Programmed Melancholy

Ding Dong Bell is an invitation to cross the threshold into a world that belongs not only to the imagination, but also to the concrete possibility of a different way of inhabiting reality. In this space, details weave together landscapes and reveal characters, hinting at unexpected encounters in a continuous search for shapes and textures, in a chromatic immersion and a sequence of perspectives on a syncretic and archaic world, on an alchemical pictorial practice, where the complex figurative iconography of living beings and cosmic constellations is progressively enriched with tonal stratifications and semantic density.

The collection of paintings outlines universes in which plants, animals, human beings, and subtle presences coexist outside any pre-established hierarchy. The forms cross each other lymphatically and transform without ever being fully accomplished, metamorphically generating a visual ecosystem based on the continuous exchange of substances and the visceral mixture of matter. In this fluid chorus, everything is constantly redefined in the process of becoming, yet without losing its identity. What emerges is a symbolic horizon that becomes a universal hope: an invitation to living beings, witnesses of contemporaneity, to cultivate mutual respect and nurture a providential alliance, where the different planes of existence vibrate in resonance.

The titles of the works, inspired by traditional English nursery rhymes, and the accompanying texts take the form of ancient and surreal chants, capable of evoking both the childhood of the world and its possible future. Their language, closer to illuminated manuscripts than to linear narration, constructs a vivid imaginary world in which whirlwinds and impulses evoke the idea of original totality: at the end of this long succession of worlds, everything seems to tend towards a single, shared substance of being.

Barbara Cammarata (born in 1977) lives and works in Catania (Sicily).

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed grapples with the poetics-pleasures-politics of Black knowledge production, information technologies and belief formation. Her work looks at knowledge and how it is created, embodied, stored, cataloged, hidden, learned, and also unlearned, with particular focus on facets of incompleteness, information (il)legibility and the use of seemingly error-ridden image and text data.
Rasheed works primarily with paper and vinyl that she attaches to walls and public spaces, creating what she describes as "ecosystems of iterative and provisional projects." Based on a 1974 poem of the same name by American writer Lucille Clifton, her exhibition "i am not done yet" deals with questions of incomplete knowledge and continuous learning through "Black storytelling" and "Islamic mysticism." At the same time, the titular sentence "i am not done yet" can also be understood as an assertive, declarative statement in its own right.

This artist book is published on the occasion of Kameelah Janan Rasheed's first ever institutional exhibition in Germany at Kunstverein Hannover in 2022.

"When I think about the density of language, I imagine the material presence of the language in space. But I also hope there is acknowledgment that no sentence is a simple sentence. Every sentence holds meaning, exceeds meaning, moves in different directions simultaneously." - Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Texts by Sergey Harutoonian, Kathleen Rahn, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Legacy Russell

A journey through the artist's work and life.

William Anastasi is the author of a prolific body of work. A major figure in conceptualism and in many respects one of its initiators, his trajectory cannot be solely confined to this chapter in the history of contemporary art. The book revisits, through the prism of multiple voices, the various aspects of an approach that unfolded with the use of complementary mediums. Drawing coexists with photography and "new" technologies, alongside objects, paintings, and installations. Within this corpus to be (re)discovered, sounds, images, and language, as well as artifacts, protocols, and processes, convey inquiries related to space and time, representation, and perception. With contributions from Dove Bradshaw, Chiara Costa, Béatrice Gross, Valérie Mavridorakis, Hélène Meisel, Sébastien Pluot, Julia Robinson, Robert Storr, and Erik Verhagen.

Edited by Erik Verhagen.
Texts by Dove Bradshaw, Chiara Costa, Béatrice Gross, Valérie Mavridorakis, Hélène Meisel, Sébastien Pluot, Julia Robinson, Robert Storr, Erik Verhagen.

Regions surface often in this issue—across arts, tales, and gatherings of individuals and meanings—as a possibility to bypass the borders of nation-states and the meta-geographies of colonial modernity.

