Riffing off the title, this volume includes an interview with Carolyn Lazard – an artist whose conceptual and often spare videos, sculptures, installations, and performances explore the full amplitude of relation – by Catherine Damman, plus a feature on New York-based contemporary artist Tishan Hsu, whose practice examines the “embodiment of technology”, and contributions by time-based media artist Silvia Kolbowski, for whom political resistance, the unconscious, and structures of spectatorship are a central concern of all her projects; choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer; and science fiction author Octavia Butler.

Retroactively compiled from the curators*’ footnotes to the exhibition handout of the 2021 exhibition Zeros and Ones, at KW Berlin.

Dedicated to the Sadie Plant book of the same name (Zeros + ones: digital women + the new techno culture, 1997), the issue embodies a (cybernetic) reading & writing machine, as it co-authors artists’ work.

* Edited with Kathrin Benthele, Anna Gritz, and Ghislaine Leung - the edition has 180 pages, 4 colour plates, two bookmarks, an otherwise unavailable postcard donated by the Stanley Brouwn estate, and… SIXTEEN possible covers, reproducing a work by Lutz Bacher.

Powerfully inventive and atmospheric, Strega is a modern gothic story of nine young women on the cusp of inheriting society’s submission to violence, and the age-long myths that uphold it

With little boxes of liquorice, hairbands, and notebooks in her bag, Rafa arrives at the remote Alpine town of Strega to work at the grand Olympic Hotel. There, she and eight other girls receive the stiff uniforms of seasonal workers and are taught to iron, cook, and make the beds by austere matrons. In spare moments between tasks, the girls start to enjoy each other’s company as they pick herbs in the garden, read in the library, and take in the scenery. But when the hotel suddenly fills with people for a raucous party, one of the girls disappears. What follows are deeper revelations about the myths young women are told, what they are raised to expect from the world, the violence they are made to endure, and, ultimately, the question of whether a gentler, more beautiful life is possible.

A monument to long-dead maids and their shrouded knowledge, Johanne Lykke Holm’s luminescent and jagged prose, delivered in Saskia Vogel’s incisive translation, resonates like a spell that keeps exerting its powers long after reading.

Stitching together girlhood memories with the finest threads of innocence, feminist intellectual bell hooks presents a powerfully intimate account of growing up in the South.

"With the emotion of poetry, the narrative of a novel, and the truth of experience, bell hooks weaves a girlhood memoir you won't be able to put down--or forget. Bone Black takes us into the cave of self-creation."-- Gloria Steinem 

A memoir of ideas and perceptions, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood shows the unfolding of female creativity and one strong-spirited child's journey toward becoming a writer. She learns early on the roles women and men play in society, as well as the emotional vulnerability of children. She sheds new light on a society that beholds the joys of marriage for men and condemns anything more than silence for women. In this world, too, black is a woman's color--worn when earned--daughters and daddies are strangers under the same roof, and crying children are often given something to cry about. hooks finds comfort in solitude, good company in books. She also discovers, in the motionless body of misunderstanding, that writing is her most vital breath.

Ronaldo V. Wilson’s Carmelina: Figures excavates the territory between memory, nation, and embodiment, exploring place as a discipline of the body and an extension of the hand. Through poems, photographs, drawings, records of performance, and home movies recorded in Guam, Tennessee, and the Subic Bay between 1962 and 1979, Wilson reckons with familial heritage, diaspora, and legacies of militarism.

The book pays homage to Wilson’s mother, Carmelina, who served for most of her working life as a certified nursing assistant at Florin Convalescent, an assisted living facility in South Sacramento, California. A glut of signals and media recovers Carmelina’s vivid and urgent experience of exile from the Philippines to marry Wilson’s father—a Black American soldier—being disowned, and before that, of her parents’ assassinations during the Japanese Occupation. Through a visual logic of repetition and reenactment that works to unmoor sensory expectation and narrative logic, Wilson renders her figure as trace, melody against paper, drawing within song, mixed media, dance, and through improvised, masked, and recorded performances in the Berkshires, MA; Long Island, NY; Emeryville, CA; and Boulder, CO. Carmelina: Figures is a book of the Psoas, ice, smudge, and light. 

Borderline Visible begins as a journey from Lausanne to Izmir in 2022 by two artist friends, one of whom experiences health problems halfway and has to stop. As the other continues towards Turkey, suddenly alone, the narration grows into a moving and troubled psychogeography as it shifts between “we” and “I”, present and past, piecing-together value and meaning from the very human ruins of aspiration, history, and language. Ant Hampton’s careful, at times miraculous, process of reconnection gradually lights up a constellation: voices and earthquakes, the Sephardic diaspora, tourism and forced movement, breakdowns and dementia, the end of the Ottoman Empire, swifts and swallows, Eliot’s The Waste Land and an urgent insight into hidden atrocities at the edge of Europe being funded from its centre.

