Books

This first monograph includes all of Van der Stokker's murals and most of her drawings.

In an interview in this collection of Van der Stokker's wall paintings and drawings, John Waters says, 'Millions of teenage girls have drawings that are good, but no one ever tells them that they are'. Van der Stokker celebrates teenage girlishness, and has since 1983 found both immense support and immense rejection within the art world community. Includes interviews with Van der Stokker and a complete presentation of her works in situ, printed on full-page spreads on quality mat paper.

Dutch-born van der Stokker (1954, Hertogenbosch), active artist-gallery owner on the East Side of New York in the 80's, now lives between Amsterdam and New York. She developed pictorial murals with happy candy-coated slogans that incited acid sarcasm from her contemporaries.

Texts by Anne Pontégnie, Éric Troncy, John Waters/Charles Esche, Mirjam Westen, Amy Kellner.

Exhibiting for Multiple Senses looks into artistic and curatorial research practices that emphasize the multisensory character of the human body in the encounter with artworks. For some time now, numerous contemporary artists and curators have moved beyond the primacy of the visual in the experience of art exhibitions. The book discusses this shift by bringing together experimental exhibition-making, curatorial theory, art, design, and museum research, disability activism and crip theory. Its intent is to demonstrate resonances between curatorial theory and practice and between disability and crip art activism. While the latter is still often regarded as relevant for only small portions of visibly disabled people, in recent years neurodiversity and invisible disabilities have proven to be relevant for the sensory experiences of much larger parts of exhibition audiences.

Exhibiting for Multiple Senses shares famous and lesser-known examples of experimental exhibitions as well as of artistic practices linked to exhibitions. By mobilizing the senses of touch, smell, taste, and hearing, as well as applications of multimodal technologies and insights from neuroscience, these examples all explore abilities and possibilities of the complex and diverse sensory apparatus that is the human body.

Contributors: David Bobier, Luca M. Damiani, Stephanie Farmer & Hettie James, Eva Fotiadi, David Gissen & Georgina Kleege, Adi Hollander, Lilian Korner, Elke Krasny, Renata Pękowska, Caro Verbeek

One Big Bang brings together 78 charcoal and pastel drawings from Adel Abdessemed's recent series Nature Morte and Politics of Drawing, where everyday objects, animals, and flowers are subtly charged with tension. Through these works, Abdessemed explores the intersections of beauty, fragility, and unrest. With texts by Hélène Cixous and David Elliott, One Big Bang offers a thoughtful entry into an artist's visual language shaped by memory, myth, and political urgency.

Published following the eponymous exhibition at Projeckt Brussels in 2024.

Adel Abdessemed (born 1971 in Constantine, Algeria, lives and works in Paris and Berlin) deconstructs identity codes, tackling head-on the tensions that permeate our society. His works, with their typical simplicity—sculptural installations, drawings, photographs, videos and performances—echo precise facts and familiar situations, but go beyond narrative commentary and militant criticism. Adel Abdessemed questions, among other things, the social and economic status of the artist in a system where his foothold is slight, by shrewdly keeping a distance in a gesture of subversive and committed resignation.

Abdessemed refuses to be limited to a single ideology. In his early works he passionately tackled religious, sexual, and taboos subjects and his later exhibitions have often focused on the theme of global violence. In an interview with Elisabeth Lebovici he stated, "I do not live between two cultures. I am not a postcolonial artist. I am not working on the scar and am not mending anything. I am just a detector … In the public sphere, I use passion and rage. Nothing else. I don't do illusions."

Sometimes reduced to a simple word, as in "Mohammedkarlpolpot" (1999), a condensation of names evoking totalitarism and religion, and sometimes complex and monumental installations such as "Habibi" (2004), a suspended skeleton of 17 meters propelled by a jet engine, Abdessemed's practice belongs to a new generation of artists who appeared recently on the French art scene, looking to offer another perspective on culture and identity.

The Chroma Series lists elements of reality and systematically changes their color to evoke monochrome universes. The resulting poems may be conceived as mental films where quick-change art coexists with nonsense and politics.

Published in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, NYC, this book beautifully gathers pictures of the latest series of paintings by Amy Sillman – and, yeah, reproductions of the full series of 74 amazing works on paper, UGH for 2023 – “Torsos” and “Words” – where marks become membres become shapes become letters become layers bodies become shades – a diagram of time, “a broader contemplation of transformation and temporal fluidity”! 

