Disobedience

Published on the occasion of her exhibition at the Palais de l'Athénée, Geneva (September 18–October 18, 2025) following her Prix de la Société des Arts de Genève award in 2025, this new artist's book by Shirana Shahbazi is fully dedicated to her "Displacement" series (2023–2025). To describe it, she states: "I use multiple exposure and overlapping to create an independent experience of time and space. The simultaneity of different realities is relevant to many of us. I think a lot about how to depict these complex realities."

Designed by Norm, Zurich, this publication is itself an inquiry into space and time, and our relationship to them. Each alternate page is trimmed short, creating new perceptions. The artist adds: "I enjoy deconstructing rooms, creating new ways of experiencing them. Sharpening the awareness while you see the works." The latest book in a series of acclaimed photography publications, this volume is characteristic of Shahbazi's distinctive and conceptually rigorous approach to photography in which light, vibrant color field, and layering play key roles. Flipping through the pages of An Exciting Opportunity Lies Ahead of You is a dream-like journey through architecture and senses. 

Born in Tehran in 1974, Shirana Shahbazi moved to Germany at the age of 11. She studied photography in Dortmund and Zurich, where she lives and works today. Her practice has been dedicated to generating a hybrid visual language that defies simple categorization and can be experienced on multiple levels. It challenges the translation and the transcultural construction of meaning. The physical presence of her work is just as important as its semantic underpinnings.

In her darkly funny 1985 take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, acclaimed French writer and activist Monique Wittig restages the journey through the circles of hell, limbo, paradise from a lesbian feminist perspective. 

Never-before published in the US, Across the Acheron follows the adventures of “Wittig” and her anti-Virgilian guide through laundromats, billiard parlors, dyke bars, and picnic grounds of a 1980s San Francisco populated by hunters and their prey, lost souls, and fantastical beasts, including a robotic eagle and angelic bikers. Wittig reimagines Dante’s epic poem through a feminist and queer lens, subverting his cosmological order and upending gender identities and literary traditions. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s final novel back into print for the first time since the early-1990s, revised according to the author's notes, and with a new introduction by Sophie Lewis.

“Across the Acheron is a work of lesbian struggle and triumph across two kinds of hell. The hell of the classic western literary canon—and the hell of San Francisco. Monique Wittig brings all of her writerly powers and political experience to bear here, as witness to the horrors of heterosexual patriarchy and also to the possibility of another world for another life. Her work is a rare combination of deeply felt materialism and radical linguistic freedom. If we're to have another world, we'll need to create another language. She knew that, and she lived it.” — McKenzie Wark

“Even in fiction Monique Wittig’s writing is critical, prescient, brilliant, satirical, searing, and way ahead of its time. I’m so glad this work is back in circulation to revisit and revel in.” — Pamela Sneed

“In this unendurable yet compelling journey through the circles of patriarchal hell, Wittig encounters hordes of tortured women who do not struggle against their oppressors. Their brainwashing is as difficult to witness as their bloodied flesh. Only through communal activism does the seeker’s soul becomes tough enough to enter Paradise, where bare-breasted angels dismount motorcycles and offer baskets of 'cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, peaches, plums, tomatoes, avocados, green melons, cantaloupes, watermelons, lemons, pawpaws, pineapples and coconuts.’ The bounties of Across the Acheron are lush and many.” — Dodie Bellamy

“A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice’s tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved.” — Publishers Weekly

Introduction by Sophie Lewis
Translated by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland

Susan Stryker is a foundational figure in trans studies. When Monsters Speak showcases the development of Stryker’s writing from the 1990s to the present. It combines canonical pieces, such as “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” with her hard to find earlier work published in zines and newsletters. Brought together, they ground Stryker’s thought in 1990s San Francisco and its innovative queer, trans, and S/M cultures. The volume includes an introduction by editor McKenzie Wark, who highlights Stryker’s connections to developments in queer theory, media studies, and autotheory while foregrounding Stryker’s innovative writing style and scholarly methods. When Monsters Speak is an authoritative and essential collection by one of the most important and influential intellectuals of our time.

McKenzie Wark invents a new genre for another gender: not a memoir but an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

Another genre for another gender.

What if you were trans and didn't know it? What if there were some hole in your life and you didn't even know it was there? What if you went through life not knowing why you only felt at home in your body at peak moments of drugs and sex? What if you expended your days avoiding an absence, a hole in being? Reverse Cowgirl is not exactly a memoir. The author doesn't, in the end, have any answers as to who she really is or was, although maybe she figures out what she could become.

Traveling from Sydney in the 1980s to New York today, Reverse Cowgirl is a comedy of errors, chronicling the author's failed attempts at being gay and at being straight across the shifting political and media landscapes of the late twentieth century. Finding that the established narratives of being transgender don't seem to apply to her, Wark borrows from the genres of autofiction, fictocriticism, and new narrative to create a writing practice that can discover the form of a life outside existing accounts of trans experience: an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

This first monograph includes all of Van der Stokker's murals and most of her drawings.

In an interview in this collection of Van der Stokker's wall paintings and drawings, John Waters says, 'Millions of teenage girls have drawings that are good, but no one ever tells them that they are'. Van der Stokker celebrates teenage girlishness, and has since 1983 found both immense support and immense rejection within the art world community. Includes interviews with Van der Stokker and a complete presentation of her works in situ, printed on full-page spreads on quality mat paper.

Dutch-born van der Stokker (1954, Hertogenbosch), active artist-gallery owner on the East Side of New York in the 80's, now lives between Amsterdam and New York. She developed pictorial murals with happy candy-coated slogans that incited acid sarcasm from her contemporaries.

Texts by Anne Pontégnie, Éric Troncy, John Waters/Charles Esche, Mirjam Westen, Amy Kellner.

Born in Beirut, Ali Cherri lives and works between Beirut and Paris. He belongs to this generation of Lebanese artists born during the civil war whose work has been strongly affected by this context of instability.

Through an introduction by the artist, 4 essays and an interview, this first monograph reveals the political, aesthetic and dreamlike dimensions of a work that the artist has been developing for over fifteen years. Ali Cherri's interdisciplinary work explores the myths and classifications of ancient worlds and contemporary societies

A scrapbook on Baillie's life and career, with stills, ephemera and writings by filmmakers across generations.

This is the first book on the West Coast avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Baillie (1931-2020), famed for the films Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964), Castro Street (1966) and All My Life (1966) and for his influence on directors such as George Lucas (one of Lucas' charitable foundations helped fund the digital transfer of Baillie's films) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Alongside stills from Baillie's films, the book fosters a dialogue between Baillie and filmmakers and writers across several generations, including experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton, filmmaker and anthropologist J.P. Sniadecki and Jonas Mekas, along with suites of images by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, British artist and experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers and Brazilian artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz, among others. Reproductions of correspondence and other ephemera are also included.

The book includes Mendieta's first published comprehensive filmography resulting from three years of collaborative research conducted by the Estate of Ana Mendieta and the University of Minnesota as well as original essays by John Perreault, Michael Rush, Rachel Weiss, Lynn Lukkas, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, and Laura Wertheim Joseph.

The first book-length treatment of Mendieta's moving-image practice, Covered in Time and History aims to locate her films centrally within her larger oeuvre and at the forefront of the multidisciplinary shifts that characterized visual arts practice during the 1970s.