Maquillage as Meditation: Carmelo Bene and the Undead

Adrian Piper: Performing Objects I Have Been, 1972-2018, is a collection of documents from, or potentially relevant to Adrian Piper's performance Some Reflective Surfaces (1975-76) that has been edited by art historian and curator Rhea Anastas. This publication sits within If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution's Peformance in Residence Series, and its seventh artistic program, Social Movement (2017-18).

Adrian Piper, who lives in Berlin, at the age of seventy-two, is one of America's best-known artists. It so happens she is also one of America's best-known female artists. And yet, to use such a qualifier is to make the mistake of accepting limitations, coerced and containing, for artists and thier work— and, to quote Jacqueline Rose, "to dissolve the very possibility for women of any purchase on historical time." 

This publication focuses on an early performance called Some Reflective Surfaces (1975-76). In it, as Piper dances under spotlights, she stages multiple images and sounds. Over the work's duration, the audience follows the performer's images, physical performance, and sound. In "Artist's Statement" (1999), Piper descrvibes her 1960's work that led up to this one as "concered with duration, repetition, and meditative conciousness of the indexical present." Some Reflective Surfaces was produced in New York at the Fine Arts Building, New York University, in 1975, and then at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976. The performance has not been staged since. A collection of the documents of Some Reflective Surfaces is reissued in this publication for the first time, along with other writings spanning Piper's work from 1972-2018.

Published 2021. 

Writing Out Loud is a publication that brings together the transcriptions of eight lectures by the artist Jon Mikel Euba that were live translated from Spanish to English during the course Action unites, words divide (On praxis, an unstated theory) at the DAI. The lectures were delivered across the academic year 2014 – 2015 at the invitation of If I Can’t Dance. They sit within a larger writing-centred project by the artist that he has pursued for almost a decade, through which he aims to define a form of praxis that could evolve into a technical theory.

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs.

Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

d.a. carter with contributions by Taylor Renée Aldridge; Samiya Bashir; La Marr Jurelle Bruce; DJ Lynnée Denise, Jennifer Harge, Duane Lee Holland, Jr., William H. Mosley, III, Zoé Samudzi, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Melanie Stevens and Phillip B. Williams.

This experimental children’s book narrates cross-species practices of survival across the Indonesian archipelago, centring the perspectives of local animals such as endangered monkeys, cosmopolitan rats, migrant sparrows and fugitive dogs. Written in the form of a play, its six episodes ground the readers in the animals’ struggles and aspirations as they go about their daily lives and face the consequences of postcolonial erasure, ecological destruction and capitalist expansion. While the stories unfold, their interconnected existences become an archive of uncertainties, where the fate of many different creatures, humans included, is inseparable from each other.

As a script for intergenerational transmission, the book thoughtfully combines dialogues, songs and drawings, with contextualising essays and extensive notations. Through these different modes of reading, children and adults alike will learn about cross-species solidarity and rebellious movements, but also about disappearing Indigenous cosmologies, and the brave women who wove cloths around the mountains in eco-political resistance.

Acoustic Thought is an exegesis of the Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal gospel found at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945.
 
With a score for six female voices by Lisa Holmqvist; a collage of writings by medieval female mystics; and photographs taken by Jeff Weber at the Coptic Museum in Cairo, during a research period at Beirut project space.
 
The book’s covers reconstruct patterns found on the covers of Nag Hammadi Codex II, which, as well as the Gospel of Thomas, contains the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Philip, the Hypostasis of the Archons, On the Origin of the World, the Exegesis on the Soul, and the Book of Thomas the Contender.
 
Presented and performed during Perfomance Days, Amsterdam (November 2014) and Hotel Theory, REDCAT, Los Angeles (November 2015).

In This is NOT what I want to tell you: she looks at the many attacks carried out by teenagers in Palestine in 2015 and 2016. The teens, all children aged between 10 and 15, were shot dead or sentenced to years in prison. The series of almost daily knife attacks by these lone wolves reflected the hopelessness and despair among the young people of Palestine. They wanted to send a message to the world, but were unable to convey this in ordinary language.

In Two Ladybugs the fates of three characters, a Belgian woman, a Palestinian girl and an Israeli soldier, are closely intertwined. The players don't feel comfortable in this new, strange world and they don't hide that from the public.

Broken Shapes: A young woman in a city that has been occupied for decades, on the day of her father’s funeral, discovers his architectural drawings. Overcome with grief, she slips into the dream worlds and imagined places that he created.

Rimah Jabr Rimah Jabr (Nablus, Palestine, 1980) is a theatre director, playwright, screenwriter and Ph.D. candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. She completed a master’s degree in theatre-making from the RITCS in Brussels. She wrote and directed several plays produced in Belgium, Canada, and Palestine. She actively collaborates with visual artists to craft unique performances. Her doctoral research is a performance ethnography research-creation with Palestinian Designers from Hebron, examining the impact of confinement on the creative process involved in set design. Broken Shapes is a collaborative project co-created by Toronto-based theatremaker Rimah Jabr and Brussels-based visual artist Dareen Abbas.

I am Welton Santos reenacts a dialogue between the Brazilian geo-bio-architect Welton Santos and an Interviewer. The book, which is always read collectively, is used in reading performances by groups of at least 3 people.

Printed on the occasion of an artist residency at PAV, Parco d’Arte Vivente, Turin, July 2016. Texts based on transcripts of interviews with Welton Santos.

As If They Had A Spirit is the first comprehensive monograph of artist Pontus Pettersson. Using drawing and narration, the book expands on Pettersson’s sculptural, poetic and choreographic practice through the accounts and fabulations of long term collaborators. As If They Had A Spirit centers the acts of re-membering, re-telling and re-tracing as situated  methods for documenting and studying the protracted and evolving nature of process-based artistic practices.

Recounted and drawn by Linnea Hansander, Robert, Malmborg, Diana Orving, Karina Sarkissova, Sandra Lolax, Stina Nyberg, Anna Koch, Peter Mills, Anna Efraimsson and Galerie (Simon Asencio & Adriano Wilfert Jensen)

Edited and redrawn by Galerie (Simon Asencio & Adriano Wilfert Jensen)
Editing assistance Izabella Borzecka
Published by Galerie, Int
Co-publisher & Distibribution: PAM, Stockholm

As If They Had A Spirit was made possible with generous support by the Swedish Arts Council, Weld, MDT and PAM