Unsorcery (2nd Edition)

This book traces the legacy of Zona, Eastern Europe performance art festival that took place in Timișoara, Romania, between 1993 and 2002, years which were marked by a transition from communism to a new society built on different principles.

Bringing together artists from the former "Eastern Bloc," Zona became a space of encounters, a platform for theoretical discussions and postmodern art experiments, which displayed a remarkable diversity of artistic languages. The fall of the Berlin Wall, as Nicolas Bourriaud noted in his book "The Radicant", was the first decisive step towards globalization and the generalization of postmodern thought.

In the early 1990s, adopting subversive strategies helped artists overcome critical moments in totalitarian societies, which had been consolidated for decades in Eastern Europe. They combined techniques of expression such as pastiche, quotes, historical images, popular culture, or subcultures with personal mythologies. What resulted was often a critical mixture with an explosive effect. Body art became an appropriate language for critically analyzing stereotypes about the nation, religion, gender, or social prejudices and taboos. Body art facilitated the transfer of ideas and a dialogue with the audience, or it helped launch questions about identity politics. The concerns and intentions of the festival's protagonists were built around political, social, and artistic topics that were debated between the East and the West.

Essays by Ileana Pintilie, László Beke, Vladimir Bulat, Robert Fleck, Alexandra Titu, Berislav Valušek; artists' texts by Alexandru Antik, Matei Bejenaru, Ștefan Bertalan, Geta Brătescu, Oskar Dawicki, Ion Grigorescu, H.arta Group, Karen Kipphoff, Liliana Mericioiu, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, Sorin Vreme.

Schismatics consists of 10 short stories, in a fictitious way dealing with forgotten historical personas. Among them, artist Goda Palekaitė includes Mary Anning –– an amateur discoverer of dinosaurs, Emanuel Swedenborg –– a mystic who empirically explored the architecture of heaven, and Essad Bey –– a Jewish-Muslim writer and orientalist. Here their lives are revived and balance between the lines of history and story.

The book fuses elements of fiction, academic writing, and artistic research, and intertwines with rumors, forgeries, and inventions. Previously, its characters and narratives have already appeared in Palekaitė’s performances and installations, which are presented in the middle of this bilingual edition. In the introductory essay, Valerio Del Baglivo analyses the author’s exploration of facts and fiction, the mechanisms of knowledge production, and the trans-chronological perception of time. At the end of the book, Monika Lipšic ‘Riddle’ reflects on a ‘schismatic poetics’. 

Goda Palekaitė is a contemporary artist and researcher whose work combines visual, literary, performative, and anthropological practices. Exploring the politics of historical narratives, the agency of dreams and collective imagination, and social conditions of creativity, her work evolves around long-term projects that manifest as performances, scenographies, installations, and texts. Her performances, solo and group shows are being presented internationally. In 2019 Goda Palekaitė received The Golden Stage Cross and the Young Artist’s Prize for her artistic contributions across disciplines.

Published September 2020

Suzon — both a reprint of Raimundas Malašauskas sold-out book Paper Exhibitions from 2012 and a new collection of writings by the author that have happened since — offers a window onto Malasauskas' worldview, based on collective improvisation, congregation and continuous drift. It includes essays, exhibition guides, personal letters, song lyrics, an opening speech and a cocktail recipe offering a glimpse of what perhaps in a few years we will look back upon as L'esprit du temps.

The publication Suzon is printed on the reverse of the revised edition of Paper Exhibition, which was originally published in 2012 by Sternberg Press, Kunstverein Publishing, Sandberg Institute, and the Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt (Baltish Arts Magazine).

Editors: Tom Engels, Yana Foqué & Krist Gruijthuijsen
Design: Goda Budvytytė
Copy-editor: Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey
Printer: Graphius, Ghent
Publishers: KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Grazer Kunstverein (Graz), Kunstverein Publishing (Amsterdam), Baltish Arts Magazine (Vilnius) and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König (Köln).
ISBN: 978-3-7533-0767-1

Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism’s arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston’s entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston’s journalism and criticism—in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980—and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston’s appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston’s criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston’s feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism’s roots in avant-garde art practice.

The artist book Amanda is greatly inspired by “Tradeswomen” quarterly magazine for women in blue-collar work, published in the 1980’s and 1990’s in the United States. Amanda is similarly thought as a periodical dealing with the subjects of technology and industry from a feminist (not solely female) angle. The first issue contains fiction stories of an emancipatory character, citing trade associations, oil industry in Iran and ghosts of the printer feeders.

The publication is made in the framework of The Building Institute, an experimental organisation aiming to strengthen the position of femmes builders in the domain of technical construction work. Amanda brings together literary texts by Maria Toumazou, Samantha McCulloch, Sepideh Karami and Madeleine Morley, combining fiction stories with visual artwork. 

Olga Micińska is a visual artist currently living in Amsterdam. Graduated from the MA Art Praxis program at the Dutch Art Institute and holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Also trained as a woodworker, collaborates with craft studios of various domains. Recently she has initiated The Building Institute.

The Building Institute (TBI) is an experimental platform aiming to emancipate the undermined knowledges dwelling in the craft domains, and to unpack diverse questions related to technology and the means of production. TBI combines art’s speculative competences with the grounded practice of manual labor, manifesting its objectives through educational activities, exhibitions, and publications.

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Translated by Daniella Shreir with an introduction by Eileen Myles and afterword by Frances Morgan.