Starship 20

An oral performance (concept, texts and voice by Karl Holmqvist). 

Newspaper articles, snippets of conversation and pop lyrics form a textual mesh and merge into a variety of forms in dealing with text and its decoding and recoding. The text sometimes allows the quoted sources to stand out clearly and at other moments concentrates on the original qualities of the language.

Karl Holmqvist reads his poems in his distinctive lilting monotone way. He unterstands reading poetry as a form of visual art: as a form of invisible visual art, or as a form of Everyman's visual art. He is interested in poetry as a vehicle for communicating with and between people.

Recorded at Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève and in Karl Holmqvist's studio in Berlin.

Karl Holmqvist (born 1960 in Västerås, lives and works in Berlin and Stockholm) is a Swedish artist and poet whose work explores language as a sculptural and performative medium. Known for his text-based pieces, readings, and installations, he reconfigures language into rhythmic, often hypnotic compositions that unfold across performance, print, video, and object-based formats. Drawing on pop culture, protest, and poetry, Holmqvist transforms everyday language into visual and sonic material—blurring the boundaries between reading, speaking, and listening. His distinctive voice and approach invite audiences to encounter language not just as communication, but as energy, structure, and presence.

A masterpiece of surrealist fiction, steeped in controversy upon its first publication in 1984, Blood and Guts in High School is the book that established Kathy Acker as the preeminent voice of post-punk feminism. With 2017 marking the 70th anniversary of her birth, as well as the 10th year since her death this transgressive work of philosophical, political, and sexual insight—with a new introduction by Chris Kraus—continues to become more relevant than ever before.

In the Mexican city of Merida, ten-year-old Janey lives with Johnny—her "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father"—until he leaves her for another woman. Bereft, Janey travels to New York City, plunging into an underworld of gangs and prostitution. After escaping imprisonment, she flees to Tangiers where she meets Jean Genet, and they begin a torrid affair that will lead Janey to her demise. Fantastical, sensual, and fearlessly radical, this hallucinatory collage is both a comic and tragic portrait of erotic awakening.

Contributions by: Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Georgia Sagri, John Kelsey, Matthew Pang, Cathy Wilkes, Sarah Rapson, Nick Irvin, Gene Beery, Anne Dressen, Anne Pontégnie, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Sara Deraedt, Anne Rorimer, Kari Rittenbach, Olga Balema, Maria Nordman, Louise Lawler, Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Adrian Morris, Matt Browning, John Miller, Envers Hadzijaj, Enzo Shalom, Bedros Yeretzian, Morag Keil, Helmut Draxler, Gianna Surangkanjanajai, Steve Cannon, Rae Armentrout, Zoe Hitzig, Pierre Guyotat, Lola Sinreich, Fanny Howe, Hélène Fauquet, Marie Angeletti, Richard Hawkins, Andy Robert, Alexander García Düttmann, Daniel Horn, El Hadji Sy, Henrik Olesen, Aurélien Potier, Richard John Jones, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nora Schultz, Peter Fend, Megan Francis Sullivan, Jill Johnston, Sturtevant, Tonio Kröner, Bernard Bazile, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Jérome Pantalacci, Gérard Traquandi, Gladys Clover, Maria Wutz, Jimmie Durham, Richard Sides, Camilla Wills, Michael Callies, Steven Warwick, Matthew Langan-Peck, Dan Graham, Nina Könnemann, Hans Christian Dany, Valérie Knoll, Win McCarthy, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Anna Rubin, Heji Shin, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Inka Meißner, Simone Forti, Morgan O’Hara, Angharad Williams, Ye Xe, Lily Van Der Stokker, Yuki Kimura, Peter Wächtler, Eva Steinmetz, Michael Van den Abeele, Marc Kokopeli, Bradley Kronz, Robert Grosvenor, Samuel Jeffery, Charlotte Houette, Adam Martin, Wade Guyton, Chloe Truong-Jones.

Edited by Marie Angeletti with Gianmaria Andreetta and Camilla Wills.

Printed in December 2022.
416 pages, Edition of 840.
© 2022 Claude Balls Int. / the author(s).

This issue uses the font designed for german news magazine Spiegel by amazing Lucas de Groot. The color poster is part of the full print of the series “Les Filles d’Amsterdam” by photographer Jean-Luc Moulène. It is the first time this series is printed in book form and in an exclusive interview the artist tells the story of that work.

Contributors: Lily Wittenburg, Maren Grimm & Jakob Krameritsch, Michael Milano, Assaf-Evron, Sophie Thun, Juliana Huxtable, Interview with Jean-Luc Moulène, poster by Jean-Luc Moulène, Magda Tóthová, Peter Machen on Brenda Fassie, Mariah Garnett, Shady El NoshokatyTommy Støckel

catflap is the annual publication of new queer writing from Outburst Arts, a hot mix of open call submissions, curated interviews and smart queer writing with a disco heart.

A multilingual, feminist and original publication edited by Kulte Éditions in Morocco, TAMO, a journal where art, history and contemporary issues intertwine, unashamedly thinks, discusses, criticizes, promotes and denounces.

Contributions by Hassan Hajjaj, Leila Kutub, Abdellah Taïa, Dalila Ennadre, Lilya Ennadre, Rim Battal, Junko Toriyama, Younes Benmoumen, Ali Essafi, Mririda n'Aït Attik, Apolonia Sokol, Azzedine Saleck, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Younes Rahmoun.

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

To wilt tears for an infatuation who has no name of their own. To weep rain like a sentence that passes through the unrequited glimpse. Language is the instrument of our shivers; literature the wink that slips into a wince.

Out of profane necessity we dress the missing words for each circumstance in ecstatic deprivation. Anticipation and alienation. Shock and sorrow. Craving and cruelty. Elation and tension. Emotion is the borrowed absence of transferred meaning: the sensuous "legs" of a table and the sunrise that falls-in-shadow upon the "foot" of a bed. Quintilian's "thirsty" crops that have neither tongue nor throat. Barthes' compassed "wings" of a house. Augustine's "piscina" in which no fish are to be found (and only humans drown). With delirium we endure, and delight in, the abuse of our sensibilities by the sadistic literalization of metaphor.

Featuring Will Alexander, Kimberly Alidio, César Dávila Andrade, Martine Bellen, Stanislav Belsky, Anselm Berrigan, David Buuck, Garrett Caples, Sam Cha, Logan Fry, Lawrence Giffin, Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough, E. Tracy Grinnell, Karen Holman, Elise Houcek, Andrew Joron, Inna Krasnoper, Carlos Lara, Jonathan Larson, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Michael Leong, Douglas A. Martin, olga mikolaivna, Sheila E. Murphy, Ann Pedone, Sal Randolph, Martha Ronk, Jonathan Simkins, Christophe Tarkos, Edwin Torres, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Wendy Xu & John Yau