Books

Human history is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes all fall into this category. 

From the myths of antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, The Gender of Sound charts the gendering of sound in Western culture. Carson invites us to listen again, and in doing so to reimagine our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood.

Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.

Cow time meets clerical time meets poet time in Stacy Szymaszek’s gently thrilling Essay. These luminous poem-essays flow with the churning propulsion of dailiness: a roving record of the poet’s ruminations alongside the many cows and calves she befriends. Seeking to honor life beyond usefulness, Szymaszek has given us a large-hearted, gorgeous, and wholly riveting meditation on aging queer life and interspecies friendship on the farm and under capitalism. In Essay, the poet notices, marvels, aches, searches, and wants more for all of us. — Megan Milks

Stacy Szymaszek has long been a poet attentive to work, and this attention is of course animated by place – whether the urban quotidian and attendant human dramas of previous books, or her present workplace on a dairy farm in upstate New York. In Essay’s conversational, immediate, vulnerable, affecting and affected poems, Szymaszek turns to cows and to the cow-like exhaustion of humans who labor in service of capital’s voracity. Essay is bent to the workday but not beaten down by it. We are offered a visionary form, boldly attendant to the present, to prolong survival without denying death.“The heart of the matter is to be able to keep / loving in the face of cow-sorrow unspeakable brevity / unpredictability and contradictions.” In Essay, Szymaszek has built a bed of hay where we can break from our labors and daydream about the “livelihood where we can all work / a single day and have enough for the year and the work / of the cows can be ended.” — Alli Warren

Collected writings, artworks and manifestos outlining the developments in Indigenous cinema and its most adventurous practitioners. 

Founded in 2018, COUSIN Collective is dedicated to promoting Indigenous artists working with the moving image. Temporal Territories is the collective's critical anthology on Indigenous experimental cinema, bringing together new works, reprints of key writings, theoretical interventions, artist portfolios, intergenerational dialogues and manifestos. With topics ranging from science fiction to found-footage filmmaking to the strange case of the DeMille Indians, the volume surveys a varied and vital body of work, and suggests new forms still to come.

As COUSIN writes in their introduction, "We hope this collection can be something like a celebration, a point along your path that fosters conversations and connections. ...There are no rules to this thing, and you are not alone."

Contributors include: Raven Chacon, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Lou Cornum, Grace Dillon, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Miguel Hilari, Sky Hopinka, Kite, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Pedro Neves Marques, Fox Maxy, Michael Metzger, Jas M. Morgan, Caroline Monnet, Shelley Niro, Adam Piron, Tiare Ribeaux, Diana Flores Ruíz, Walter Scott, Girish Shambu, Paul Chaat Smith, Adam Spry, Elizabeth Weatherford.

This book was published in conjunction with COUSIN Collective.

An artist's book presenting a photographic study of onions.

On Onions is a photographic study of onions by artist Elad Lassry (born 1977). Characteristically highlighting the spectrum of hues and shapes for the vegetable, Lassry's selected taxonomy includes sections on red, yellow and white onions, each of which possesses its own distinct taste and benefits. On Onions is Lassry's first artist's book, and the work will exist only in book form; it is at once wry, refreshing and disorienting in its biology workbook style, which makes fruitful use of "the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph" (as the artist has described his practice in general).

Composed by the artist and arranged by Stuart Bailey, the book includes an essay written by Angie Keefer about the effects of sliced onions on human tear ducts.

In a first-time English language translation by Cristina Viti to mark the poet’s centenary, Tenement Press will publish Pier Paolo Pasolini’s groundbreaking, filmic work of prose and verse, La rabbia / Anger.

Why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war? In order to answer this question I have written La rabbia, not following a chronological or perhaps even a logical thread, but only my political reasons and my poetic sense. - Pier Paolo Pasolini

Written in response to producer Gastone Ferranti’s request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini’s lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John XXIII; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we’ve a panoply of photorealist intimations of Pasolini’s ‘poetic sense.’ The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, and as the poet’s line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints.

