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Cover of Unlearning with Translation – A Critical and Collective Practice

Sternberg Press

Unlearning with Translation – A Critical and Collective Practice

Virginie Bobin

€12.00

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.

Published in 2025 ┊ 148 pages ┊ Language: English

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Cover of I Want

Sternberg Press

I Want

Pauline Boudry/ Renate Lorenz

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.

Cover of Burn & Gloom! Glow & Moon!

Sternberg Press

Burn & Gloom! Glow & Moon!

Katrina Daschner

Monograph €19.00

Retrospective monograph: a journey through over two decades of intersectional and queering practices in film, performance, sculpture, community work, and textiles.

In Daschner's textile-based works, threads are minimal yet highly visible, akin to the pinch needed to wake up from a dream. These works—as well as her collages—merge with her confronting yet inviting image politics: she cuts and pastes stories of love and pleasure, violence and resilience, death and rebirth.
The written contributions reflect on Katrina Daschner as part of a hardworking generation of queer artists and makers who have been responding to the major conceptual shifts and gender upheavals happening in contemporary art since the 1990s, especially in New York and London. They highlight Katrina Daschner's longstanding line of intersectional queer interest that continues to undermine (neo-)liberal, heteropatriarchal conceptions of sexuality, gender, subjectivity, and relationships

Edited by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu.
Texts by Amelia Groom, Tim Stüttgen; foreword by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu; interviews by Rike Frank.

Cover of Film X Autochthonous Struggles Today

Sternberg Press

Film X Autochthonous Struggles Today

Nicole Brenez, Jonathan Larcher and 2 more

First global exploration of contemporary forms of filmmaking from political and cultural self-determination movements of Autochthonous communities and peoples.

Film X Autochthonous Struggles Today brings together for the first time filmmakers, activists, film curators, and scholars who share a common interest in filmmaking practices that emerge from and participate in the various situations of struggle that the Autochthonous/Indigenous/Native/Aboriginal/First Nations peoples and communities are involved in worldwide.

Starting with the Edison Studio's 1894 short films Buffalo Dance and Sioux Ghost Dance, representations of Autochthonous peoples have been part of cinema right from its inception. The vast majority of these representations, however, have not been produced by nor for Autochthonous peoples. In the wake of political and cultural self-determination movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and with the gradual democratization and accessibility of the tools of moving-image making, Autochthonous communities have displaced and renewed cinema's forms and means of production, increasingly reclaiming their right for self-representation by way of film and video.

Along with the vibrant forms of moving images arising from within the communities, close to their existential political concerns, filmmaking has also become a potent tool in Autochthonous struggles. This book answers the need to take a global look at the diverse ways of filmmaking that fight for land rights and against environmental injustice (Brazil, Morocco, Taiwan, USA), that resist neocolonial domination, economic and political exploitation (Japan, Philippines), that offer a counterpoint during low intensity or drawn-out armed conflicts (Colombia, Mexico), that invent strategies of counter information and representation (Australia, Canada, Russia, Samoa), and that strive for visibility.

Contributions by Myrla Baldonado, Mayaw Biho, Nadir Bouhmouch, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Carolina Canguçu, Amaranta Cesar, Karrabing Film Collective, Rupert Cox, Nicolas Défossé, Etienne De France, Sophie Gergaud, John Gianvito, David Harper, Aurélie Journée-Duez, Blackhouse Lowe, Caroline San Martin, Laura Langa Martínez, Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Dan Taulapapa Mcmullin, Chie Mikami, Francisco Vázquez Mota, Omar Moujane, Marie Pierre-Bouthier, Perrine Poupin, Ariel Arango Prada, Beatriz Rodovalho, Roberto Romero, Jonathan Sims, Mercedes Vicente, Jamahke Welsh.

Cover of Citizens of the Cosmos

Sternberg Press

Citizens of the Cosmos

Anton Vidokle

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.

Cover of On the Benefits of Friendship

Sternberg Press

On the Benefits of Friendship

Isabelle Graw

Essays €22.00

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.

Cover of Peau d’Ana

Daisy Editions

Peau d’Ana

Ana Jotta, Alice Dusapin and 2 more

Monograph €22.00

A long conversation about the work and life of Portuguese artist Ana Jotta, accompanied by 60 previously unpublished photographs of her homes (in Brazil, Morocco, and Zanzibar) and her years in theater in the late 1970s.

“Peau d’Ana” is a conversation with the Portuguese artist Ana Jotta (1946), conducted in January 2024 by Alice Dusapin, Martin Laborde, and Baptiste Pinteaux in the Lisbon apartment that Ana has occupied for over forty years. Through the history of both this unique place and the various other homes in which she has lived — Tangier, Madeira, Brazil, and the Portuguese countryside — Ana Jotta mischievously and playfully invites us to revisit fragments of her life. She discusses her childhood, her work as an actress and set designer, her first exhibitions in the mid-1980s, and her life in the studio. She talks about the importance of pleasure and frustration, her love of painting and literature, and the role of the irrational in her work. She shares her dislike of families, her friendships with artists and other animals, and the detours necessary for finding, and preserving, the energy essential for work… and for sleep. She disarms with the precision of her words, which describe a solitary, demanding, and profoundly vivid existence where mediocrity has no place. The interview, published in French and English, is accompanied by some sixty previously unpublished photographs and documents.

Cover of Espaces pédagogiques alternatifs

Villa Arson

Espaces pédagogiques alternatifs

Anna Colin

Pedagogy €12.00

A critical exploration of the values and qualities inherent in independent educational organizations and the hurdles in the way of remaining "alternative" with the passing of time.

Anna Colin is programme director of the MFA Curating and co-director of the Centre for Art and Ecology, Goldsmiths, London. Besides Open School East, Anna worked as associate curator at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2014–20), associate director at Bétonsalon, Paris (2011–12), and curator at Gasworks, London (2007–10). She co-curated Chaleur Humaine, the 2nd Dunkirk Art & Industry Triennale (2023–24) on the relationship between energy and the arts since 1973. She holds a PhD in cultural geography and has a training in arboriculture.

Edited by Céline Chazalviel, Alice Dusapin, Sophie Orlando.
Texts by Anna Colin and Catherine Quéloz.

Cover of One And Many Mirrors: Perspectives On Graphic Design Education

Occasional Papers

One And Many Mirrors: Perspectives On Graphic Design Education

Brad Haylock, Luke Wood

This ambitious book brings together a wide international selection of new and recent writing by educators and practitioners who question the rules and hierarchies of graphic design education today. It holds a vivid mirror up to the ways in which graphic design is imagined, taught, received, and reproduced. Edited by two designer-educators (Brad Haylock and Luke Wood), 'One and Many Mirrors' provides an urgent overview of the field of contemporary graphic design education for all those concerned with its past, present, and possible futures.