Books

The 15-year history of the production of a "German scotch" Black Whisky, made by Dexter Sinister together with Stahlemühle, a distillery set up by former publisher, Christoph Keller.

The story is told in reverse, starting with the delivery of 342 bottles to Berlin in 2022, and ending with an interview with Christoph for the journal Dot Dot Dot in 2007, during which the idea began to germinate. A summary of the project is accompanied by photographs taken at the time, interspersed with five previously published texts (an essay, three conversations, and a statement of intent) written along the way.

Dexter Sinister is the compound name of David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey, collapsing together distinctions of editing, design, production and distribution into one efficient activity.

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.

Charlotte Birnbaum meets with Gilbert & George to discuss The Meal—a culinary performance organized in 1969 by the British duo, with David Hockney as the guest of honor. Also included here are photos and memorabilia from the singular event (the sixth publication in the On the Table series, that explore the encounter between food and art).

Gilbert & George never cook and always eat out. Back in 1969, however, the artist duo hosted The Meal, an elaborate dinner party that included thirteen guests, Princess Margaret's butler, a chef who prepared a meal from a Victorian cookery manual, and the guest of honor, artist David Hockney. While the art world of the time was largely characterized by Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art, Gilbert & George developed an entirely unique philosophy and combined their daily lives with their artistic vision; in short, their art and life are one! Charlotte Birnbaum took a trip to London's East End to visit the immaculately dressed pair to discuss The Meal and other curious projects from their fifty-year collaboration. Also included here are photos and memorabilia from the singular event.

Photographer Olivier Degorce brings together a series of fridge photographs shot from 1993 to 2017: Beyond the obsessive nature of the project lies the sheer diversity of individual eating habits in the form of contemporary still lifes.

The photographs presented in Fridge Food Soul were shot from 1993 to 2017, for the most part on the spur of the moment, using all sorts of analog and digital devices ranging from the most sophisticated to the most rudimentary cameras. In most cases he took only one shot of each fridge. The serial collection of these snapshots in a single book testifies to the systematic, even obsessive, nature of this project.

This book brings together the Palabrarmas series by the artist, poet, and activist Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile). A neologism that translates to “word weapons” or “word arms,” Palabrarmas imagine new ways of seeing language. By taking the form of collages, silkscreens, drawings, poems, fabric banners, cut-outs, mixed media installations, and street actions, Vicuña brings together many aspects of her practice in poetry, activism, and visual art, allowing new meanings to emerge. This book presents a range of palabrarmas, created over the past four decades, in color for the first time.  

Cecilia Vicuña is an artist, poet and activist currently based between New York and Santiago.

Les Voies du Paradis rassemble ce qui subsiste d’une œuvre perdue : les seules notes de bas de page d’un texte manquant, laissées par un chercheur après son décès et éditées par Peter Cornell. Ces notes et leurs illustrations forment un ensemble incomplet, qui se donne ici à lire à travers ses manques. Un fil – d’Ariane ? – se tisse entre les diagrammes, les figures de spirales et de labyrinthes – de Cesare Ripa à Ernst Josephson et Robert Smithson, des Templiers aux spirites et aux surréalistes – qui parcourent le texte et se font écho, comme les éléments d’une énigme ou des figures ésotériques. Le « Paradis » dont il est question ici, c’est le rêve de la connaissance absolue, la saisie de l’ordre caché des choses, à laquelle aspirent autant poètes et artistes que mystiques et scientifiques…

Paru en Suède en 1987, Les Voies du Paradis y a acquis la réputation d’un livre culte. Peter Cornell y propose une perspective inédite sur les liens entre art, littérature, spiritualité et occultisme, dans un texte à mi-chemin de l’essai et de la fiction, de l’érudition et de la mystification. La volonté de savoir y est mise en scène comme une quête prise au piège de l’irrationnel ; les notes s’assemblent par logique associative, programme éclectique qui tente encore de retrouver un centre perdu – comme les algorithmes auxquels est confiée aujourd’hui la tâche fantasmée de mettre en ordre les connaissances humaines.