In Viti’s translation, the weave of prose and poetry that forms La rabbia portrays the vitality of Pasolini’s work in its capacity to speak to both the specifics of his contexts, the character of our own present tense, and the ironic fact of a life lived against the gulf of discontent in its myriad forms. Here, we’ve a startling confrontation of a revolutionary struggle in stasis set in lines that crystallise a rallying call against blindness. ‘I’ll not have peace, not ever,’ he writes. A lucid acceptance of the poet’s restlessness, and a marker for Pasolini’s commitment to a solidarity with the oppressed that we find reaffirmed on every page, in La rabbia the poet charts how ‘the powerful world of capital takes an abstract painting as its brash banner’ in this unravelling of ‘crisis in the world.’

The Stone Door is a surrealist allegory intertwining myth, mysticism, and romance. Written by Leonora Carrington after World War II, the novel follows a woman's symbolic journey through esoteric teachings, ancient lands, and dreamlike visions in pursuit of spiritual awakening and the unification of male and female forces. Both a metaphysical adventure and a tribute to Carrington's personal love story, it offers a visionary exploration of transformation and liberation.

Eight or more performers and instructors. Score.

The Poeticians is a publication of the performance of the collection of clothes and poetry called Writing Wounds To Heal by Swedish choreographer Pontus Pettersson. Made in velvet silk with the poetry burned out in the fabric exposing the texts, the poetry exposes both itself and the skin of the performer. Throughout the durational piece the performers are doing Pontus Petterssons cat practice and is one of the main ingredients of the project as well as the clothes/poems. The Poeticans is also a choreo-curational event that hosts different choreographic proposals inside of it. It is seen as module or installation where pieces, objects, performers can be inserted rather than a performance that executes and performs the same over and over. It was created as an extension of Pontus interest in poetry and choreography where hospitality and proximity is seen as key concepts in the development and execution of the event.

This tale about seduction, obsession, family, and the confines of capitalism is one of director Pier Paolo Pasolini's most fascinating creations, based on his transcendent film of the same name.

Theorem is the most enigmatic of Pier Paolo Pasolini's four novels. The book started as a poem and took shape both as a work of fiction and a film, also called Theorem, released the same year. In short prose chapters interspersed with stark passages of poetry, Pasolini tells a story of transfiguration and trauma.

To the suburban mansion of a prosperous Milanese businessman comes a mysterious and beautiful young man who invites himself to stay. From the beginning he exercises a strange fascination on the inhabitants of the house, and soon everyone, from the busy father to the frustrated mother, from the yearning daughter to the weak-willed son to the housemaid from the country, has fallen in love with him. Then, as mysteriously as he appeared, the infatuating young man departs. How will these people he has touched so deeply do without him? Is there a passage out of the spiritual desert of modern capitalism into a new awakening, both of the senses and of the soul? Only questions remain at the end of a book that is at once a bedroom comedy, a political novel, and a religious parable.

A manifesto against the current moralizing trend in the arts.

Should art be determined by political ideals? In recent decades art institutions have sought to embody liberal values of universal equality and social justice. This move toward greater inclusivity has borne witness to a countervailing trend: artworks are increasingly scrutinized for their political implications, and artists must take care not to transgress particular moral fault lines.

Examining contemporary exhibitions as well as works of art and film, and the broader cultural reactions to them, Rosanna McLaughlin investigates the consequences of this moralizing approach to creative work. She invites us to rethink the connection between political values and art—and to ask whether a relationship between them should exist at all. In arguing against morality in the arts, McLaughlin lays the groundwork for a more expansive concept of difference in twenty-first-century art making.

"What if ambivalences were seen as productive, and not a danger to erase? Would we not begin to know ourselves better? What is it that we are so afraid of finding out? Art is a testing ground for ideas, a means of reaching. What a shame, if we use the space it offers to destroy it entirely."

Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer based in East Sussex and the author of Double-Tracking: Studies in Duplicity (2019) and Sinkhole (2023). Her writing on art and culture has featured in ArtReview, Frieze, Granta, The Guardian, and The White Review, among other publications. Between 2021 and 2023 she was co-editor of The White Review.

Toby Altman’s Discipline Park documents the demolition of Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, a landmark of architectural brutalism designed by Bertrand Goldberg in the 1970s. Altman was born in the building, and years later, was employed by Northwestern University when they tore it down. His personal proximity to the site leads to a wider critical evaluation of the cruelty of a neoliberalism that asks us to draw sustenance from the very institutions that poison and erase our bodies, habitats, and histories. But, as it indicts the present and its claustrophobic, ruinous politics, Discipline Park also recovers or reinvents utopian vistas through an extended engagement with Goldberg's architectural practices.

Violet and Rainer, over the course of a long phone call, become hosts of an imaginary literary summit where attendees spar over casualwear, animal metaphors, fascist art, bodily autonomy, and other problems of the everyday. A collaborative work of friendship as much as the occasion for philosophical scholarship, where one can find the answers to burning questions like: What makes sex good? What constitutes a good reason to dislike someone? What does my nipple piercing mean for your nipples? And how have you been, lately?

D'Alexandrine à Zizanie, 101 définitions mythologiques, topographiques, et poétiques, inventées par Helena de Laurens, Clara Pacotte & Esmé Planchon, inspirées par le Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes de Monique Wittig & Sande Zeig, publié en 1976.

An anthology of occult resistance: unpredictable and fascinating, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music.

The End Times are here. The Digital Middle Ages approaches, the plague reaps its deadly harvest, climate apocalypse is around the corner, and fanaticism, fascism, and madness are rampant. The idea that we might gain the upper hand over the dark abyss into which the planet is tumbling is a form of magical thinking, laboring under the delusion that we can subdue eternity with relentless bloodlust, brutish exploitation, abuse of power, and violence. Revolutionary Demonology responds to this ritual of control, typical of what esoteric tradition calls the “Dogma of the Right Hand,” by reactivating the occult forces of a Left Hand Path that strives for the entropic disintegration of all creation, so as to make peace with the darkness and nourish the Great Beast that will finally break the seals of Cosmic Love.

Unpredictable and fascinating, genuinely bizarre, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music alike with its fevered touch, this “anthology of occult resistance” collects together the communiqués of an arcane group who are already being hailed as the first morbid blossoming of “Italian Weird Theory”: a rogue contingent of theorists, witches, and sorcerers who heretically remix gothic accelerationism with satanic occultism and insurrectional necromancy.

Design Fiction is a method to vividly render tangible futures by creating material artifacts that represent the implications of change. Design Fiction is as much a mindset as it is a methodology whereby foresight, research, expectations, strategic direction, and planning can be cohered into representational ‘artifacts from possible futures.’from possible futures. Design fiction opens up new conversations and considerations whilst augmenting existing, well-trodden research and foresight practices.

Over fifteen years in the making, this book explores the origins of design fiction, and details the practical approach to assessing the consequences of decision making by creating tangible artifacts from possible futures. Design fiction opens up new conversations and considerations whilst augmenting existing, well-trodden research and foresight practices. The writers of this book have used design fiction approaches with clients such as Apple, Warner Bros, IKEA, Edelman, Dubai Museum of the Future, Google and Facebook, and they aim to bring these techniques to a wider audience through the publication of this book.

Written by Julian Bleecker, Nick Foster, Fabien Girardin and Nicolas Nova in collaboration with Patrick Pittman and Chris Frey of No Media Co. Designed by Chris Lange

Here the mirror image of the almost hallucinatory, heart-rending loss of the familiar is literary defamiliarization. Arsanios both mourns and blasts apart the notion of the mother tongue, reminding us that for each “mother tongue” at least another tongue is silenced. Desire propels her genre-defying writing, which grief notwithstanding still manages to tongue languages, and that is her genius. — Mónica de la Torre

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, and Guernica, among others. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace fellow, and an ART OMI resident in fall 2017. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday night reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017–19.