With an essay by Felix Bernstein titled, “AMY SILLMAN’S DIALECTICAL JACULATIONS”

Four zines, documenting and continuing a series of four exhibitions that took place last summer, also known as the summer of 2021 at Klosterruine Berlin. Digging up what’s always already left behind, this series reframes the exhibition as an excavation site and engages archeology as a speculative and aesthetic procedure. A map, a notebook, a calendar and a dream diary, these four zines allow you to become your own archeologist.

Texts: Simone Fattal, Bassem Saad, Anna M. Szaflarski, Christopher Weickenmeier
Designer: Studio Manuel Raeder

A pathbreaking new volume of poems from Fred Moten, All That Beauty combine's Moten's penchant for lyrical prosody, radical thought, and African American theory to produce writing unlike any other poetry in the world: "What is it to reside without settling? Is that is or is that ain't like being stuck in sweetness, held in life?"

"The line between Fred Moten’s theory and poetry is increasingly cloudy; the distinction almost seems (but isn’t quite) irrelevant. In All That Beauty, his new poetry collection, the poems come closer than ever before to the capacious, disorienting density of his prose writing: not just for their hairpin turns of speculative reasoning, or even their gleeful embrace of specialized academic terminology, but because they are strewn with names, citations and allusions that situate the text in a range of discourses – from Black studies to sound studies to the philosophy of maths." —Steven Zultanski

(Published 2019.)

A collection exploring the intersections of gender and religion in post-secular knowledge production and visual culture.

Over the last three decades, religious practices and belongings have gained increased visibility across the globe, turning secularity and its relationship with religion into subjects of intense interdisciplinary and international debate. Previously marginalized in gender studies, the secular and the religious now attract growing interest in academic and activist feminism, prompting a critical reflection on secularity's emancipatory potential. This publication aims to foster this interest by providing a platform for interdisciplinary and transregional discussions on the complex dynamics of secularity, religiosity, and gender, as well as new approaches to explore these relationships.
 The contributions examine the entanglements and boundaries of religions and secularities in everyday life, art, culture, and knowledge production. By presenting relevant case studies, this book underscores an understanding of religion as both a category of knowledge and a marker of identity.

“Today is the day with the letter,” Celan writes to Bachmann on October 30, 1957. Theadora Walsh’s essay-poem, The Almond concerns, for I hesitate to write “about” or “is in relation to”, the love between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Two Austrian writers flung across Europe by the atrocities of the Holocaust, excavating the narrows of a language not theirs, or taken from them. An almond is the closest two people can be, and becomes the binding structural conceit of the book, two segments reaching across the blank page to each other, across history, time and language.

A “witty, often-chilling, compulsively readable” (Vogue) horror debut following a woman who seeks refuge at an all-trans girl commune only to discover that demons haunt her fellow comrades—and she’s their next prey!

Herculine’s narrator has demons. Sure, her life includes several hallmarks of the typical trans girl sob story—conversion therapy, a string of shitty low-paying jobs, and even shittier exes—but she also regularly debates sleep paralysis demons that turn to mist soon after she wakes and carries vials of holy oil in her purse. Nothing, though, prepares her for the new malevolent force stalking her through the streets of New York City, more powerful than any she’s ever encountered. Desperate to escape this ancient evil, she flees to rural Indiana, where her ex-girlfriend started an all-trans girl commune in the middle of the woods.

The secluded camp, named after 19th-century intersex memoirist Herculine Barbin, is a scrappy operation, but the shared sense of community among the girls is a welcome balm to the narrator’s growing isolation and paranoia. Still, something isn’t quite right at Herculine. Girls stop talking as soon as she enters the room, everyone seems to share a common secret, and the books lining the walls of the library harbor strange cryptograms. Soon what once looked like an escape becomes a trap all its own. 

While trying to untangle the commune’s many mysteries, the narrator contends with disemboweled pigs, cultlike psychosexual rituals, and the horrors of communal breakfast. And before long, she discovers that her demons have followed her. And this time, they won’t be letting her go.

