OSLO/ISTANBUL.- The main agenda of the Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics is to investigate the possibilities of artists and art scenes worldwide to reflect and influence their local political situation.

Seismopolite will come out 4-6 times per year, presenting art reviews, essays and interviews in a bilingual English and Scandinavian online issue.

Highlights from the first issue:
Blind encounters in the fault lines of an empire: Blind Dates Project is a collaborative project involving artists and researchers from estranged societies in the former territories of the Ottoman Empire. The project tackles the master narratives, remains and gaps produced by the empire's fall, in an attempt to create new future trajectories.

Between utopia and dystopia: On June 30th, Between Utopia and Dystopia opened at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) in Mexico City. In this exhibition, Asian artists mediate between art, life, politics, history and social memory in their respective localities and historical contexts.

One day it will have to be over: In a series of three exhibitions, Museo de Arte Contemporãnea (USP) in São Paulo covers the period of military dictatorship in Brazil, displaying how art became one of the few and most efficient tools of opposition to the regime over three decades. Far more than the media coverage of the last biennial managed to do, this exhibition puts the question of art and politics, albeit retrospectively, in a local historical perspective of relevance far beyond Brazil.

The performative archive: In different ways, the two recent exhibitions Fluxus East and The Creative Act at Henie Onstad Art Center in Oslo both experiment with the idea of the archive, in a search for a way in which art can maintain its political agency over time. The reflexivity of the two exhibitions largely stems from their juxtaposition and turns our attention towards the performativity of art.

I can't go on, I'll go on: This essay addresses the present conditions of art as a tool for social and historical betterment, by responding to the Questionnaire on “The Contemporary” in e-flux and October. As a means to tackle the intangible causes of 'the contemporary's' evasiveness in current debates on 'contemporary art', as well as to break this concept's spell over the present, the essay appropriates Walter Benjamin's analysis of capitalist modernity as a 'hellish' existence – that is, more precisely, of 'transiency without progress'.

Interview with MAP office: Josef Ng interviews the artist couple Valérie Portefaix and Laurent Gutierrez in Hong Kong.

Contributors to the 1st issue are Chris Mansour, Aylin Soyer Tangen, Josef Ng and Paal Andreas Bøe.

Paal Andreas Bøe is the editor of Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics.