Resonating at the heart of Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 is the question whether art has present, past, and future functions. The modernist assertion of the autonomy of art was intended to render superfluous art's social and religious functions. But what if the functionlessness of art comes under suspicion of being instrumentalized by bourgeois capitalism? This was an accusation that informed the anti-modernist critique of the avant-garde, and particularly of Surrealism. The objective throughout the crisis-ridden present of the 1920s to the 1940s was to reaffirm a once ubiquitous, but long-lost functionality--not only of art. The publication accompanying the exhibition examines the strategies deployed in this reaffirmation. These include the surrealist Primitivism of an "Ethnology of the White Man" together with the excavation of the deep time of humanity--into the "Neolithic Childhood" mapped out by the notoriously anti-modernist Carl Einstein (1885-1940) as a hallucinatory retro-utopia. The volume brings together essays by the curators and academics involved in the project, primary texts by Carl Einstein and a comprehensive documentation of the exhibition including lists of works, texts on as well as images of numerous exhibits and finally installation views. At the center of the volume, a glossary discusses Carl Einstein's own theoretical vocabulary as well as further associated terms, such as Autonomy, Formalism, Function, Gesture, Hallucination, Art, Metamorphosis, Primitivisms, Totality. With contributions by: Irene Albers, Philipp Albers, Joyce S. Cheng, Rosa Eidelpes, Carl Einstein, Anselm Franke, Charles W. Haxthausen, Tom Holert, Sven Lutticken, Ulrike Muller, Jenny Nachtigall, David Quigley, Cornelius Reiber, Erhard Schuttpelz, Kerstin Stakemeier, Maria Stavrinaki, Elena Vogman, Zairong Xiang, Sebastian Zeidler With reproductions of artworks by: Jean (Hans) Arp, Willi Baumeister, Georges Braque, Brassai, Claude Cahun, Lux T. Feininger, Max Ernst, Florence Henri, Barbara Hepworth, Hannah Hoech, Heinrich Hoerle, Paul Klee, Germaine Krull, Helen Levitt, Andre Masson, Alexandra Povorina, Gaston-Louis Roux, Kalifala Sidibe, Louis Soutter, Yves Tanguy, Toyen, Jindrich Styrsky, Raoul Ubac, Paule Vezelay and others.

How do cultural institutions and art practices respond to long-standing states of national and international emergency? It is with these questions in mind that Khalil Rabah's artistic practice investigates the future of visual arts production under such conditions. Exploring the relationships between historically sanctioned and experimental exhibition settings, fictional and documentative narratives, and the histories of displacement, his methods not only propose but produce speculative institutions. As the artist's first major monograph, Falling Forward / Works (1997-2025) presents a comprehensive selection of exhibition materials, previously unseen archival documents, and detailed background notes on how Rabah's methods relate to broader themes in his work. The volume also introduces new critical writing from curators, authors, and researchers on the interrelated subjects of anticipatory aesthetics, subterfuge and fugitive acts, mimicry and performativity, knowledge production, archival technologies and, crucially, the politics of humor.