own humanity—induced by a discursive economy that runs on the accumulation of ethical or moral positions that is then exploited by algorithms and by fascist logics to expose and divide society.
It is from this mounting loss, this omnipresence of cultural and bodily death, that the question I bring to this symposium arises:
What if art criticism did not understand itself as a site of judgment, but as a practice of midwifery—attending to and supporting that which is only just coming into language?
We are not here to affirm what is already legible. Nor to celebrate excellence nor to distill meaning. We are here to dwell in the threshold.
To test a different paradigm:
Critique not as authority, but as companion.
Not as a verdict, but as dialogue.
Not as control, but as initiation.
Fig.1
I. Departing from Judgment
Let me begin with judgment.
Judgment is never objective. While it can be a powerful force for liberation, it is also rooted in a patriarchal lineage of exclusion. It has long functioned as a tool to maintain aesthetic and intellectual hierarchies. Maybe that is why judgment is everywhere now: We all feel we might be losing everything; and we cling to the power judgment seems to provide; but it doesn’t. In the age of ultimate gaslighting, it divides and exposes us.
Judgment seemed to provide power even to the powerless, in the interest of truth. But what it increasingly conceals and reveals is fear.
Fear of uncertainty.
Fear of not knowing.
Fear of losing ground in a shifting cultural terrain.
Fear of powerlessness.
Disagreement is vital. But recently, I have seen gestures of judgment masked by critique that hurt rather than relate, that ridicule rather than reckon.
To offer a recent example, take Cornelius Tittel’s public attacks on Klaus Biesenbach. I, too, disagree with Biesenbach’s institutional strategies—particularly in their alignment with spectacle and class stratification—but disagreement is not disavowal. Tittel’s dismissal performs critique as character assassination. It fragments the cultural landscape to the benefit of far-right extremism. Tittel offers no systemic analysis—only a caricature. In doing so, he participates in the very spectacle he claims to oppose, reinforcing the elitism he purports to critique, and the patriarchal closure of spaces for reflection, contemplation, and learning.
A second example: The decontextualization of Zasha Colah’s answers to an interview on Berlin Art Link that reads: “My friend tells me there is a word in German for “preemptive obedience,” that precedes legality. There is no censorship, I would say, in Germany. Not legally. The obedience is not related to the Constitution, but to something else which is illegal. For hate crimes or anti-semitism, there are already very good laws that are part of the criminal code, and on the other hand there’s a very abstract ambiguity in the way the IHRA definition of antisemitism is formulated. It exceeds what law can do. Law cannot put into writing something that is inexact, excessive or ambiguous. Obedience to something else, then.”
Decontextualizing that sentence from the whole interview, which, across many layers of meaning, opens up spaces for critique of the current cultural landscape—or as in the case of Cornelius Tittel’s simplistically articulated attacks on Biesenbach—repeats the strategies of disparagement, oversimplification, and detachment adopted by fascist propaganda. Colah’s answers deserve to be read for what they are: an effort to articulate the curatorial ethics, complex solidarities, and fragmentary processes that shaped the 13th Berlin Biennale. Even if this might appear lacking a strategic awareness of the power of an affirmation as such to overshadow the lived experience of individuals and groups affected by censorship, Colah is providing a window on the subtle workings of language in bureaucratic spaces and how it can be used to illuminate and deceive at once. Rather than taking a pre-prescribed stance, the interview traces the messy, contradictory, and often silent undercurrents that form part of curatorial work today—especially when dealing with histories of violence, complicity, and resistance, and current structural constraints that are, to be sure, not equal to the sort of repression we are witnessing from afar in Palestine, Myanmar, Sudan, DRC, or many other countries in which state structures are deeply sunken in overt authoritarianism. This is not the case, yet, in Germany.
To reduce this labor to an Instagram callout, as seen in a post by the collectives Arts & Culture Alliance Berlin, Palestinians and Allies, ANGA and the European Support Center, is symptomatic of a broader problem: the lack of care through which articulate disagreement, disapproval and dissent in ways that do not replicate the very punitive culture these groups expose and seek to challenge through their positionality. It is fundamental to recognize that cohesion in the message of our advocacy needs to be achieved by looking at society in all its variables, classes, disparities, rather than as a monolithic whole. So the process here would be, how do we allow each other to translate common struggle into a multitude of strategies? This is essential to transform cultural advocacy in ways that redirect the violence and the aggression that shape society in all its components into a nurturing field of commonality. Critique must remain possible—but not come at the expense of nuance. Especially not when it prevents accountability from being formed in ways that are not destructive, but which come from a rising of social consciousness.