Spanning more than three decades, In Part brings together a full spectrum of the New York-based artist, writer and activist Julie Ault's (born 1957) published texts through carefully selected extracts in a single volume.

Reprinted in chronological sequence alongside a selection of full-length texts, this series of excerpts offers a timeline of Ault's continuous artistic growth, longstanding political concerns and dynamic interpersonal affinities.

Beginning in the 1980s with texts written with her collaborators in Group Material, In Part highlights Ault's shift from exhibition making in the mid-1990s to include publishing and writing. Ault's dialogic practice extends to the present day through her sustained engagements and relationships with such artists as Corita Kent, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Nancy Spero, Martin Beck, David Wojnarowicz, Liberace and Martin Wong.

Lucy R. Lippard contributes an introduction.

From the acclaimed author of The Employees, a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood

After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf the new mother, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively buys clothes she can’t afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, Anna forces herself to read and write.

My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms – fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters – to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.

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.

After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and two kids, McKenzie Wark has an acute midlife crisis: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recasts her relation to the world. Transition changes what, and how, she remembers. She makes fresh sense of her past and of history by writing to key figures in her life about the big themes that haunt us all—love and money, sex and death.

In letters to her childhood self, her mother, sister, and past lovers, she writes a backstory that enables her to live in the present. The letters expand to address trans sisters lost and found, as well as Cybele, ancient goddess of trans women. She engages with the political, the aesthetic, and the numinous dimensions of trans life and how they refract her sense of who she is, who she has been, who she can still become. She confronts difficult memories that connect her mother’s early death to her compulsion to write, her communist convictions, her coming to New York, the bittersweet reality of her late transition, and the joy to be found in Brooklyn’s trans and raver communities.

Exhibition catalogue of filmmaker, visual artist, and writer Pedro Neves Marques's solo project "Vampires in Space" at the Portuguese Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022.

"In space it's always night." A family of vampires travels through space, carrying life to a faraway planet. Alone, they recall their past, offering an open-ended narrative about the role of fiction in our lives, with a special care for transgender experiences.

This book includes an interview, film scripts and poetry by Neves Marques, curatorial texts by João Mourão, Luís Silva, alongside visual documentation and other contributions by Manuela Moscoso and Filipa Ramos.

The work of Pedro Neves Marques (born 1984 in Lisbon, Portugal) combines anthropological research, cinema, publishing, poetic and fictional writing. Their hybrid aesthetic, that blends science fiction and documentary realism is influenced by the history of feminist and queer sciences, and projects us into futures that question the control of our bodies, our desires and the world around us beyond the register of dystopia. In doing so, they explore how we might transform our imaginaries of gender, new technologies, ecology and postcolonial issues.

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.

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.

A broad and inclusive volume of the celebrations and critiques of performance arts.

Focusing on the living arts—dance, theatre, music, performance art, ritual, and popular entertainment—performance studies expands our understanding of "performance" as both a vital artistic practice and a means by which to understand social and cultural processes. Bridging the gap between cultural studies, performing arts, and anthropology, performance studies explores myriad ways in which performance creates meaning and shapes our everyday lives.

The broadest and most inclusive volume to date, The Ends of Performance both celebrates and critiques the institutionalization of the field. Only recently has the field given keen attention to the interpretive force and consequences of performance events, and it is these consequences that the The Ends of Performance articulates. Here performance studies illuminates the complex social and cultural formations of our time—the impact of virtual technology, the racialized discourses of legal and cultural citizenship, the impact of new medical discourses, and the medicalization of the body. Featuring work by leading theorists such as Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, and Richard Schechner, excursions into performative writing by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Della Pollock, and texts by performance artists Orlan and Deb Margolin, The Ends of Performance illuminates the provocative intellectual ends which motivate these varied approaches to performing writing, and to writing performance.

