The Immeasurable Want Of Light

Contributions by: Julien de Smet, Ronny Heiremans, Heike Langsdorf, Vanessa Müller, Filip Van Dingenen, Stijn Van Dorpe, Clémentine Vaultier, Katleen Vermeir.

The books included in the series Choreography as Conditioning are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students work together with invited guests. They explore the notions of choreography, understood as ways of organizing subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making. Where, how, and by whom are things organized and what kind of landscapes of experience are made (im)possible by the practices we enact and encounter?

The Orphans of Tar – A Speculative Opera answers the question posed in the second book by transforming life into voices and presenting possible mindsets through co-authoring a factual fiction. As such, it constitutes a mental space in which ficti­tious characters find an almost disturbing expansion of their thoughts. Accordingly, the book can be considered as an alle­gory of human thoughts as (possible) actions: what could happen becomes what does happen. For better and worse.

October 2019

The new issue consists of 8 plays and performance texts by Iranian women writers living in or outside Iran. Whether based on actual experience, fictional, or drawn from archives, these texts deal in one way or another with the question of the stage. They produce a contested space of performance that is inevitably linked to the performer's body, whose thresholds are stretched and contracted into potentially new forms of staging. The authors in this issue place their writing in performative relation to the specific historical and sociopolitical conditions in which they live and work. In many ways, the writings interrogate the politics that delineate the stage itself.

The authors in this special issue are: Nasim Ahmadpour, Nil (Alista) Aghaee, Naghmeh Manavi, Athena Farrokhzad, Nazanin Sanatkar, Azade Shahmiri, Zahra Mohseni and Naghmeh Samini.

Drawing from notions of "bad poetry" as the critical undoing of normative taste, Antilogy brings together works by the Brazilian artist and poet Alex Hamburger.

Central to Hamburger's practice and engagement with poetry is a focus on writing as the expression of a performative disruption and playful reworking of semiotic systems. With references to Fluxus intermediality, Brazilian concretism, experimental music, and sound poetry, Hamburger's work dynamically collapses the distinctions between fact and fiction, theory and performance, system and noise. From visual poems to abstract narrative to personal fantasy, Antilogy reminds us about the potent sense of refusal and experimentation that all art should carry.

Alex Hamburger was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1948. From the 80s onward his researches and proposals turned to the possibilities of fusion and intertwining of languages, developing works in Verbal, Visual and Sound Poetry, Object-Poem, Artist's books, Installation, Performance art, etc. He has published seven books in various poetical genres, three CDs of Sound Poetry and has performed several performance pieces, some in partnership with the visual artist Marcia X, with whom he established a fruitful relationship throughout the 80s, contributing decisively for a better understanding and acceptance of the above practices in the local art circuit of Rio de Janeiro. His work is held in the collections of contemporary art institutions, in Brazil and abroad, including The Museum of Modern Art, RJ, The Museum of Modern Art, SP, Printed Matter Bookstore, New York, Compendium of Contemporary Fine Prints, Hamburg, ICA, London among others. Alex Hamburger continues to live and work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Coinciding with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s exhibition, Serpentine and Archive Books have released the artist’s first monograph, THE DELUSION. It imagines a ‘new bible for emotional processing’ and offers intimate insight into the project and the artist’s wider practice, in a gamified, interactive style. 

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995, London) is a Berlin/London-based artist who graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2019. Working predominantly in animation, sound, performance, and video game development, their practice intertwines lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell the stories of Black Trans people. Encouraging the active participation of the visitor-player in their installations, the artist highlights the role of individual choices in shaping narratives and histories.

Contributions by Mckenzie Wark, Helen Starr, Legacy Russell x Mindy Seu, Tamar Clarke-Brown, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Kay Watson, Rebecca Allen, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Shenece Oretha, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Barby Asante, Ebun Sodipo

The Appendixes #1-4 is an editorial series by Mette Edvardsen, Léa Poiré and Victoria Pérez Royo that came out of the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. For a two-year residency at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers (2022-23), they came together as a small work group, shaping the work process, hosting presentation formats and making the publication series on paper as four cahiers.

The cahiers comprise a collection of commissioned texts and contributions created for this context, selected documents and traces from work sessions and encounters organized during the residency, texts read together and republished for this occasion, a collection of references, notes in progress, unfinished thoughts and loose fragments - on paper, between pages.