To be erotic is to be alive. In this collection of erotic short stories, desire and imagination meet in stairwells, apartments, bars and glances that linger just a little longer. Commissioned for and first published in Extra Extra magazine, these unique stories range from vibrant encounters of mere minutes to hours of simmering tension.

Carefully curated and unapologetic in its imagination, it’s an invitation into a literary space shaped by lust and longing.

One Hundred and six erotic short stories contains erotic stories by Obe Alkema, Karin Amatmoekrim, Mischa Andriessen, Sarah Arnolds, Simone Atangana Bekono, Gerbrand Bakker, Maria Barnas, Leonieke Baerwaldt, Persis Bekkering, Abdelkader Benali, Hannah van Binsbergen, Marion Bloem, Fiep van Bodegom, Daan Borrel, Charlotte van den Broeck, Saskia de Coster, Eelco Couvreur, Daniël Dee, Nikki Dekker, Maxime Garcia Diaz, Don Duyns, Rob van Essen, Edwin Fagel, Mira Feticu, Moya De Feyter, Andy Fierens, Gamal Fouad, Johan Fretz, Steff Geelen, Maureen Ghazal, Arnon Grunberg, Esha Guy Hadjadj, Thomas Heerma van Voss, Mariken Heitman, Tom Hofland, Philip Huff, Auke Hulst, Nicole Kaandorp, Asha Karami, Maite Karssenberg, Mensje van Keulen, Emy Koopman, Falun Ellie Koos, Willemijn Kranendonk, Selin Kuşçu, Rachida Lamrabet, Jordi Lammers, Wietske Leenders, Sandro van der Leeuw, Sun Li, Gilles van der Loo, Hannah Chris Lomans, Alma Mathijsen, Kiriko Mechanicus, Jens Meijen, Lars Meijer, Carmien Michels, Kaweh Modiri, Roelof ten Napel, Richard de Nooy, Joost Oomen, Jamal Ouariachi, Iduna Paalman, Gustaaf Peek, Elvis Peeters, Froukje van der Ploeg, Marja Pruis, Julius Reynders, Hannah Roels, Astrid H. Roemer, Martin Rombouts, Daniël Rovers, Alfred Schaffer, Marijke Schermer, Koen Sels, Vamba Sherif, Frank Siera, Louise Souvagie, Yentl van Stokkum, Florence Tonk, Elfie Tromp, Joost Vandecasteele, Dominique van Varsseveld, Annelies Verbeke, Peter Verhelst, Wytske Versteeg, Daniël Vis, Dirk Vis, Sven Vitse, Maria Vlaar, Marwin Vos, Nadia de Vries, Niña Weijers, Han van Wieringen, Romy Day Winkel, Maartje Wortel, Pete Wu, Kira Wuck, Mia You, and Ivo Victoria

We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.

With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.

'Femme' describes a constellation of queer, gendered expressions that uproot expectations of what it means to be feminine. Building upon experiences of transformation, belonging and harm, this book is a transfeminist call for collective liberation.

Trans Femme Futures envisions the future through everyday actions that revolutionise our lives. Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift discuss struggles around trans healthcare, the need for collectives over institutions, the importance of mutual care, and transfeminism as abolition.

The authors show how social change can be achieved through transformative practices that allow queer life to thrive in a time of climate, health, political and economic crises.

'A brilliant, useful, and immensely moving book that deals a critical blow to the epistemic austerity of our times' - Jordy Rosenberg

Teline Trần's Ad Học traverses the improvisational structures that shape social life in order to reflect their valences as both insufficient and abundant. In their first poetry chapbook, Trần locates those junctures with bittersweet pleasure and biting critique and asks how to sustain both at once. This is, Trần shows us, the work of living, against and within the ongoing attrition and amnesia at scales historical and governmental, interpersonal, familial, and social. Ad Học asks the reader to turn inwards, towards a personal politic, to self-revolution, in order to seek horizons dreamier, queerer, and hopefully insurgent.

Teline Trần is a writer from Orange, California or Gabrieleño/Tongva land. They write about home and interstitial faith via several mediums such as fiction, poetry, film, and ultimately, the browser. Teline works as the Membership and Community Engagement Coordinator at Wendy’s Subway, where they were a Fellow in 2020. They also work as the Development Coordinator at Mekong NYC, a Southeast Asian grassroots organization in the Bronx. They hold a degree in Comparative Literature from Reed College.

