Deep Scroll

By way of archiving, digital translation and reproduction, Philip Poppek extracts from Magritte’s word paintings twenty-six letters; segmental symbols of a textual system form an alphabet of a, with a familiar apple punctuating a provisional end to the sequence. A poetic correspondence with the letter a speculates on the prehistory of this alphabet, as though searching for some indication as to how we may have come to where we are now, in this ‘post-factual moment’.

Maybe at some point we fell into the foxes’ den, only to re-surface in a landscape of ruins. This book poses a number of necessary questions, perhaps beginning with: ‘Which feminine noun trails after the title script ‘est pas une?

Pomme? Pipe? Histoire? Communauté?

Published as appendix to the Yvonne Rainer Retrospective (November 6-28 2024), organised by Terrassen at Palads Cinema, Copenhagen.

Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934), one of the great American artists of her generation, revolutionised dance and choreography in the 1960s. Yet over the course of two decades - from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s - Rainer also directed seven feature films, each intensely discursive and consistently inviting critical reflection. Radically diverse and impossible to categorise, her films carve out their own space between documentary, fiction, performance, and the avant-garde. For decades, these films have been difficult to access, and when shown, they were often confined to small monitors in large museum settings. Now, newly restored in 4K, they were presented in a retrospective by Terrassen in 2024 - the first of its kind in Denmark. 

The retrospective culminated in the publication of a new Yvonne Rainer filmography, with contributions from Babette Mangolte, Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Mira Adoumier, Emily Wardill, Emily LaBarge, Amelia Groom, Valérie Massadian, Iman Mohammed, Frida Sandström and Yvonne Rainer herself.

Retrospective monograph: a journey through over two decades of intersectional and queering practices in film, performance, sculpture, community work, and textiles.

In Daschner's textile-based works, threads are minimal yet highly visible, akin to the pinch needed to wake up from a dream. These works—as well as her collages—merge with her confronting yet inviting image politics: she cuts and pastes stories of love and pleasure, violence and resilience, death and rebirth.
The written contributions reflect on Katrina Daschner as part of a hardworking generation of queer artists and makers who have been responding to the major conceptual shifts and gender upheavals happening in contemporary art since the 1990s, especially in New York and London. They highlight Katrina Daschner's longstanding line of intersectional queer interest that continues to undermine (neo-)liberal, heteropatriarchal conceptions of sexuality, gender, subjectivity, and relationships

Edited by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu.
Texts by Amelia Groom, Tim Stüttgen; foreword by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu; interviews by Rike Frank.

First published in 1930 by anti-fascist, avant-garde publisher Éditions du Carrefour in Paris as Aveux non Avenus, Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is Claude Cahun’s wildly radical answer to an invitation to write a memoir. Shattering the very premise of the “memoir”—the singularity of identity—into sharp and prismatic fragments, Cahun assembles an ever-mutating inquiry into the instability of “self” and its many masks.

Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.

Using a multitude of forms (fables, jokes, aphorisms, letters, dialogues, dreams, hymns, pronouncements, etc.), to plumb the subjects of desire, love, gender, sex, fear, faith, religion, and vanity (among others), Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is a tour-de-force work of resistance: it provokes the reader to enter the capacious, provocative, playful, and deeply imaginative space constructed by Cahun in defiance of all categorization, to repudiate a delimited, censured world and embrace, instead, the outcasts and cast-offs, the unknowable and the unknown.

I believe, but in the conditional: I would like to believe.

Thoughtfully redesigned to emulate the original artist’s book, this revised edition of the out-of-print English translation by Susan de Muth—originally published in the UK by the Tate in 2007 and in the U.S. by MIT Press in 2008—includes novelist and critic Pierre Mac Orlan’s original 1930 preface along with contemporary essays by scholar Amelia Groom and translator de Muth. Almost 100-years-old, it is not only prescient, but urgent, in.

It’s not enough to be vanquished, you also have to know how to turn defeat to your advantage.

Translated by Susan de Muth, preface by Pierre Mac Orlan, essay by Amelia Groom.

I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.

The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.

Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.