Edition of 265 copies. A deluxe edition, accompanied by an original work numbered n/508 (oil pastel on paper A3), has been produced in 35 copies signed and numbered by the artist.

Hardcover, offset printing, 508 p., 31.8 x 25 cm.  Printed by Cultura, Gent.

Over the years 1919–20, the celebrated medical scientist and doctor Carl Julius Salomonsen began giving public lectures and publishing pamphlets regarding a new “epidemic” that had begun to affect the European populace: the increasing ubiquity of modernist art.

In a 1919 pamphlet titled New Forms of Art and Contagious Mental Illness, he wrote: “We stand, at this moment, before a movement in art which is psychopathic in character, and whose victorious journey through all countries is probably caused by the same spiritual disease that gave the older, religious spiritual epidemic such a powerful spread.” This pamphlet and the accompanying talks were countered by a retaliatory pamphlet published by members of Grønningen, a Copenhagen modernist painters group, to which Salomonsen responded with a further pamphlet.

Translated into English for the first time by literary theorist Andrew Hodgson, the entire altercation is gathered in this book, documenting one of the earliest rejections of modernist art.

Edited & Translated by Andrew Hodgson.

At an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the centre of everyone’s attention. Haunted into adulthood by her Korean father’s abandonment of his family, as well as the spectre of her beguiling, abusive white mother, the painter finds herself caught in a perfect trap. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. Since she’s an artist, she will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. As for Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a new sheet of paper.

When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist’s first sold-out show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their work, and her seduction. But, just when the painter is on the verge of her long sought-after breakthrough, a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.

Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it any wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit exciting to think she could too?

Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.

Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and 
musician who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of the essay 'Sick Woman Theory', originally published in 2016, which has now been translated into ten languages. Hedva is also the author of the novel On Hell, which was one of Dennis Cooper's favourite books of 2018, and the nonfiction collection Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain. Their albums are The Sun and the Moon and Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House.

A fully-fledged artistic project expanded with writings, poems, and aphorisms by the artist alongside various interviews.

Traveling in the Dark is an exhibition and a publication by the world-renowned film director, poet, writer, music composer, literary critic, and art theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha. The book is a fully fledged artistic project conceived by Trinh from the script and visuals of her film What about China? and expanded with her writings, poems, and aphorisms as well as various interviews that investigate "a relationship to infinity," "memory of the mirror," and the "in-between." The book offers an experience with many possible entries, words, voices, thoughts, images, and pauses. As a visual, poetic, and philosophical experience, Traveling in the Darkinvites us to rethink and experience "reality" differently from an approach mainly based on knowledge and re-presentation that we already possess or that is imposed on us. In other words: How can we learn to see our world without a priori seeing and knowing? In a time when the "all-seen" and "all-told" invade and control our daily lives, our private spheres and urban spaces, where are the areas of invisibility and shadows that leave us autonomy to see and to think, to say and to represent, to remember and to imagine? Traveling in the Dark engages the visitor and reader in an open montage of visual, sonic, and poetic textures, whose resonances, vibrations, recollections, exchanges, brushes, reflections, and passages undermine any pretense of fixed identity, historical truth, or prescribed territory.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, in 2022-2023.

Born in Vietnam in 1952, Trinh T. Minh-ha is an artist, writer, music composer, filmmaker, and literary theorist, teaching as Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in the departments of Gender & Women's Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco.

A sardonic spin on the ABC book, A is for Anarchist is a sharp knife in a drawer full of safety scissors. 

