Evidentiary Bodies

First comprehensive monograph of the Swedish queer and feminist performance artist.

Holes Dug, Rocks Thrown is the first comprehensive presentation of Line Skywalker Karlström's work. It documents a practice, that over a period of more than twenty years have been committed to "queer feminist world making" using a performative and embodied approach. Correspondingly with Skywalker Karlström's understanding of art as a chaotic and associative knowledge production, which unfolds as a collaborative and ongoing conversation, their book has become a bastard monograph, which describes an artistic practice through its relationships and its flock. For the book, Skywalker Karlström has invited a number of colleagues to engage in conversations with them departing from selected works and jointly attempt to expand upon the strengths and qualities of queer and feminist artistic strategies. In addition to an extensive documentation of works, drawings and ephemera, Holes Dug, Rocks Thrown contains a number of inserts with works by other artists, which have informed Skywalker Karlström's art practice.

Line Skywalker Karlström (born 1971 in Karlstad, Sweden, lives and works in Berlin) is a Swedish performance artist who works with a diverse range of materials dealing with the role of art in life, lesbian and gay identity and the perception of space. Her performances take place in the public realm and also in gallery installations. Karlström was a member of the feminist performance group High Heels Sisters (2002-2007), and a founding member of YES! Association / Föreningen JA! (2005-2018), a group of Swedish artist activists that she left in 2009.

A journey through the archive of BAFTA award-winning curator and film programmer, June Givanni. This private collection made public contains thousands of films from across Africa, the Caribbean and the diaspora amassed in a career spanning more than forty years. Using oral history interviews and ephemera from four film festivals as her touchstones, author Onyeka Igwe offers a way to encounter Pan-African film through the archive. 

The book starts with Third Eye, the film festival that propelled June into a career in Pan-African cinema. Through connections she made there, she travelled to FESPACO in 1985. Participating in the festival while Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso was under the leadership of revolutionary Thomas Sankara was a formative experience. In Ouagadougou she connected with film programmers Suzy Landau and Claire Andrade Watkins, who would take steps to organise Images Caraïbes, Fort de France, Martinique, 1988, and Celebration of Black Cinema, Boston, US. 

Using original oral history research with June and other key figures in Pan-African and Black British cinema, Onyeka uncovers the important role that women festival organisers, programmers and cultural workers have played in Pan-African cinema history. She conceptualises June Givanni’s Pan-African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) as a feminist counter archive that foregrounds marginalised histories and proposes a radical approach to archiving itself. In tracing and naming the cinematic legacies that ground political filmmaking practices today, she preserves June’s work, knowledge and fervour for Pan African cinema for future generations.

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.

A reflection about the status of the image as a balance of forces in tension and a paradoxical act of cancellation of the body through its own representation.

In Ion Grigorescu’s work, as in the book, the body is continually shown in different ways - from photography to film, from performance to drawing - and yet it remains absent, obscuring its own identity in an attempt to question the collective one. As it is impossible to show his art during the regime, it ends up hiding, disappearing inside the image. Instead of showing, the image conceals, because it is non-documentary and non-transmittable; it is an act of birth, a prove of the artist’s resistance, especially as a human being inside (or against) any geographical or historical background. In the rituals of his gestures and in the symbolism of his performances, Grigorescu finds a way to stay alive, preserving his own intellectual status while also defending the dignity of everyday life.

The book traces the progression, both expansive and inclusive, of his work, which inscribes itself into the space of the body and of the world. Grigorescu absorbs elements of the surrounding reality, showing us a continuity between art and life: his act of dissidence is not an outcry of provocation, nor is it extreme; it is an anti-aesthetic operation which uses experimentation and rough techniques to uncover the fiction of art, to denounce the artifice of representation and to affirm images as an instrument of subversive power.

Ion Grigorescu (Bucharest, 1945) is one of the most significant Romanian contemporary artists of the Post-War period and an iconic figure of the conceptual and performative art since the early 70s. He represented Romania at Venice Biennial in 1997 and 2011; his works are in the main public collections, such as MoMA, New York; mumok and Erste Foundation, Vienna; Tate Modern and Deutsche Bank AG, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris.

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.