Moderna Museet’s Anthropology Series represents something rather unusual in today’s museum world: a rigorous exploration of a well-defined philosophical theme through a series of large-scale exhibitions. The project’s philosophical point of departure: the chapter “Man and his Doubles” in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966). This is the key section for anyone trying to grasp Foucault’s notion of modernity as a space in which “Man” can appear in relationship to forces from the outside. These forces are Labour, Language, and Life. 

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These were the themes for the exhibitions Explosion – Painting as Action (2011), After Babel (2015), and Life Itself (2016). The exhibition trilogy, exploring the triple root of modern humanity, was following by The New Human (2015–17), a complex examination of new forms of subjectivation in today’s political and technological environments. Do we see new forms of subjective life emerge? The advent of a new form of life that, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, ‘is neither God nor man and which, it is hoped, will not prove worse than its two previous forms.’

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This forum, edited by Daniel Birnbaum and Ben Livne-Weitzman, presents the Anthropology Series through some of the philosophical texts that form its beginnings as well as through a number of curatorial and artistic statements by some of its protagonists.