Features

What kind of role does art actually play in society? From the Bauhaus to Thomas Hirschhorn, and from The Yes Men to Jean-Luc Godard, how and in what ways does art circulate beyond the sphere of the art world?

Matthew Darbyshire’s architectural interventions, installations and displays of consumer objects hone in on the gap between what is promised by those who shape our world and what is actually on offer

Children’s TV shows and tromp l’oeil

The Dutch artist’s carefully scripted day-long conference, Any Other Business

Dan Fox talks to Nils Norman, Timotheus Vermeulen, Anton Vidokle and Sharon Zukin about art, gentrification and artistic freedom

Ahead of dOCUMENTA (13), reflections on the exhibition by its previous curators

The growing social bond between consumers and corporations has changed the way artists are working with commodities

The resurgence of nature motifs is part of a shift from Pop cultural references to pure atmospheres

Michael Riedel records, copies and repeats whatever he can get his hands on and combines the material to create austere and ironic works

Since the 1970s, Manon has used staged identities – and glamour – to devise new strategies for femininity

Alexandra Leykauf turns photographs inside-out to explore their illusionistic properties

Laptops, loops and body movements

Ab-Ex clichés, living canvases and graveyards

Performance lectures, Hollywood cinema and secret societies

The Finnish artist’s subtly transgressive video performances

Ten contemporary sculptors are asked about the ways in which they feel meaning is controlled and conveyed in their work

Spirits, objecthood and the ‘Black Forest voodoo’ of Geoffrey Farmer’s mirages and micro-events

The language of cinema and the psychology of sculpture

The New York-based artist’s latest video installation, Plymouth Rock

Fabio Mauri's Ideology and Nature was re-performed at Venice this year. Here, Barbara Casavecchia examines the artist's enquiry of art and ideology