Playing Monogamy

The many mass protests that have taken place since 2011 have been characterised by an unmistakable need to challenge, overthrow and destroy the prevailing political representations without proposing new ones. The protests are not concerned with replacing the current government or leader with others, and thus getting a better version of what we already have. Instead, they refuse all leaders, including the most critical opposition leaders: these protests are about dismantling the need for leaders. More and more people are coming to the view that it is not possible to manage the many crises within the framework of the political institutions we have today. 

The new protests are political acts that are neither class struggle nor the establishment of an opposition to those in power. Rasmussen argues that we should understand these protests as the emergence of a new kind of revolutionary action that is as much an anthropological as a political transformation: it is an attempt to break free from all the traditional notions of how the social context that we call society and the nation-state is organised.

A richly illustrated exploration of Sung Hwan Kim’s complex record of migrant stories, displacement and belonging, border-crossings and translation.

In A Record of Drifting Across the Sea (2017–), Sung Hwan Kim looks at histories of migration. The artist parses the traces –archival and bodily – left by undocumented Korean migrants who came to the US by way of Hawai’i at the turn of the twentieth century, and ponders over their impact on other migrant and indigenous communities. As an ongoing film and installation series, comprising two chapters and a third in progress, A Record unsettles the limits of the ‘one work’ with its distributive, open-ended and collaborative nature.

In this speculative inquiry, Janine Armin explores each chapter in Kim’s multi-layered work as a mycelial network of feelers entangling and extending the wider work in-process. Engaging history through embodiment, folklore and myth, as much as through archival material, Kim navigates and crosses the boundaries between displacement and belonging. Focusing on the artist’s attempt to escape from representation, Armin illuminates and attends to the different stories and non-sovereign ways of being together towards which his work points us.

This title is part of the One Work book series, which focuses on artworks that have significantly changed the way we understand art and its history.

Feminist Fatwas traces how Muslim feminists are resisting misogynistic interpretations of the Quran (like the verse male clerics have used to condone wife-beating). 

For centuries, the translators and interpreters of the Holy Quran have been men. This is changing now as more and more Muslim feminists cast their eye on the patriarchal contexts of these interpretations. Feminist Fatwas tells the story of  Verse 34 in Chapter 4 which has been interpreted by male clerics as condoning a husband beating his wife. This essay traces the groundbreaking work of knocking down this misogynist Quranic interpretations. The story of how Muslim feminists are doing this work is a chronicle of the slow and quiet feminist revolution taking place within Islam as women take on significant and powerful roles. 

Rafia Zakaria is a Pakistani-American attorney, feminist, journalist, and author. She has written for The Nation, Guardian Books, The New Republic, The Baffler, Boston Review, and Al Jazeera. In 2021, she published Against White Feminism, in which she critiques the emphasis that conventional feminist thought places on the experiences of white women while excluding women of color

Traditions of realism are brought together with the decolonial and ecological concept of "planetarity" to understand a new realism in contemporary art.

The devastation left in the wake of modernity and globalization is revealing a fragile and unfamiliar planet, and humanity has awakened to a new real. If the old "realist" tools of objectivism have contributed to capitalist society's divorce from the natural world, how are artists finding new ways to make us really see—and feel—the planet?
Surveying a body of planet-facing art, communal practices, and activism, Josephine Berry investigates art's power to break with capitalist realism and decarbonize the imagination. With chapters on feeling as world-making, the rupture of petroleum landscapes, artists' urban exodus, and migration as survival, Planetary Realism delves deeply into art's necessary reimagining of life on Earth.

"Planetary Realism is a deeply necessary book to add to our toolkit of struggle against a corporate world intent on destroying our planet for nothing but profit. Berry's book is a wake up call to artists and all those whose imaginations have not been destroyed by the consensensual silence surrounding the life or death issue of climate catastrophe. She dismantles the concept of art's autonomy to describe how artists all over the world are becoming artworkers for Planet Earth." — Peter Kennard, London-based artist and activist, and Emeritus Professor of Political Art at the Royal College of Art

"Through this superlative and vigorously argued version of a realism for today—meticulously attuned to planetary predicaments and the art and culture that inhabits them—Berry gives us means to map ways of being more hospitable, disobedient, migratory, alive, in the present." — Matthew Fuller, co-author of Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility, and Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth

Josephine Berry is an art theorist, writer and editor. She supervises thesis only and practice based PhDs in the School of Arts and Humanities, Royal College of Art, London, and teaches in Media Communication and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a member of Mute magazine's editorial collective Mute and is a peer reviewer for the journal Theory, Culture & Society.

Set against a backdrop of trans life that begins with her own transition in the 1960s, Vivian Blaxell takes us on a witty and expansive sweep through history, from Australia to Japan, to Hawai’i to Mexico, to heretofore unmapped regions of the mind. In seven devastatingly intelligent parts, her essay covers a vast range in time and space — from the arson of a Japanese temple to a transformative encounter with a coral reef, from Nietzsche and Hegel to Indigenous metaphysics, from a perplexing relationship with a beautiful man to the unknowable minds of animals. Fleshy and philosophical, searching and exalted, utterly distinctive and assured, Worthy of the Event belatedly establishes Vivian Blaxell as one of the major writers of her generation.