As arts and cultural workers, we must rescue critique from its weaponization as a tool of judgment, from the rage that fuels and propels it. In the current state, it fails to articulate collective alternatives. We must ask what happens when critique holds space for the birth of effort to metabolize power, contradiction, pain, and possibilities that are multiple, opaque, and fugitive?
The symposium takes one of its points of departure from the work of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. Conceived as a continuation of her thinking, it approaches art not as a finished representation but as an ongoing process of co-becoming and co-witnessing. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, a long-time companion of BRACHA’s, describes her practice as an “augural,” auratic painting in which thinking, feeling, and image become indistinguishable:
BRACHA’s painting is not only the painting of memory traces, but mainly it is an attempt to pre-figure, just like when we reach, half blindly, into the womb for ultrasound signals. The m(Other) receives intimations of the prenatal subject, while the prenatal subject listens to signals from outside the womb. The ultrasound resists imaging technologies while it uses them in duration. This is what painting the emergent, and co-emerging with painting, means, an augural form of painting, an auroral painting. Bracha co-emerges with her paintings, with our paintings.
Bracha’s pivotal concepts—co-witnessing, self-fragilization, sensing-with—underlie the methodology of the symposium itself: rather than seeking clear answers or fixed positions, it follows the subtle traces of an ethics of being-with, whereby art becomes a space where we learn how to be aware of each other, of our shared vulnerability, knowledge, thus birthing and nurturing plural methodologies.
Birth is not judgment. It is vulnerability, friction, and transition. It is an opening into relation, not the completion of a thought, but the invitation to remain with it.
To reimagine art criticism as midwifery of consciousness is not to abandon analytical and dialectical rigor, nor a commitment to justice. It is to reconfigure what rigor looks like—less the sharpening of knives, than the building of vessels strong enough to carry what is fragile, inarticulate, or yet to come.
It is no coincidence that our time calls for reconnection with Marxist dreams and feminist revisions of art history and practice from the 1960s, a decade shaped by postwar disorientation and the rift between capitalist and socialist epistemologies. Susan Sontag, in Against Interpretation (1966), famously lamented the over-intellectualization of art writing. She was not against analysis per se, but against a form of interpretation that reduced artworks to content. She wrote:
“In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.”
For Sontag, this erotics was a practice of attention—one that privileged presence over projection, encounter over extraction. She insisted on form, rhythm, and temperature—on what art does, not just what it means. Sontag writes against interpretation as a form of control—domination disguised as insight. Her call was to resist turning art into a code to be cracked. But perhaps an erotics is not enough. Or, rather: we need a politicized erotics—one that moves from arousal to accompaniment, from individual sensation to collective responsibility.
If embodiment, relation, and care should really arrive at the center of cultural labor—not as metaphors but as methodologies—Sontag’s erotics might evolve further: into midwifery.
Where Sontag invites us to feel more deeply, the midwife invites us to stay.
Where Sontag interrupts interpretation in defense of the sensual, the midwife intervenes again: in defense of the emergent, the fragile, the unborn.
Eroticism awakens attention. Midwifery sustains it.
Eroticism resists the violence of meaning. Midwifery resists the violence of isolation.
Fig. 2
II. Critique as Midwifery
Art criticism as midwifery might create space for an expanded gaze—one that includes all those involved, that distinguishes between pain and breath, between mediation and accompaniment. Ceding interpretive authority, critique can open itself beyond control, toward co-creation.
In this light, we might read Sontag’s sensual formalism as a transitional phase. The midwife/art critic can not simply step back from interpretive violence. She needs to step into the labor of care, to enter into relation, with the one birthing, and with the process itself.
This requires critics to be vulnerable. To name their positions, sensibilities, and complicities.