Borderline Visible is created by the artist Ant Hampton, who is also co-director of the Time Based Editions series. With a deep focus on liveness, his performance work since 1999 has often involved guiding people through unrehearsed situations using automated devices and a subtle use of instructions and narration.

As with all Time Based Editions, an audio track combines narration, soundscape, and instructions that guide you over a given time through the book.

In the context of the Artist in focus Trinh T. Minh-ha program at Courtisane festival 2023, Courtisane invited musician, author and curator David Toop to reflect on the sound work in her films. The resulting publication, titled Breath, rhythm, silence, resonance: listening beyond seeing in the films of Trinh T. Minh­ha, is the first publication in the Echoes of Dissent series, devoted to the politics of the soundtrack.

A monograph / artists' book that engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories. Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.

Catalog is a serial publication about cataloging, written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala. This is Catalog issue 17, ‘Introduction’, it’s part of a sub-series, researching the life, work and near invisibility of writer Duncan Smith (1954–1991).

Exit Ambition is a catalogue of practices, documents, videos, and other projects - virtual & actual. The book operates as an incomplete index of a series of installations, instructions, anti-plays, performance scores, descriptions, etc.

Jake Reber lives and works in Buffalo, NY, where he co-curates hystericallyreal.com.

The 6th installment of The Social Life of the Book series is a section of the catalogue of publications from English conceptual artist Helen Chadwick’s personal library, reproduced by Will Holder for single mothers. The library was acquired in 2006 and is held by the Henry Moore Institute archive, Leeds, UK.

“Un livre qui fera date. Deux ans de recherches, 512 pages, 1.361 illustrations en quadrichromie, 119 revues lettristes parues de 1946 à 2016 pour un total de 1.200 ouvrages décrits (avec la couverture et le sommaire de chaque numéro). Qui d’autre que les éditeurs suédois de OEI (Jonas J. Magnusson et Cecilia Gronberg) aurait pu sortir ce travail anthologique? Personne!” — www.mauricelemaitre.org

“The ‘unreasonable’ idea for this ‘catalogue raisonné’ came to me as an attemps to draw up a complete inventory of all the journals and periodicals of the Lettrist group, from its birth until today. Because the lifespan of the Lettrist movement has exceeded that of all the other avant-garde movements, we are undoubtedly in front of the most immense corpus ever produced in terms of magazines, coverin a period from 1946 to 2016. It presents more than a hundred different titles with more than one thousand items and hundreds of authors. . . . I hope that this comprehensive work will give the reader an opportunity to understand the different paths of the Lettrist groups and the many areas addressed, if not shaken, beyond the books of Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître. Since other Lettrists have published relatively few monographic books, and very little outside their own magazines, OEI #92-93 is a unique database for most of the Lettrist texts that we can access, also making it possible for new readers to come across Lettrism.”
— from Frédéric Acquaviva’s introduction

Design by Fält

Stemming from a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, this monographic catalogue offers a range of perspectives on urgent issues around gender, sexuality and labour in the digital age.

This book orbits “Second Sex War”, a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen addressing political and ethical questions arising from the use of digital bodies in contemporary visual culture and the means of production and distribution for these commodities. Realising that the same avatars are used across the pornographic, gaming and cultural industries, she investigates the working conditions and relationships that structure these fields. Through numerous essays and conversations, Second Sex War, the book, emphasises her collaborations with various practitioners (animators, musicians, writers) and the way they have inflected her practice. Media theorist Helen Hester (author of the Xenofeminist manifesto) reflects on the limitations of the porn industry and the use of female avatars. Artists collective Radclyffe Hall talks to photographer Phyllis Christopher about early lesbian erotica magazine in the 1980s. Linda Stupart compiles quotes by Sara Ahmed, Kathy Acker and Ursula K. Le Guin to consider what is radical sex today.  Artist Hannah Black's contribution, which opens the publication, reads like a manifesto for artists being crushed under the weight of current political circumstances. 

Edited by Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Robert Leckie.

Texts by Robert Leckie, Hannah Black, Helen Hester, Phyllis Christopher & Radclyffe Hall, Linda Stupart, Josefine Wikström. Entretiens with Helena Vilalta, James B Stringer, Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) by Sidsel Meineche Hansen.

Eight or more performers and instructors. Score.

The radical, joyful follow-up to the Goldsmiths Prize-winning Sterling Karat Gold.

This is the story of Corey Fah, a writer on the cusp of a windfall, courtesy of the Social Evils prize committee, for whom the actual gong - and with it the prize money - remains tantalizingly out of reach.

Neon beige, with UFO-like qualities, the elusive trophy leads Corey, with partner Drew and surprise eight-legged companion Bambi Pavok, on a spectacular detour through their childhood in the Forest - via an unlikely stint on reality TV. Navigating those twin horrors, through wormholes and time loops, Corey learns - the hard way - the difference between a prize and a gift.

Both radiant and revolutionary, Isabel Waidner's fiction gleefully takes a hammer to false binaries, boundaries and borders, turning walls into bridges and words into wings. Fierce, fluid and funny, they free us to imagine another way of being.