Associated with key 1960s avant garde figures such as Ginsberg, Burroughs, Rauschenberg, and Johns, John Giorno was an early pioneer of multimedia poetry through Giorno Poetry Systems, which also distributed a who’s who of the American underground from Patti Smith to Sonic Youth. Giorno’s use of transgressive material and in-your-face, amplified delivery was also a key influence on punk/new wave pioneers such as Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, and Black Flag. Not just a poet but a sexual, spiritual, and political radical, Giorno helped pioneer the open celebration of queer sexuality in poetry in the 1960s.

Subduing Demons in America offers the best of Giorno’s revolutionary poetry, from his striking Pop Art–influenced poems of the 1960s to the psychedelic, echo-laden, multitracked cut-ups of the 1970s with their explosive configurations of queer sex, spiritual practice, and the bohemian Good Life. Also here are the pared-down punk/hip-hop performance poems that Giorno performed in the 1980s.

First monograph devoted to the playful, explosive and colorful paintings of the Iranian artist, featuring extensive illustrations along with a selection of drawings and preparatory studies that reveal the methods behind Hoda Kashiha's compositions, which are often constructed like collages, in which multiple layers intersect, cut-out shapes emerge, and images evolve through a combination of hand-drawing and digital manipulation.

Published following the exhibition I'm Here, I'm Not Here at Passerelle Centre d'Art Contemporain, Brest, in 2022, Hoda Kashiha's first solo public exhibition in Europe.

Developing a distinctive form of pop painting that moves freely between uninhibited Cubism and a cartoon-like visual language, Iranian artist Hoda Kashiha (born 1986 in Tehran) produces works that appear playful at first glance but reveal darker, more enigmatic, and deeply symbolic layers upon closer examination. Humour is a recurring strategy in her practice—one that fosters intimacy with viewers while enabling her to address serious and sensitive questions rooted in the social context and political climate of her home country. Her paintings also engage universal concerns, including gender relations and the place of women in society. For Kashiha, her protagonists become activists without ever speaking: they assert their differences openly and remain steadfastly optimistic. With her exuberant use of forms and colour, Kashiha creates an explosive blend of genres in which Picasso seems to drift into the world of Minecraft, joyfully dismantling the conventions of the past.

Text by Lilian Davis; conversation between Loïc Le Gall and Hoda Kashiha.

Blade Pitch Control Unit is a gathering of Sean Bonney’s work in poetry between 2000-2005. It collects together all the work from his previous pamphlets that he still feels is valid, plus a number of previously unpublished pieces.

The presentation of this work in a single volume makes clear the scope of his project as a psychogeographic/historical exploration of the possibilities of political verse that would seek to obliterate the pitfalls of simple protest or the expression of easily assimilable opinions.

The work moves from psychogeographical registerings of Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs at the time of the Millennium Dome, through excavations of the ghosts of millennial heresies still present in contemporary London, and into a charting of the effects of official mendacity on the psyche of any individual citizen who knows that all private experience is collective.

The events of recent history play a major role, sometimes obliquely, sometimes less so, but Bonney refuses to allow his voice to be merely an outraged commentary on contemporary woes. Instead, he presents a poetry that makes clear that the protestor is also culpable, but equally a poetry that understands that only through a registering of this position can a way out be found.

For Bonney, a poem is typically a highly rhythmic (or arrhythmic) object that seeks through maximum density to communicate a dialectical relationship with the cosmos, and to explore the faultlines of official history and urbanism through which possibilities of liberation can be traced.

As our streets become ever more securitised and visually sanitised, and as most forms of everyday communications are shifting to the digital realm, homemade missing posters are one of the few remaining forms of paper-based citizen expression still found in public spaces.

Drawing on a collection of several hundred missing animal posters collected over the last 10 years, “MISSING” brings seemingly isolated text fragments into conversation to weave a narrative of loss and hope. 

