How to Sleep Faster 4

The book transcribes a body broken by American empire, that of ex-con Rafael Luis Estrada Requena, hacking itself away from contemporary society. Johanna Hedva, author of Sick Woman Theory, takes the ferocious compulsion to escape (from capitalism, from the limits of the body-machine, from Earth) and channels it into an evisceration of oppression and authority. Equal parts tender and brutal, romantic and furious, On Hell is a novel about myths that trick and resist totalitarianism.

The platform, free speech and contempt

Moulded from clay, between 2021 and 2023, The subtle rules the dense is a series of ceramic chest plates, by the artist Phoebe Collings-James. Inspired by Makonde and Yoruba body masks and Roman muscle cuirasses, the sculptures explore the interplay between ritualistic objects’ violent histories and their contemporary presentation as fetishistic ornaments. This publication brings together responses to the series from artists SERAFINE1369 and Rehana Zaman and geographer Professor Kathryn Yusoff; exploring layered references to tarot, Shakespeare and post-colonial theory; probing the materiality and extractive politics of geology; and reflecting the plural multifaceted nature of Collings-James’ practice.

A series by Phoebe Collings-James

With Texts by Serafine1369, Rehana Zaman, Kathryn Yussof.

Constructed in Pennsylvania in 1827, Gravity Road was a precursor to the modern roller coaster; a sloping stretch of railroad used to cart coal out of mines. With passenger rides on offer soon afterwards, the rapid descent became an attraction and the technology was appropriated for thrill rides in amusement parks.

Jesse Darling’s sculptures, drawings and installations address the fallibility, fungibility and mortality of living beings, systems of government, ideologies and technologies – nothing is too big to fail. For his exhibition at Kunstverein Freiburg in 2020, Darling created a sculpture of a dysfunctional roller coaster, broken down to a child-like scale, becoming an anti-monument to a modernity that celebrates progress, acceleration and mastery and produces violence.

Exploring the entangled history of labour, leisure, extraction and entertainment, Gravity Road: A Rollercoaster Reader was commissioned in response to Darling’s 2020 exhibition, bringing together new texts by artist and Darling-collaborator Joe Highton and writer Sabrina Tarasoff along with a correspondence between Darling and the Kunstverein’s director Heinrich Dietz.

FEATURING TEXTS BY:
Jesse Darling
Heinrich Dietz
Joe Highton
Sabrina Tarasoff

Metabolize, If Able is a queer correspondence sent from a dystopian future. ​Clay AD’s hybrid-novel​ follow​s​ the lives of clones​ and their spawn through ​medical charts, IMs, self-help meditations, screenplays, and, of course, epistles. ​For the clones, a ​corporation​ controls life and death, sickness and wealth. Corp doctors, or DRs, bring the clones to life and assign them work. But DRs restrict clone reproduction. They pathologize and withhold care. They keep the clones sick. What happens when the clones and their anti-Corp cell turn illness into a weapon? AD’s ​sci-fi world posits the hope found in collective intimacy & the struggle against state control.

The first monograph on Christiane Blattmann takes its title from her solo show Un-Break My Walls at Kunsthalle Münster in 2019. Blattmann intricately interweaves, intermeshes, combines, compounds, merges, and processes in her work not only materials but also structures, things, stories, characters. The volume includes extensive illustrations of exhibitions, projects, and works, and a great number of black-and-white images capture the artist’s studio practice. The interactions of materials, along with theoretical and literary references, serve as important points of departure, and the emblematic outcomes involve text and texture as material structure and patterned surface; vivid condensation and entanglement; and invitations to exploration and reflection. The book compiles different elements designed on a series of shifting layers. Texts by Merle Radtke and Chloe Stead and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark provide insight into Blattmann’s art, complemented by a piece of fiction by Huw Lemmey.

Texts by Merle Radtke, Huw Lemmey, and Chloe Stead, and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark

During a residency on Fire Island, artist and writer Hannah Black decided to tackle a highly daunting project: the 2020 novel.

The result of her efforts, Tuesday of September or the End, is a slim, playful work of speculative fiction. Written in the aftermath of the early months of the pandemic and the uprisings of summer 2020, the novel explores the ruptures of the year with a satirical sci-fi bent. Black chronicles the lives of two characters, Bird and Dog, as they contend with rapidly changing political possibilities during the pandemic while the run of Moley Salamanders (i.e. Bernie Sanders) concludes and aliens finally invade earth. Through a galvanic vision of how the riots of 2020 might have turned revolutionary, Black offers a meditation on collective life. This crucial novel invites readers to consider who we are—and, by extension, what we are here for—when our normal referents are muted, deleted and upended.

Hannah Black (born 1981) is a New York-based visual artist, critic and writer from Manchester, England. Her work spans video, text and performance and draws from communist, feminist and Afro-pessimist theory. She is the author of Life (2017, with Juliana Huxtable) and Dark Pool Party (2016). Black is represented by the gallery Arcadia Missa in London and Isabella Bortolozzi in Berlin.

Casual Encountersz presents On The Rag, America’s Greatest Tabloid. Blending art and literature with sex, slime and sleaze, On The Rag emerges from LA's underground reading series Casual Encountersz to create a new media platform where the Ivory Tower and the gutter collide. On The Rag is a literary journal, gossip mag and conceptual art project all in one. Get off the apps…And get On The Rag!