TBW Books is pleased to announce the publication of Painting Photographs, a new book by Creative Growth Art Center artist Alice Wong. Wong's bold interpretation of vintage vernacular photographs breathes new life into family album kitsch and cliché shots of plants and landscapes, transforming them into a hyper-color plane of vivid abstraction. Using paint markers to enhance and obscure the formal qualities of appropriated imagery, Wong's hand brings energy to each underlying image, recalibrating the viewer's eye and sparking appreciation for otherwise still compositions. With fluid mark-making and a striking approach to color-blocking, Wong's craft merges with the photographic process to create work that feels at once of times past and completely contemporary.

Creative Growth Art Center is the oldest and largest nonprofit art studio for artists with developmental disabilities in the United States. Since 1974, Creative Growth has played a significant role in increasing public interest in the artistic capabilities and achievements of people with disabilities, providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition and representation.

A Book Knot Book is a 208 pages long performance, the first from the research and publishing initiative Body Text. In this study of language in action systems of meaning-making crash, sparkle and swoon. In a playful voice over A Book Knot Book self-reflects on the materialities and choreographies of publishing, reading and writing. With guest stars in fragments; Monique Wittig, Yvonne Rainer, Cristina Rivera Garza, Amiri Baraka, Will Rawls, David Abram, Thich Nhat Hanh and more. 

Edited and designed by Sara Kaaman. Published with the support of Stockholm University of the Arts.

Nazareth Hassan’s devastatingly brilliant Slow mania is a powerful document of senses and sense-making where estrangement and ugliness meets longing and beauty. The artist begins with a photographic sequence: two white-blue sky panels; a shattered glass storefront window; a street gutter clutching leaves, smashed straw sleeves and plastic lids; then snow holding a disassembled red stained chest of drawers. These are the writer’s plinths where form as waste is configured: “smoggy breath thru burnt-edged holes tracking acid mucous inside your home.” Slow mania provokes through enumerative structures, for instance, “screening bodies” who keep a sex club’s gates open only to some: “…197 mmm maybe lemme think / 151 yes / 162 yes / 197 ok yes, but keep your shirt on.” The poet deftly folds human intimacy into interspecies metaphor: “The rat torso twitches in agreement. Across / the street, the flies continue to starve,” where “…you’re lost in your own hole: what did you find?” Hassan attends to this painful search, bearing witness to the disturbingly exultant, offering a radical state of being, in and out of which the stunning and timely Slow mania lives and thrives. — Ronaldo V. Wilson

Slow mania is resistance to resolution, it’s pointillistic magic, it’s Seurat in Bed-Stuy: the tighter you zoom, the more undifferentiated beauty you encounter. It’s kinky (the kinked-up curls of somebody’s greased-up chops). It’s tender (bruised and brown, like the overripe fruit that haunts your summer kitchen waiting to be crumbled into a crumble). The colors are blurry, the edges are soft, the stakes are high, and everything—everything!—shimmers in the space between life and afterlife. Hassan’s gaze is a hot summer steam that sneaks into the skinniest, stinkiest crevices; the grimiest seams, the most miraculous cracks. Breathe into the abyss, that’s the invitation. Take it in, let it in. Be a wit(h)ness to every single being. — Steffani Jemison

This amazing book reads like a synesthetic performance, the only thing missing is the smell of sweat, of streets, of loss. A book of choreographed pages, scores, movements, image blur, hand-scribbles. The bleak, unsparing texts hidden among the materials turn out to be the record of sudden eruptions, violent street scenes, pick-up scenes, unclear dialogues, insults, self-debasing verbal injuries on repeat. The performers are racialized, sexualized, anonymized “persons,” “meats,” numbers, lovers, passers-by, all caught up in these dangerous yet desperately emotional and triggering dances at the limit. It will leave you raw, spaced-out, both roused and alarmed as though coming out of an intoxicating show, and wanting more. — Caroline Bergvall

The motifs produced during time-intensive dyeing processes – which uses indigo, urine, and extracts of natural waste materials – are neither conventional fabric nor lace patterns, and they have only a distant relationship to batik painting. Yet, they are simulations and portraits of both.

Pattern Nor Painting starts in a batik Workshop in Bantul, Indonesia where an artist reconnects with her blank canvas and the batik techniques she learned from an artist in Serekunda, the Gambia many years ago. As documented in this publication Van Hoorebeke’s installations and performances deftly combine unique textiles and ceramics with production-chain goods, ranging from car parts to strawberry jam. Engaging with ages-old traditions of batik production for present-day communities and settings, her work embodies ancient craft, story-telling, time, female thinking, and above all, a connection to the natural world.