Featuring exaggerated duotone images, the publication explores the link between the weathering of physical posters and the fading away of cherished memories. While looking through these visual artefacts, one is left to wonder how many of these animals have been reunited with their families. 

Printing: Risograph, Grafische Werkplaats Den Haag; Photography and colour separations: Livio Liechti; Design: Apsara Flury. 
First print run (Blue) – Dec 2024: 40 copies.
Second print run (Teal) – May 2025: 50 copies.

Wind & De Wilgen (English/Dutch) was designed by Lawrence Weiner and published on the occasion of the execution of his work Wind & The Willows in the Openluchtmuseum voor beeldhouwkunst Middelheim, Antwerp.

Lawrence Weiner was an American artist and one of the central figures in the formation of conceptual art in de 60s. His work was strongly language-based and often took form in typographic texts, also visible in this artist book. 

Edition of 1000 copies

First monograph of the Franco-Iranian artist.

This monographic catalogue looks back over the first 15 years of work by Iranian artist Elika Hedayat through more than 110 reproductions. Two of these are on a 1:1 scale, and a detailed set offers a comparison of the dimensions of the works in relation to each other.

Françoise Docquiert introduces the issues at stake in her practice with an essay, complemented by an interview with Joana P.R. Neves.

"Elika is a Parisian-Iranian artist. This cultural blend  is  slightly  ironic  though  very  significant, as it nourishes her artistic work and practice. Inspired by her childhood, her life, and the violence in her native country, she makes films, videos, and drawings always filled with beauty, scathing humour and cruelty." - Annette Messager

Born 1979 in Tehran, Elika Hedayat lives and works between Paris and Tehran. Arriving in France in 2004, she was admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in Annette Messager's studio, from wich she graduated with the Jury's congratulations in 2008.

For her works, Elika Hedyat often uses testimonies and experimental documentaries stage in a dreamlike and imaginary universe. Her stories are contemporary and her characters are real. All of her works revisits historical references, transferring them to the field of personnal experience, mainly using the various possibilities of her repertoire as a narrative document and memory retrieval tool. Reality, memory and imagination come together in a personal story under different forms : drawing, video, documentary, painting and performance. 

Text by Françoise Docquiert.
Interview with Elika Hedayat by Joana P. R. Neves.

Following their book AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (winner of the PEN and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry), CAConrad's Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return shifts its attention from the previous book’s focus on communing with animals who are extinct toward communicating and caring for animals still living among us. 

Recalling the historical and symbolic significance of the boomerang as an instrument of return, these poems emerged from a (soma)tic poetry ritual in which the author wrote with animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, resulting in sculptural poems that are uninhibited and mysterious as they emerge organically from the bottom of each page. Guided by the urge “to/desire/the world/as it is/not as/it was,” CAConrad writes from an ecopoetics that is generous and galvanizing, reminding us of how our present attentions collectively shape a future humanity.

Dans cet essai au verbe acéré, Paul Gilroy dénonce la pathologie néo-impérialiste des politiques mises en œuvre dans les pays occidentaux, sclérosés par les débats sur l’immigration, et propose en retour un modèle de société multiculturelle. De la création du concept de « race » à la formation des empires coloniaux, le sociologue britannique soulève quelques grandes questions de notre époque, et vise à faire émerger une réelle alternative aux récits édulcorés de notre passé colonial. En choisissant de mettre en avant la convivialité et le multiculturalisme indiscipliné du centre des grandes métropoles, Paul Gilroy défend une vision cosmopolite inclusive et plaide pour l’avènement d’une société qui refuse de céder aux discours de la peur et à la violence.

En examinant l’invention de catégories hiérarchisantes fondées sur la notion de race, et ses terribles conséquences, il démontre comment les écrits de penseurs tels que Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois ou George Orwell peuvent encore faire avancer les réflexions sur le nationalisme, le postcolonialisme et les questions raciales. Mélancolie postcoloniale fait écho aux luttes postcoloniales d’aujourd’hui, en quête d’une pensée critique exigeante.