Mousse Publishing

Compassion and Inconvenience combines artist Vika Kirchenbauer’s 30-minute video work Compassion and Inconvenience (2024)—with its script reproduced alongside stills and audio descriptions—and her essay Instituting Inconvenience and Colonial Relations: The Genesis of European Contemporary Art Institutions in Mid-18th Century London (2025). Both these contributions engage with the historical context of the cultural scene in mid-18th-century London, when the first public presentation of contemporary art took place. In a setting inextricably entangled with early capitalism and British colonialism, an emergent artistic elite fundamentally influenced how, for whom, and under what conditions contemporary art entered the public sphere. As part of this genesis, moral philosophical concepts and artists’ feelings—most distinctly around compassion and inconvenience—played important parts in inserting imaginings of superiority and constellations of dominance into the core of European notions of art and taste. By deepening into the historical roots of contemporary art exhibitions, this reader examines the conditions under which what we now consider self-evident came into being.

"Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker whose work has expanded our understanding of digital culture since the 1990s. A pioneer of Net Art and a key figure in post-internet thinking, her groundbreaking practice continues to push the boundaries of the digital and physical realms. This book accompanies the exhibition KI$$ KI$$ at Haus der Kunst München. It features sketches, photographs, and work concepts by Cheang, a conversation between the artist and curator Sarah Johanna Theurer, as well as an essay on selected archival materials by the latter. A glossary and the first comprehensive bibliography of the artist’s work provide a systematic entry point into her diverse practice spanning installation, software interaction, video, film, and multiplayer performance. "