Consider Oliver Hardt’s laudatio for Sea & Fog, an exhibition by the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden that was honored this week in Dresden as Exhibition of the Year 2024. You can read the text on aica.de Hardt quoted from Mariam Ghani’s “There’s a Hole in the World Where You Used to Be,” a short film and larger body of work exploring memory, mourning, and the impact of loss. Ghani says:
“There is no after, only a through.”
The midwife does not invent birth. She does not command it. She accompanies it. She reads pain—not to suppress it, but to hold space for it. To breathe through it. Midwifery offers a model of critique grounded in this recognition. A through that can only be understood as birthing. To reimagine the art critic as a midwife is to move from extraction to presence.
To practice critique not after the fact, but alongside—as a form of ethical proximity.
We saw this in the friendships of the 19th century. Émile Zola wrote of Claude Monet as if describing his own life. But that world was built on and upheld masculinist domination.
Today, that domination, always latent in ostensibly “modern” societies, is increasingly shameless in the forms of expression it is taking.
To understand the art critic as midwife also is to draw from the work of the midwife Rachelle Garcia Seliga. She speaks of “midwifing a cultural shift.” Her work restores perinatal care to its original function: not as clinical transaction, but as ritual, as transition, as collective responsibility.
Seliga writes:
“The physiology of birth mirrors the physiology of transformation: to move through rupture and reorganization, we must stay present to what is becoming.”
This, too, is where critique might find its new form—not as a tool of finality or judgment, but as a companion to transformation.
Fig. 3
III. From Judging to Healing
Critique neither abandons its function nor does it romanticize its object.
It proposes a more reciprocal ecology of art and writing—where both are forms of cultural labor rooted in fragility, care, risk, and mutual recognition, and where both must be resourced, socially and economically, in equal measure.
The question becomes not: what is this work saying?
But rather: what is it trying to bring into being?
And: what does it require of me to support that process?
Judging is easy.
To support life—this is the real work.
To reframe critique as a form of healing requires us to confront cruelty—not only in our institutions, but in our imaginations.
The Argentinian anthropologist Rita Segato speaks of the “pedagogies of cruelty” that train us to stop feeling. To endure pain by silencing empathy. To turn bodies into things.
Critique has not been immune to this training. In fact, cruelty has long been inherent to it.
Here, I would draw on Segato’s counteractions to the pedagogies of cruelty:
Cruelty is a concept that relates to the exhibition of violence in the media—particularly the repetitive ways in which violence against women’s bodies is portrayed. Reducing levels of empathy—our capacity to resonate with suffering and the possibility of suffering, even our own, and especially with that of others—is functional to capital and to contemporary forms of accumulation.
Lowering those thresholds of empathy becomes a project. For Segato, it’s a policy clearly visible on television, in series and in displays of cruelty that were not present before. Performative cruelty is not confined to the realm of armed conflict, and small barbarities are available through our smartphones in a permanent flow.
Segato’s framework is a bridge for us to understand why midwifing needs to overcome the cruelty of judgment. In her text Patriarchy from Margin to Center: Discipline, Territoriality, and Cruelty in the Apocalyptic Phase of Capital (2016), she shows how the things that happen to women—and to women’s bodies—are wrongly minimized, wrongly pushed into the sphere of intimacy, and treated as political leftovers. It is essential that we understand what happens to women—and to any subjectivity who is not cis-male, the only one claiming supremacy—as a thermometer of our times, as a way of diagnosing the economic phase we are currently living through.
Cruelty is growing—not only in the way death is inflicted, or rapes are carried out—but also in the ways in which bodies are disposed of: dumped in landfills, stuffed in garbage bags. These practices are increasing. This increase has to do with a pedagogy—a teaching of disdain for life, of teaching people that we are in a world of things, where things dominate life, and where bodies are things. And things don’t feel.
Learning not to feel, not to acknowledge suffering, learning to endure pain—this is a core feature of all military training: the hardening of the body. To endure one’s own pain and then become completely insensitive to the pain of others is essential to this phase of capitalism.
It’s a necessary pedagogy for an age in which the dominant personality type—the most functional one for today’s economy, an economy of ownership—is the psychopathic personality structure: one that lacks empathy, that sees the other as a thing, an instrument, incapable of positional reciprocity, incapable of putting oneself into another’s place.