Obsessing on the relationship between creation and absence, Argentine poet Liliana Ponce presents an unsettling meditation on body, language, and self. For the first time in English, this edition brings together Ponce’s serial poems from the closing years of the twentieth century, the widely anthologized Theory of the Voice and Dream and Fudekara, a shorter sequence written in response to a Japanese calligraphy course. In these major works, Ponce questions the nature of writing itself, of how to write when to write today is an emptiness, or when mouth and voice cannot find each other. Breaking with Argentine poetic conventions, Ponce charts a new model for poesis—oneiric, embodied, and urgent. As she says, I write so I don’t have to speak, so I don’t have to watch.

It’s fall (or autumn) 2018. The Trump administration wants to fortify the United States-Mexico border, Robert ‘Beto’ O'Rourke is running for Senate, and British grifter Nicki Smith has just secured a “low-paid glamour job” at the University of Texas’ Jacques Lacan Foundation. In between sleeping with the air-conditioning repair guy (or man) and watching Kate Moss make-up commercials (or advertisements) Nicki completes the first ever American-English translation of Lacan’s newly discovered and highly controversial notebook – without knowing any French.

An Anglo-American comedy of manners about identity and class The Jacques Lacan Foundation reveals—and revels in—the numerous pretensions that surround academia and authorship, and the institutions that foster them.

In a reality in which the boundaries between cinema, art, installation and multimedia experimentation seem to be increasingly blurred, History of a Tree by Flatform is a project that sets out to radically alter the idea of the portrait in western art. 

A non-human living organism – the Oak of the Hundred Knights of Tricase, the oldest Vallonea oak in Europe at the age of 900 years – and the territory in which it has stood for centuries become the subject: through a film and a robotized video installation, statements become a portrait, and are transformed into a work of art. 

The book retraces the genesis, development and implementation of this original idea, providing a visual score, the film in 80 images, dialogues in ten languages, the contributions of a tree searcher, an art historian and two philosophers, as well as a series of in-depth essays drawing on the fields of science, history, anthropology, music and linguistics. 

Dictee is the best-known work of the multidisciplinary Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. This restored edition features the original cover and high-quality reproductions of the interior layout as Cha intended them. Produced in partnership with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, this version of Dictee faithfully renders the book as an art object in its authentic form.

A formative text of modern Asian American literature, Dictee is a dynamic autobiography that tells the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles),and Cha herself. Cha's work manifests in nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Deploying a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry, Cha links these women's stories to explore the trauma of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory it causes. The result is an enduringly powerful, beautiful, unparalleled work.

Black Bedouin, by Mohammed Zenia and Tenaya Nasser is a book of the IMMEDIATE — written immediately (in the span of five days, very literally at the printing press at 1080PRESS) in response to the current genocide against, and in solidarity with, the people of Sudan and in the context of immediate echoes in Palestine, Congo, Pakistan, and more — and throughout it all imbued with the immediacy that the global situation demands of us and our moral consciences. Black Bedouin rings in the creative immediacy of New York School all-night-writing-to-mimeograph-next-day with the political immediacy of a this-is-happening-right-now Crass single or Etel Adnan's incomparable (but here spiritually correlated) The Arab Apocalypse. In other words, Black Bedouin hits every star in a very cool and specific constellation. — Dave Morse

Le numéro 1 de la revue de cinéma Fidback éditée par le FIDMarseille, avec un retour sur la 35e édition du festival, un regard rétrospectif sur des films qui ont fait l'actualité mondiale du cinéma en 2024, une carte blanche à Clara Schulmann, et un portrait de l'artiste et cinéaste Declan Clarke par Alice Leroy.

Retour sur six films issus de la sélection officielle du FID, par des auteurs, critiques et écrivains de langues française et étrangères. Les textes critiques sont accompagnés d'entretiens, de documents ou de matériaux inédits. De Amsevrid, premier film magistral du cinéaste algérien Tahar Kessi, jusqu'au Tríptico de Mondongo du maestro argentin Mariano Llinás, ce bouquet de films est un condensé de l'édition 2024 du festival – une poignée de films parmi tous ceux qui auraient mérité le retour.