Slavs and Tatars; Hera Chan on Stephanie Comilang; Stephanie Bailey on Ho Tzu Nyen; Drifting into the Atmospheric by Sohrab Mohebbi; Lauren Cook contributes nine newly commissioned note-like fiction pieces; Asad Raza on Édouard Glissant; Mira Dayal in conversation with Shanzhai Lyric, TJ Shin, and jina valentine; Temporary Communities, Four Points on Radically Public Institutions by Elvira Dyangani Ose; A Signature Truer Than the Name by Dani Blanga Gubbay; tidbits: Ruoru Mou by Amy Jones; Virginia Ariu by Brit Barton; Bagus Pandega by Harry Burke; Ceidra Moon Murphy by Alex Bennett; Oshay Green by Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi; Shafei Xia in conversation with Danielle Shang; books by Christian Rattemeyer; Guest Design: Lamm & Kirch.

This issue comes with different covers, randomly distributed.

Mousse is a bimonthly contemporary art magazine. Established in 2006, Mousse contains interviews, conversations, and essays by some of the most important figures in international criticism, visual arts, and curating today, alternated with a series of distinctive articles in a unique tabloid format.

The Trial is an extensive publication chronicling the decade-plus-long evolution of one of Rossella Biscotti's seminal works, focusing on the trials of members of the revolutionary left-wing movement Autonomia Operaia in the early 1980s, an emblematic judicial drama of Italy's Years of Lead.

The core of the book is the English transcription of a six-hour audio piece, originally composed from hundreds of hours of the trial's archival recordings broadcast by Radio Radicale. Edited like a theatrical script, The Trial becomes a polyphonic narrative that foregrounds the political voices of defendants in opposition to the structure and language of the legal machine: prosecutors, judges, lawyers. The transcript is accompanied by critical texts by Michael Hardt, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, and Giovanna Zapperi, as well as a conversation between the artist and philosopher Antonio Negri, one of the trial's key defendants. It investigates how political memory is carried, translated, and embodied across time.

Featuring visual documentation and multilingual excerpts from performances staged across various institutions and countries, this publication traces the work's ongoing reactivation through translation, collaboration, and context-specific interventions.

Before making his first films in the 1950s, Chris Marker was a regular contributor to the Paris-based magazine Esprit from 1946 to 1952. Unbound by genre or form, Marker's pieces range from short stories, essays, poems, and reviews to fabricated reportage and invented news affairs, all gemmed with the hallmarks of his style: a blurring of reality and imagination, a wry sense of humor, a sustained political engagement, and, of course, a limitless curiosity for animal life.

Eternal current events marks the first time these exemplary works are available in English, published in an adapted facsimile of the original periodical. In these short selections, what one encounters is less a past life before his turn toward cinema than a preamble to his celebrated body of work. Moving images did not replace Marker’s production as a writer but were incorporated into it. Before the “imaginary films” there were “imaginary current events”; before the travels through time in La Jetée there was a bulletin rethinking the psychogeography of the around-the-world trip; and before the musings on a Japanese temple consecrated to cats in Sans Soleil, there was a summary report on the theological implications of the 1952 Parisian Cat Fair. Marker did not just begin his career as a writer, he remained one throughout his life.

David Hoyle (b.1962, Blackpool, United Kingdom) is a performance and visual artist. His work over the last 30+ years has referenced gender, politics, identity, mental health issues and the ongoing fight for equality.

Hoyle came to prominence in the ‘90s as The Divine David, a kind of anti-drag queen whose lacerating social commentary – targeting both bourgeois Britain and the materialistic-hedonistic gay scene, which he called, “the biggest suicide cult in history” – was offset by breathtaking instances of self-recrimination and even self-harm. Following a couple of outré late-night Channel 4 TV shows and a part in the movie Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes, Hoyle killed off The Divine David, during a spectacular show at the Streatham International Ice Arena in 2000 and retreated to Manchester for “a period of reflection”.

He returned to television screens in 2005 in Chris Morris’ Nathan Barley, then began performing live again, under his own name. Hoyle’s biting satire, bravura costumes, wicked comic timing, and compelling charisma remained intact.

Hoyle is also a prolific painter often painting in his live shows. His paintings are deeply personal, and tackle the same themes as his performances, incorporating domestic waste, flyers, newspapers, magazines, wrapping paper, and more, which reinforce his disdain for the ruling-class bourgeoisie.

This is the first book dedicated to Hoyle’s paintings, offering an edited selection of works made between 2010 and 2022. At Hoyle’s request, all of the works are published undated: thus, emphasising their timelessness, timeliness, relevance, and urgency to the desperate age in which we now find ourselves!

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.