The discourse of “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes” is declining. It has become obsolete.
To consider a work of art a “thing” is exactly the problem.
In a world such as this, where accumulation has surpassed every limit, the abrupt shift in wealth since 2010—the year Oxfam began publishing data on global concentration—is staggering. It should shock us all that in 2010, 280 people owned as much wealth as the poorest half of the world. By 2015, that number was 62%. The rate of concentration is ungraspable, especially when we consider its relationship to decision-making within the industrial-military complex and the asset-driven art market. Tax havens, offshore accounts: these now determine how art is treated, and how humans are treated.
This treatment enacts a death drive.
One that performs detachment, not an embrace of life.
It enacts the psychopathic personality of contemporary power: rational, efficient, and unfeeling.
But if we want art to matter—if we want critique to be useful—then we must unlearn these structures.
Havîn Al-Sîndy, an artist I deeply admire—and whose path I am committed to accompany— said to me:
Not everything can be healed. Not every wound will close.
Not every work seeks healing.
And criticism must be able to endure that too.
Fig. 4
IV. Birth Over Death
Midwifery holds pain, grieving, and so should art critique: shifting not only in tone or position, but in its entire epistemology—its tools, methods, and forms of accountability.
Midwifery, as a metaphor for critique in times of global war and techno-feudalism, challenges the expectation that critics must own or condemn, determining an artwork’s value or social function. It instead embraces the idea that critics can be part of the process by which artistic, social, or political meaning is slowly articulated, never how it is fully determined.
The work of Barbara Debeuckelaere offers a powerful example of what this mode of critical midwifery might look like in practice. Her project Om (Mother), created in collaboration with eight Palestinian families from Tel Rumeida in Hebron, does not document these women’s lives in the usual mode of reportage. Nor does it translate their experience into a symbolic or metaphorical register for aesthetic contemplation.
Instead, it builds a visual and narrative space that emerges directly from the women’s voices, memories, and ways of seeing, without tokenizing them. The images and stories were not simply taken; they were shared, discussed, and shaped together. Debeuckelaere’s role as photographer is not extractive. It is participatory and deeply situated. Her work demonstrates what it means to approach art-making—and by extension, art criticism—not as a tool for exposure, but as a practice of witnessing and holding space.
This is particularly crucial in Hebron, where the reality of occupation and surveillance permeates every detail of life. In the historic neighborhood of Tel Rumeida, small extremist settler outposts divide the city’s fabric into militarized zones. Checkpoints cut through homes and communities. Palestinian residents—especially women—are subjected to constant restrictions and threats.
To work in such a context requires a form of presence that resists spectacle and refuses simplification. It requires, in other words, an ethics of midwifery. Debeuckelaere does not attempt to represent suffering to trigger recognition or empathy in a distant audience. Rather, she works within the limits of what can be shared and what must remain opaque, respecting the fragility of relationships forged under pressure. In this sense, her work resonates with the practice of Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist from Hebron and the founder of Youth Against Settlements.
Amro insists on the power of nonviolent presence. His activism is rooted in visibility, not as provocation, but as a strategy of refusal: to be there, to remain, to walk where walking is forbidden. He documents and speaks from within the experience of occupation, not about it.
His efforts to build international solidarity and local resilience are grounded in the belief that transformation begins with accompaniment—showing up, bearing witness, and resisting the erasure of everyday life.
Both Debeuckelaere and Amro embody the politics of staying. Their practices—artistic, activist, ethical—resist the imperative to produce legible outcomes or media-friendly narratives. Instead, they cultivate long-term trust and attend closely to context, contradiction, and the rhythms of ordinary existence. They remind us that critique is not a neutral act; it is entangled in the worlds it describes, and, therefore, bears a responsibility toward them.
This does not mean abandoning critical acumen.
On the contrary, it means sharpening it through humility, curiosity, and relation.
There is no after.
Only through.
//
This text is adapted from the opening remarks delivered at the symposium Art Critique as Midwifery of a Shifting Consciousness, organized by AWC and ICA Germany, and held at Atelier Gardens, Berlin, on June 21.
- All images:
Barbara Debeuckleare & Mothers from Tel Rumeida, From the Series ‘Om (Mother), 2024. © and courtesy of the artist.