Le choix des huit films sur lesquels nous avons invité des auteurs et autrices à poser leur regard est en soi un geste critique. Il nous a semblé que les derniers films d'Albert Serra, Miguel Gomes, Alain Guiraudie, Jia Zhangke et Victor Iriarte méritaient plus que d'autres l'inscription dans le temps long de la revue. Films restaurés, écrits édités, rétrospective et exposition au Jeu de Paume : Chantal Akerman fut pour beaucoup, cette année, une révélation. Naked Acts, le film ressuscité de Bridgett Davis, aura marqué ceux qui ont eu la chance de le voir.

Pour sa carte blanche, Clara Schulmann a choisi le film Lucciole (2021), de Pauline Curnier Jardin. Mais son texte porte au-delà de l'œuvre, il déplace le geste critique en un récit spéculatif sur la manière dont une vie et un travail se tissent sur une trame faite de lieux, d'histoires, de personnes.

Alice Leroy est la première à faire le portrait de l'artiste et cinéaste irlandais et berlinois Declan Clarke : à prendre la mesure, à tracer les perspectives d'une œuvre majeure, bien qu'encore méconnue, du cinéma d'aujourd'hui.

Fidback est une revue de cinéma éditée par le FIDMarseille. Chaque année, elle dessine une image-constellation du cinéma aimé et défendu par le festival.

Written according to its own dictum, "language is the universal inebriant," these epistolary essays, personal narratives, meditations on avant-garde writers, and unorthodox forays into the "narco-imaginary"—the habits and conventions surrounding literary and cultural representations of drug use—attend to the residue of transient impressions that remain, long after the delirium of creative activity subsides.

Ramsey Scott teaches at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His essays, poems, and fiction have appeared in various print and online publications, including the Southwest Review, the Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, Shampoo, Tarpaulin Sky, Confrontation, and Mirage #4/Period(ical). The Narco-Imaginary is his first book.

Eighty-page programme book score, and libretto, for performances by Indigenous musicians of in memoriam…Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau and Robert Ashley’s in memoriam... Curated and edited by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective.

[from back cover] …in memoriam Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau adds a new score and production by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman to a suite of four early scores by the American composer Robert Ashley. The fifth score honours the lives of Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau, three Indigenous women from territory at the turn of the Century as it became the province of Alberta. This significant addition continues Ashley’s project investigating the connections between musical forms and constructs of historicization, opening a conversation regarding whom and how we memorialize individuals and inscribe their legacies.

[from essay by Candice Hopkins] What histories are remembered and who is doing the remembering? What form do these rememberings take? It is not as simple as taking down one monument and replacing it with another. We need to ask more questions, take note of the voids that stand in for the past, and actively make way for other voices, particularly those are trapped under the ‘sea ice of English’. “Listen for sounds”, writes the Tlingit poet and anthropologist Nora Marks Dauenhauer, “They are as important as voices. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen.”

Etel Adnan's novel Paris, When It's Naked amazes our retinas, ears, lips, fingertips, and noses with sensing, talking, and envisioning the city of Baudelaire and Delacroix, Mallarme and Picasso, Sartre and Djuna Barnes, Miller and Nin, Vietnamese and African refugees, revolutions and Bohemia.

This tale of the Creative Now is told through the fine-tuned sensibility of Etel Adnan, the expatriate poet-painter who knew the French Capital as wholly as she did Beirut and San Francisco, her other homes. She is also the author of Sitt Marie-Rose, an underground novel of the Lebanese Civil War, and many books of poetry. This work is a philosophically charged lyric in prose. The elan vital of every word evokes the eternal present of this wise woman. A highly personal, life-enhancing masterpiece in a deathly age of impersonality. An indespensable book by an indispensable writer. (Words by Morgan Gibson)

Lyrical drifts warped by syntax into blizzarding softness; odes to beauty, meaning, and inexperience splintered by history and grammar. An aqueous surface marbled with the lightest possible touch, lost footings arrested by change’s near-griplessness. 

None of this matters. It’s only supposed
to save you from yourself. None of this
matters, when I try to take it out of me into
the world, which to find I can praise
                                                          I go out to

Composed across two winters between late 2022 and early 2024. Contains 43 poems.

“This luscious and needle sharp collection is a real feat of the textual imagination, wow.”   —Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold, no. 34