Occasioned by La Triennale 2012, a major exhibition of contemporary

visual art, film, photography, and performance occurring at the

Palais de Tokyo and other Paris-based institutions, Intense Proximity:

An Anthology of the Near and the Far is a comprehensive volume of

essays including a series of seminal writings by thinkers exploring

the connections between artistic practice and the writing of culture

throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Edited by Okwui Enwezor with Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum,

Émilie Renard, and Claire Staebler, this volume features new contributions

by curators, critics, and theorists of contemporary art, culture,

and politics - including Maxime Cervulle, James Clifford, Simon

Njami, Nadia Tazi, Françoise Vergès, and Elvan Zabunyan. In addition

to a series of newly commissioned essays, the anthology comprises

twenty-six texts spanning the period between 1928-2009, some of

which have been translated and made widely available for the first time.

Beginning with Marcel Mauss, Michel Leiris, and Claude Lévi-Strauss,

this anthology takes as its main point of departure the critical legacy

of early twentieth-century ethnographic writing. A series of subsequent

voices - framed as debates and conversations - offer critiques

and reevaluations of the foundations of modern anthropology, exploring

its resonance with artistic and curatorial practice, literature, post-colonial

theory, and cultural theory. Authors include Aimé Césaire,

Jacques Derrida, Manthia Diawara, Johannes Fabian, Hal Foster,

Abdelkébir Khatibi, and Thomas McEvilley, among others.

The volume also features over 200 illustrations, including full-color

visual essays by each of the exhibition contributors, with newly-commissioned

works from El Anatsui, Lothar Baumgarten, Yto Barrada,

Monica Bonvicini, Geta Bratescu, Daniel Buren, Thomas Hirschhorn,

Isaac Julien, Annette Messager, Wangechi Mutu, Eva Partum, and

Thomas Struth, among many others.

This book offers readers the singular opportunity to explore the broad

landscape of human interaction, in words and in images, from the most

remote cultures of the world to those who live with and around us.