This is a novel about coming into one's own, the labour of love, the tendency of history to repeat itself and the pitfalls of social mobility. It's about watching TV with your lover.

What are our politics of refusal? Sleep? Catatonia? Hedonism? Transgression even? #hustle? 

[Can refusal can be performed as resistance and not operate as preemptively fucked. . .]

Arcadia Missa Publications; Rózsa Farkas, Holly Childs, Leila Kozma, Tom Clark (eds)

Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.  

A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki's stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.

Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.

Saidiya Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is a scholar of African American literature and cultural history.

Preface by Maboula Soumahoro.

Translated from the English (American) by Maboula Soumahoro (original title: Lose Your Mother. A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

M was exasperated by her friend's frivolous attitude toward the tragedy of losing a role. She was not trained to read the potential in R's wild imagination. Was it a commitment to realism, trained by the ideological morality of activism, that made her unresposive to the fantasy genre and vigilante characters? R's instinct was to court the unfamiliar, whereas M's training was to engage with criticality. Both these attributes could have interfaced in interesting and colourful ways, with sparks and currents, if and only if the social conditions of the time had been conducive to the arrival of a vigilante.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator and author based in Mumbai and Berlin. She has been the executive director of Majlis Culture, a centre for rights discourse and art initiatives in Mumbai, 1998-2016; and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, 2018-2021. Her areas of interest are documentary practices, urban cultures, migration movements, transient identities, and lived-in hybridity.

Rory Pilgrim presents their first catalogue, bringing together their multifaceted practice as a filmmaker, composer, and more. Sharing work produced since 2008, this lovingly made book designed by Modern Activity includes sketchbooks, scores, song lyrics, and poetry. It is published on the occasion of the exhibitions Where The Tide Takes Us, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, and Radio Ballads, Serpentine Gallery, London.

Rory Pilgrim (born 1988 in Bristol) works in a wide range of media including songwriting, composing music, film, music video, text, drawing and live performances. Centred on emancipatory concerns, Pilgrim aims to challenge the nature of how we come together, speak, listen and strive for social change through sharing and voicing personal experience. Strongly influenced by the origins of activist, feminist and socially engaged art, Pilgrim works with others through a different methods of dialogue, collaboration and workshops. In an age of increasing technological interaction, Rory Pilgrim's work creates connections between activism, spirituality, music and how we form community locally and globally from both beyond and behind our screens.

Edited by Rory Pilgrim, Jule Hillgärtner, Nele Kaczmarek, Zsa-Zsa Eyck, Matthew Appleton.

Texts by Jerry Brady, Jule Hillgärtner, Nele Kaczmarek, Human Poney, Louwrien Wijers.

In this anthology of contemporary eco-literature, the editors have gathered an ensemble of a hundred emerging, mid-career, and established Indigenous writers from Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and the global Pacific diaspora. This book itself is an ecological form with rhizomatic roots and blossoming branches. Within these pages, the reader will encounter a wild garden of genres, including poetry, chant, short fiction, novel excerpts, creative nonfiction, visual texts, and even a dramatic play—all written in multilingual offerings of English, Pacific languages, pidgin, and translation.

Seven main themes emerge: "Creation Stories and Genealogies," "Ocean and Waterscapes," "Land and Islands," "Flowers, Plants, and Trees," "Animals and More-than-Human Species," "Climate Change," and "Environmental Justice." This aesthetic diversity embodies the beautiful bio-diversity of the Pacific itself.

Telling Invents Told is the first collection of writings by artist and filmmaker Lis Rhodes.

It includes the influential essay Whose History? alongside texts from works such as Light Reading, Pictures on Pink Paper and A Cold Draft, together with new and previously unpublished materials. Since the 1970s, Rhodes has been making radical and experimental work that challenges hegemonic narratives and the power structures of language. Her writing addresses urgent political issues – from the refugee crisis to workers’ rights, police brutality, racial discrimination and homelessness – as well as film history and theory, from a feminist perspective.

An important figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, Rhodes was also a founding member of Circles, the first British distributor of film, video and performance by women artists.

Fiercely devoted to the margins of life in the generation after the devastating first wave of the AIDS epidemic, this cathartic collection of poems explores illness, travel, contagion, the meaning of home, identity, tainted purity, and the bits of life that contain them and hold them together in spite of the harsh exigency of daily life. In more than 40 pieces, Chin fearlessly delivers everything from his first exposure to science (Magnified) to a mail order fantasy experience (I Buy Sea Monkeys); from backroads travel in Asia (Little Everest in Your Palm) to the plight of immigrants in America (The Men's Restroom at the INS Building). Chin's brutal honesty and sharp humor frame a profound and original collection.

Justin Chin is the author of two collections of poetry, Harmless Medicine and Bite Hard (Manic D Press), and two collections of essays, Burden of Ashes (Alyson Press) and Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes and Pranks (St. Martin's Press). In the 1990's, as a performance artist, he created several performance works that were presented nationally and abroad.