Wryly written by critically acclaimed rapper billy woods and sublimely illustrated by artist m. musgrove, A is for Anarchist upends the traditional ABC format with earnestness that belies its irreverence. Anarchist takes modest ideas, like E is for Energy and G is for Ghosts, and flips them into incisive commentary on modern life and the state of the world. Also, it has to be the only alphabet book with annotated footnotes and a Nas reference.

woods is a writer, rapper, and father who needed somethingcool to read to his children. The child of a Jamaican intellectual and a Zimbabwean revolutionary, woods's childhood spent between the U.S., Africa, and the West Indies leaves its imprint on all his work. musgrove is a Brooklyn-based painter, illustrator, and amateur animator. She is inspired by Wimmen's Comix, William Morris, and tumult.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone's good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification.

Drawing on her own stories and those of others, especially Black and brown feminists and queer thinkers, Sara Ahmed combines depth of thought with honesty and intimacy. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook unpicks the lies our culture tells us and provides a form of solidarity and companionship that can be returned to over a lifetime.

We have to keep saying it because they keep doing it.

Do colleagues roll their eyes in a meeting when you use words like sexism or racism? Do you refuse to laugh at jokes that aren't funny? Have you been called divisive for pointing out a division? Then you are a feminist killjoy, and this handbook is for you.

The term killjoy has been used to dismiss feminism by claiming that it causes misery. But by naming ourselves feminist killjoys, we recover a feminist history, turning it into a source of strength as well as an inspiration.

In this original work of aesthetic theory, James Voorhies argues that we live in the shadow of old ways of thinking about art that emphasize the immediate visual experience of an autonomous art object. But theory must change as artistic and curatorial production has changed. It should encompass the full range of activities through which we encounter art and exhibitions, in which reading and thinking are central to the aesthetic experience. Voorhies advances the theoretical framework of a "postsensual aesthetics," which does not mean we are beyond a sensual engagement with objects, but rather embraces the cognitive connections with ideas that unite art and knowledge production. Cognitive engagements with art often begin with publications conceived as integral to exhibitions, conveying the knowledge and research artists and curators produce, and continuing in time and space beyond traditional curatorial frames. The idea, and not just visual immediacy, is now art's defining moment.  

Voorhies reframes aesthetic criteria to account for the liminal, cognitive spaces inside and outside of the exhibition. Surveying a wide range of artists, curators, exhibitions, and related publications, he repositions the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, and draws inspiration from Rosalind Krauss and Fredric Jameson, to describe a contemporary "logic of the curatorial." He demonstrates how, even as we increasingly expect to learn from contemporary art, we must avoid an instrumentalist and reductive view of art as a mere source of information. As Voorhies shows through an analysis of two major global exhibitions, dOCUMENTA (13) (artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev) and Documenta11 (artistic director Okwui Enwezor), and of Ute Meta Bauer's curatorial work at the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, it is imperative for artistic research to retain its unique role in the production of knowledge.

Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet. In turn, he argues that the forgotten figures who worked to make black politics central to the Internet's birth and evolution paved the way for today's explosion of racial justice activism.

From the 1960s to present, the book examines how computing technology has been used to neutralize the threat that black people pose to the existing racial order, but also how black people seized these new computing tools to build community, wealth, and wage a war for racial justice.Through archival sources and the voices of many of those who lived and made this history, Black Software centralizes African Americans' role in the Internet's creation and evolution, illuminating both the limits and possibilities for using digital technology to push for racial justice in the United States and across the globe. 

A significantly expanded edition of Carrington's acclaimed Tarot series, featuring new archival images and research.

The British-born Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) spent a lifetime exploring the esoteric traditions of diverse cultures, and incorporated their ideas and symbols into her artistic and literary oeuvre. Tibetan Buddhism, the Kabbalah, ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian magic, Celtic mythology, witchcraft, astrology and the Tarot were filtered through her feminist lens to create a visionary, woman-centered worldview.

Carrington created a spectacular Major Arcana Tarot deck sometime during the 1950s, laying gold and silver leaf over brilliant color. Exhibited for the first time during her centennial exhibition Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales in 2018, this extraordinary work was a revelation for the public and inspired the publication of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington.