On the Table 6 – The Meal – A Conversation with Gilbert & George

Isabelle Graw reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus.

By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships." 
— Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Isabelle Graw has written the Elective Affinities for the twenty-first century, as a feminist novel and a dysfunctional family portrait set in the contemporary art world."
— Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder ofTexte zur Kunst in Berlin.

The act of translation as a pedagogical tool, a political act, and ultimately a gesture of care in these tense cultural times.

Based on practical experiments, Unlearning with Translation posits the act of translation as a pedagogical tool, a political act, and ultimately a gesture of care in these tense cultural times. Written by French curator, writer, editor, and self-taught translatress Virginie Bobin, the essay revisits a series of workshops, exhibitions, and other collective activities that took translation as both subject and method to unsettle entrenched conceptions of language, identity, and belonging. In particular, the ambiguous notion of "untranslatability" is used as a lens through which to examine the power relations at play in those institutional, economic, and political contexts inhabited by art workers. Alongside collaborations with artists including Mercedes Azpilicueta, Serena Lee, and Mounira Al Solh, Bobin's reflections are grounded in her experience co-founding and facilitating the editorial and curatorial platform Qalqalah قلقلة†, which relies on translation as a tool for the production and publication of situated knowledge in three languages—French, Arabic, and English. Informed by feminist genealogies and methodologies throughout, the book maintains that collective labor and relations are key aspects of any critical practice, as exemplified in the concluding correspondence with Andrea Ancira.

Virginie Bobin operates across research, curatorial and editorial practices, writing, pedagogy and translation, with a particular interest in performance, experimental forms of artistic research, the role of art, artists and art institutions in the public sphere, and formats that exceed that of the exhibition. Between 2009 and 2018, she has worked for various art centers and residency programs (Villa Vassilieff, Bétonsalon, Witte de With, Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, Performa). She is a Doctor in Artistic Research (PhD-in-Practice, Academy of Fines Arts, Vienna, 2023), a professor in Art and Social Practices at ésadhar (Rouen, since 2024), and a co-founding member of the editorial and curatorial platform Qalqalah قلقلة. In addition to her contributions to various international journals, she has edited the collective publications Composing Differences (Les presses du réel, 2015), Republications (with Mathilde Villeneuve, Archive Books, 2015), and Bestiario de Lengüitas (with Mercedes Azpilicueta, k.verlag, 2024).

Edited by Alice Dusapin and Sophie Orlando.
Contribution by Andrea Ancira.

Elizabeth Povinelli's anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In these essays, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishment of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.

This book on the films of Anton Vidokle features essays and conversations by theorists, curators, and artists exploring the themes of technological immortality and resurrection informed by Cosmist philosophy.

Citizens of the Cosmos examines the artist Anton Vidokle's films and the Cosmist philosophy underpinning them. It features essays and conversations with Vidokle by seminal contemporary theorists, curators, and artists: Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Raqs Media Collective. This is the first book to survey Vidokle's Cosmism-related filmic output, begun in 2014, and includes full scripts from the films.

The book's contributors speculate on Vidokle's Cosmist conceptions of technological immortality, utopian resurrection, museology, and space travel, grappling with how these ideas embroil or crystallize contemporary theories, practices, and technologies: atmospheric manipulation, cryonics, biopolitics, extraplanetary prospecting, geo-engineering, transhumanism, genetics.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi disagrees with the Cosmist conjecture of death as a flaw in the conception of the human being. Elizabeth Povinelli digests the life-nonlife mattering of dust through relationships to and from the human and more-than-human ancestors to come.

Boris Groys contemplates the gravitational forces between Cosmism and communism according to cosmic and social orders, grounded as they are in the laws of both physics and socialist politics. Keti Chukhrov considers the formation of thinking through madness, dying, and reasoning according to Cosmist philosophical and religious debates and beliefs.

Raqs Media Collective and Anton Vidokle discuss different cultures of death, finitude, and rituals. Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins examine the in-betweeness of the categories of life and death through the designs of terraforming vehicles navigating interplanetary space travel.

Daniel Muzyczuk investigates Vidokle's interests in the context of the history of the collection at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, while Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle converse about filmmaking references and methods, from voiceover narrative to editing processes.

Edited by Miguel Amado. Contributions by Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Raqs Media Collective, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth A. Povinelli.

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 proud to announce the release of Not a Cookbook, the debut book by Canadian filmmaker and artist Robby Reis.

At first glance, Not a Cookbook appears to be just what its title implies—but beneath the surface lies a layered, collage-style portrait of a restaurant and the family that holds it together. Centered on Resto Palme, a Caribbean restaurant in Montreal run by married duo Lee-Anne Millaire Lafleur and Ralph Alerte, the book offers a deeply personal and provocative exploration of kitchen culture, where food becomes a lens through which to examine family, friendship, labor, and resistance. 

A longtime friend of the family, Reis takes an embedded, nonlinear approach to storytelling. Through photographs, texts, and contributions from customers and staff, Not a Cookbook captures not just the daily challenges of running a family business, but also the peripheral stories—of racism, activism, and the emotional labor required to build and protect something shared and sacred.

Despite its name, Not a Cookbook does offer some treasured family recipes—however, when it comes to a few key ingredients that make a certain sauce so special, Alerte leaves us simply with, “sorry blood, I can’t give it away.” The result is a new model for the cookbook: a radical kitchen guide rooted in community, resilience, and love. Less about what’s on the plate, and more about everything that makes the plate possible.

Chilli is one of the most popular food ingredients in contemporary China, and symbolic of modernisation. More Than Chilli goes beyond its trendy façade to explore Chongqing, known for its tradition of spicy food. From the perspective as a local, Rossy Liu reflects on her own personal memories associated with chilli. A combination of fragmented scenes, objects, dialogues, movements and sounds are drawn on to unravel the locality of culinary identity. While chilli has become a ubiquitous flavour in today's global society, the book emphasises the hidden intimacy that still exists between Chongqing locals and their unfiltered connection to chilli.

An artist's book presenting a photographic study of onions.

On Onions is a photographic study of onions by artist Elad Lassry (born 1977). Characteristically highlighting the spectrum of hues and shapes for the vegetable, Lassry's selected taxonomy includes sections on red, yellow and white onions, each of which possesses its own distinct taste and benefits. On Onions is Lassry's first artist's book, and the work will exist only in book form; it is at once wry, refreshing and disorienting in its biology workbook style, which makes fruitful use of "the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph" (as the artist has described his practice in general).

Composed by the artist and arranged by Stuart Bailey, the book includes an essay written by Angie Keefer about the effects of sliced onions on human tear ducts.