Heavily influenced by the Black Wave or dissident Yugoslav cinema of her childhood, artist Nada Prlja considers its unique balancing act between iconoclasm and idealism, individualism and communism to be exemplary. In an interview with Stefan Szczelkun, Prlja talks about the cultural context of communist Yugoslavia and its mutation into a consumer culture - a shift that her artwork pivots on

Bourgeois society's reduction of sexuality to the logic of (re)production results in a series of rigid dichotomies. Drawing on a rich history of radical theory, Marcel Stoetzler rejects sexual dimorphism and the gay/straight split to imagine a sexuality that is free to recreate itself

With the publication of the first English language monograph on Dušan Makavejev, the work of a great, yet underrated Yugoslav film-maker is finally gaining recognition. Howard Slater diverges from the orthodoxy of Lorraine Mortimer’s book to explore Makavejev’s compound cinema

In this issue of Mute there is a generalised refusal to have our selves, in the widest sense of the word, put to work. As we start to see the real repercussions of the financial crisis bite, the Bretton Woods ideological state apparatus is looking rather threadbare. The strategy to placate social desires through cheap credit, property acquisition and the decoration of domestic surfaces continues against a muted backdrop of factory occupations, boss-nappings, foreclosures, and the dregs of what looks to be Big Brother’s last season.

Extrapolating from his talk on Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ recent film about 18th century folk legend Jack Sheppard, Benedict Seymour traces the intimate relationship between death, representation, fiction and speculation. Then, as now, the attempt to escape from capitalism’s calculus threatens to collapse into another moment of capture

Amidst late-noughties currency fluctuation, Daniel Berchenko considers the history of the dollar's haphazard rise to global currency standard, its geopolitical consequences and the difficulty of breaking its hold

Challenging the idealism of autonomist Marxism, Negativity and Revolution is a recent anthology that uses Adorno's negative dialectics to refuse false unities, placing contradiction and antagonism at the heart of revolutionary theory. Review by Marina Vishmidt