Books

The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine brought about an emergence of a distinctive trend in contemporary Ukrainian poetry: the poetry of war. Directly and indirectly, the poems collected in this volume engage with the events and experiences of war, reflecting on the themes of alienation, loss, dislocation, and disability; as well as justice, heroism, courage, resilience, generosity, and forgiveness. In addressing these themes, the poems also raise questions about art, politics, citizenship, and moral responsibility.

The anthology brings together some of the most compelling poetic voices from different regions of Ukraine. Young and old, female and male, somber and ironic, tragic and playful, filled with extraordinary terror and ordinary human delights, the voices recreate the human sounds of war in its tragic complexity.

Acoustic Thought is an exegesis of the Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal gospel found at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945.
 
With a score for six female voices by Lisa Holmqvist; a collage of writings by medieval female mystics; and photographs taken by Jeff Weber at the Coptic Museum in Cairo, during a research period at Beirut project space.
 
The book’s covers reconstruct patterns found on the covers of Nag Hammadi Codex II, which, as well as the Gospel of Thomas, contains the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Philip, the Hypostasis of the Archons, On the Origin of the World, the Exegesis on the Soul, and the Book of Thomas the Contender.
 
Presented and performed during Perfomance Days, Amsterdam (November 2014) and Hotel Theory, REDCAT, Los Angeles (November 2015).

The chant of 'Azadi!' — Urdu for 'Freedom!' — is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation. Ironically, it has also become the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu nationalism. Just as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these two calls for freedom — a chasm or a bridge? — the streets fell silent. Not only in India but all over the world.

The coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible understanding of azadi, making nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could.

In a series of essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism

An extensive and comprehensive polyphonic exploration of the work of The Otolith Group, coming at a pivotal point in their practice.

The work of this London-based artist's collective comprised of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun covers politics of race and diversity and incorporates film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face. 

Presenting all bodies of work contained in the Xenogenesis exhibition, this publication includes many materials and graphics from The Otolith Group's broader practice, including performance, lecture and research material. The outcome of over four years of collaboration, research and conversation, the publication is not a chronological exhibition catalogue or retrospective but a cross-section of their work which includes substantial contributions from the artists themselves, in the form of writing and direct engagement with its production.

The publication also brings together important thinkers, scholars, art historians and writers from disparate fields, who know and have worked with the group, as well as those who are writing from a contemporary perspective. They include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Annie Fletcher, Anselm Franke, Shanay Jhaveri, George E. Lewis, Mahan Moalemi, Fred Moten, Grant Watson, Vivian Ziherl and the late Mark Fisher each of whom reflect on a particular aspect of the Group's practice with supplementary materials such as archival images, documented conversations, early lecture performances as well as other accompanying texts and examinations of their research sites.

Written in La Ferme Arpoix (Ceaux-en-Loudun) and Paris, 1998. Dedicated to Guy.

Staple bound, ltd. to 200 copies. Riso-printed on Munken Pure Rough 120gsm by Risiko Press in Borgerhout, covers silkscreened on Eskaboard by Maarten de With, copy editing by Sis Matthé, design by Kaye & Matthé, typeface: Elementa.

[The title of this book is in Dutch, the text is in French]

"Met dank aan Eliane Van De Velde en Marie-Sophie Beinke."

An unconventional invocation of Michael Stevenson's practice over the past 35 years.

From his refuge in upstate New York—the studio/ living complex where he enacted a late pivot back to figuration—the American painter Philip Guston once offered the following outburst to the question of how such a turn could happen.

"What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?"

Over time, this sparse utterance takes on an architectural form in the imagination, a model that proposes a tantalizing proposition when fleshed out. The painter's words situate us in two distinct yet adjacent rooms. The first: a lounge with a TV, its live feed constantly aflicker. The second, a space that's more sequestered, which we can simply understand as a place of production: "the studio." Between these spaces, the painter, often working through the night, is also the viewer or reader, shuffling back and forth as he navigates these two rooms. At a certain point, night becomes day, and we shuffle back and forth together, the presence of one room arriving in the other.

Published following the eponymous exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, in 2021.

Described as an “anthropologist of the avant-garde”, Michael Stevenson (born in 1964 in Inglewood, New Zealand, lives and works in Berlin) investigates the mythology that surrounds renowned and controversial events which have been significant in the spheres of both art and politics.

Graphic design: Will Holder

In her debut cookbook, acclaimed chef Angela Dimayuga shares her passion for Filipino food with home cooks.

Filipinx offers 100 deeply personal recipes, many of them dishes that define home for Angela Dimayuga and the more than four million people of Filipino descent in the United States. The book tells the story of how Dimayuga grew up in an immigrant family in northern California, trained in restaurant kitchens in New York City, learning to make everything from bistro fare to Asian-American cuisine, then returned to her roots, discovering in her family's home cooking the same intense attention to detail and technique she'd found in fine dining.

In this book, Dimayuga puts a fresh spin on classics: adobo, perhaps the Filipino dish best known outside the Philippines, is traditionally built on a trinity of soy sauce, vinegar, and garlic, all pantry staples, but add coconut milk, vinegar, and oil, and it turns lush and silky; ribeye steaks bring extra richness to bistek, gilded with butter and a bright splash of lemon and orange juice. These are the punches of flavor and inspired recipes that home cooks have been longing for.

A modern, welcoming resource for this essential cuisine, Filipinx shares exciting and approachable recipes everyone will wholeheartedly embrace in their own kitchens.

One of Matt Mullican's central and most consequential inventions, the so-called “Rubbings,” are a kind of “frottages,” a technique the artist uses to produce specific pictures. The book presents a catalogue of the Rubbings on canvas from 1984 to 2015. It comprises around 500 works, documented by images and catalogue entries (the book also contains an essay by Dieter Schwarz).

From the beginning of his career, Mullican looked for pictures that would not be paintings; thus, he used banners, the traditional carriers of signs, posters, and, in 1984, he realized his first Rubbing. He used a cardboard plate on which the canvas was placed; by rubbing with an oil stick the cardboard reliefs, forms became visible on the canvas. This way, Mullican was able to transfer complex representations onto canvas; the result is a picture of something that is not present, it is a form of copy. The cardboard plates may be used for other works and so the imagery can reappear in different configurations. Each Rubbing is a single work and at the same time a reproduction, like a print, part of a sequence which contains picture elements from different sources.

Following the Rubbings from 1984 to recent times, it becomes visible that they represent the motives and themes the artist worked with over the years. The sequence of the Rubbings appears therefore like a diary of Mullican's work.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Nothing Should Exist” at Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, from June 11 to October 16, 2016.

Working in the fields of performance, installation, digital technology and sculpture, Matt Mullican (born 1951 in Santa Monica, lives an works in New York) is seeking to develop a cosmological model based on a personal vocabulary combining the formal and the symbolic. Hypnosis and cartography are his principal modes of operation. He explores functional sign systems of his own devising through activities under hypnosis, in a permanent oscillation between the real and its schematization, between fiction and its physical reality.

Edited by Dieter Schwarz.
Text by Dieter Schwarz.
 
published in June 2016

This handsomely designed, concise volume celebrates Agnes Martin's pursuit of beauty, happiness and innocence in her nonobjective art created while living in the desert of New Mexico. From her multicolored striped works to compositions of color-washed bands defined by hand-drawn lines, to the deep gray Black Paintings that characterized her work in the late 1980s, Martin's treatment of color in each of these phases is examined.

A particular emphasis is placed on the latter half of her career and the broadening vision that developed during her years working in the desert, which crystalized her quest to deepen her understanding of the essence of painting, unattached to emotion or subject, yet radiant and meditative in its pure abstraction.

With editorial contributions by a selection of writers whose cross-genre works span art writing, essay and memoir, this book expands an approach to Martin's paintings beyond a purely art historical lens, bringing new voices into the conversations around her career, inviting a rediscovery of her enduring legacy. An essay by author Durga Chew-Bose provides a poetic exploration of color; the writer Olivia Laing (author of The Lonely City) discusses the nature of solitude in her text; and Bruce Hainley uses a 1974 essay by Jill Johnston as a jumping-off point to delve into Martin's life during her years in New Mexico.

A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution — from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality — and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike — either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

"Graeber and Wengrow have effectively overturned everything I ever thought about the history of the world. A thorough and elegant refutation of evolutionary theories of history, The Dawn of Everything introduces us to a world populated by smart, creative, complicated people who, for thousands of years, invented virtually every form of social organization imaginable and pursued freedom, knowledge, experimentation, and happiness way before the "Enlightenment." The authors don't just debunk the myths, they give a thrilling intellectual history of how they came about, why they persist, and what it all means for the just future we hope to create. The most profound and exciting book I've read in thirty years." — Robin D.G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, UCLA, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

In a world full of devils, the giant ape Kong defends what he loves the most. But who and what is this undomesticated animal? Might it reside within us? As we tread confidently, is this where the earth opens up beneath us?  

In Kong's Finest Hour, Alexander Kluge explores anew the accessible spaces where Kong dwells within us and in our million-year-old past. The more than two hundred stories contained in this volume form a chronicle of connections that together survey these spaces using diverse perspectives. These include stories about the folds of Kong's nose, the voice of the author's mother, the poet Heinrich von Kleist and Jack the Ripper, the indestructability of the political, and the supercontinent Pangaea that once unified the earth. Dissolving theory into storytelling has been Kluge's lifelong pursuit, and this magnificent collection tells stories of people as well of things.

This 640-page volume comprises drawings from a critical six-year period in the development of American painter and conceptual artist Lee Lozano's (1930-99) practice. Her daring, facetious sketches investigate issues of gender and the body through the erogenous anthropomorphization of tools.

Lee Lozano: Drawings 1958-64 includes two newly commissioned essays by Helen Molesworth and Tamar Garb.

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Fascinating letters and ephemera from experimental filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Nathaniel Dorsky, Jim Jarmusch, Harun Farocki, Jean Vigo and more.

More than 50 postcards, manuscripts, typewritten letters and even emails are presented alongside stills, drawings and storyboards to create a stunning epistolary archive many years in the making. Curator and Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival director Garbiñe Ortega has compiled these materials in an effort to "create echoes and reverberations between materials which, as in a film, thanks to the editing, take on another meaning beyond their specific content."

The volume includes correspondence exchanged among filmmakers Jodie Mack, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Jorge Honik, Claudio Caldini, Lech Kowalski, Nicole Brenez, Marcel Hanoun, Nathaniel Dorsky, George Kuchar, Nazli Dinçel, Norman McLaren, Maya Deren, Jean Vigo, Richard Leacock, Monica Flaherty, Richard Linklater, Gabe Kingler, Robert Breer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Fernando Trueba, Jean-Marie Straub, Jim Jarmusch, Hanun Farocki, Robert Frank, Fred Wiseman, Margaret Tait, Ute Aurand, Terrence Malick, Lynne Sachs and Gunvor Nelson.

I See / You Mean is an experimental novel about mirrors, maps, relationships, the ocean, elusive success, and possible happiness. Through a collage of verbal photographs, overheard dialogue, sexual encounters, found material, and self identi­fication devices (astrology, the I Ching, palmistry, Tarot), it charts from past to future the changing currents between two women and two men­: a writer, a model/stockbroker/maybe dictator, a photographer, and an actor. A lot happens between the lines. Art critic Lucy Lippard wrote this novel in 1970 and became a feminist in the process: “I started writing and realized I was ashamed to be a woman. Then I had to find out why. Then I got very angry. The fragmented visual form came out of contemporary art and the conflicting emotions of 1960s political confrontation; they suggested a new way to put things back together—an open-ended, female way that didn’t pretend conclusions.”

Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, activist, and curator. She is the author of twenty-five books on contemporary art and cultural criticism and has curated some fifty exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

Afterword by Susana Torre
Edited by Jeff Khonsary

'You have within you something stronger and more numinous' by Margarita Maximova is a collection of extracts of letters sent to her by her mother over the course of ten years.

A beautifully written, deeply provocative inquiry into the intersection of animal and disability liberation, and the debut of an important new social critic.

How much of what we understand of ourselves as "human" depends on our physical and mental abilities, how we move (or cannot move) in and interact with the world? And how much of our definition of "human" depends on its difference from "animal"?  

Drawing on her own experiences as a disabled person, a disability activist, and an animal advocate, author Sunaura Taylor persuades us to think deeply, and sometimes uncomfortably, about what divides the human from the animal, the disabled from the nondisabled, and what it might mean to break down those divisions, to claim the animal and the vulnerable in ourselves, in a process she calls "cripping animal ethics."  

Beasts of Burden suggests that issues of disability and animal justice—which have heretofore primarily been presented in opposition—are in fact deeply entangled. Fusing philosophy, memoir, science, and the radical truths these disciplines can bring, whether about factory farming, disability oppression, or our assumptions of human superiority over animals, Taylor draws attention to new worlds of experience and empathy that can open up important avenues of solidarity across species and ability. Beasts of Burden is a wonderfully engaging and elegantly written work, both philosophical and personal, by a brilliant new voice. 

Second volume of Ion Grigorescu's translated diaries, assembled like a small literary and art-historical sensation of the period between 1976 and 1979.

In recent years, the work of Ion Grigorescu, one of the seminal Eastern European visual artists of his generation, has attracted increasing attention in the West. This volume is the second of his translated diaries—the first from 1970 to 1975 was published in 2014 by Sternberg Press—and is assembled like a small literary and art-historical sensation of the period between 1976 and 1979. It not only counters the facile reading of Grigorescu's practice in the context of Conceptual art and performance art, but provides insight into the artist's multifocal thinking, which incorporates an original critique of modernism, the dystopian effects of an instrumentalized idea of reason and rationality, an analysis of subjectivity, and a penetrating gaze into a dialectic of secrecy and elucidation, of exposure and mystification.

Grigorescu's diaries are written notes revolving around the status of the image and investigate the relation of the body to society and of art to the world through a phenomenological approach. His work proposes a parallel conception of the public made tangible through the eloquence of the body.

In poetic language full of powerfully pictorial metaphors, Grigorescu's reflects on the tension between the realistic effects of the image, the suppression of realism, and the hidden traces the gaze holds through the activities of the increasingly present unconscious of collective memory. Along with the drawings, paintings, photographs, and sketches that accompany them, the diaries serve as an introduction that open the possibility of conceiving Grigorescu's art as a rare evocation of a singular way of thinking: a stance.

Ion Grigorescu (born 1945, lives and works in Bucarest) is one of the most emblematic artistic personalities of the post-war period in Romania, a key figure of conceptual artin Eastern Europe.

A look back in text and images at AA Bronson 's (collective) production between 2013 and 2018.

A nocturnal secret ritual performed by two naked men in a hotel room in the Netherlands; a woven tent where the artist dressed as a mage encounters visitors to share their traumas; buttplugs adorned with rooster feathers; a collection of queer zines; anal-sprayed tartan paintings; a zen garden of mugwort. A few of the singular artistic gestures AA Bronson committed in the last few years are united in this book.

After his General Idea partners, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, passed away in 1994, AA Bronson had to learn how to keep on living by himself, inventing a personal identity without his former companions, creating a new community of work, friendship and love. These issues have been at the core of his art in the last 25 years. He has developed a work where collaboration with other artists, especially younger queer artists, and creation of a social bond are central.

AA Bronson's House of Shame aims to emphasize this social dimension in his work through an overview of a series of exhibitions he made between 2013 and 2018. These are shows that bring together a community of artists; shows where performances and rituals, often invisible, contribute to the creation of a shared experience; a unique blend of art, friendship, collaboration, spirituality and humour.

The book is in two-parts. An initial monographic section, which includes an essay and an interview with the artist, brings together the works and the exhibitions. In the second, choral part, friends have been invited to bear witness and write a sort of 'journal de bord,' telling the tale of five years of the artist's community life.

With a foreword by Vincent Simon, a text by Paul Clinton, and an interview by Frédéric Bonnet, and contributions from Philip Aarons, Defne Ayas, Elijah Burger, Matthias Herrmann, Richard John Jones, Bradford Kessler, Terence Koh, Sholem Krishtalka, Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur, Gareth Long, Chrysanne Stathacos, Scott Treleaven, and Louwrien Wijers.

At a time when few women could write and most were denied a formal education, Hildegard von Bingen became a legendary healer, visionary, musician, artist, poet, and saint. In Physica, Hildegard presents nine "books" of healing systems: Plants, Elements, Trees, Stones, Fish, Birds, Animals, Reptiles, and Metals. In each book she discusses the qualities of these natural creations and elaborates on their medicinal use, explaining how to prepare and apply different remedies. With its emphasis on balancing the humors, Physica has strong affinity with the Oriental medical approaches gaining great respect today.

The modern reader interested in natural healing will recognize the enormous truth in the theories of this twelth-century physician, many of which prove effective today, serving as a reminder that our cures for illness depend on our natural world and our place in it.

As Hildegard states in Physica, "With earth was the human being created. All the elements served mankind and, sensing that he was alive, they busied themselves in aiding his life in every way."

Translated by Priscilla Throop a Latin and Greek scholar, she holds a master's degree from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, as well as a Certificate of Advanced Theological Studies from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. She is a member of the Vermont Classical Language Association and is currently translating Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae. She lives in Charlotte, Vermont.

Shifting between figuration and abstraction, comedy and doubt, order and mess, Amy Sillman's painting has greatly influenced generations of American artists.

New York-based Amy Sillman (born 1955) is one of the most beloved and quietly influential contemporary American artists. The ALL-OVER provides a comprehensive overview of her most recent bodies of work, including painting and serially exhibited large-scale abstractions, as well as diagrams, drawings, animations and sculpture.

The title of the book, and the exhibition it accompanies at Frankfurt's Portikus, refers to a concept often used to describe abstract painting (the classic instance of which is the work of Jackson Pollock). Much of Sillman's oeuvre can be categorized as such, although her abstractions often suggest recognizable forms and figures. In the 24-canvas series Panorama, motifs seem to run continuously around the walls of the exhibition space, but in fact are repeated prints of the artist's drawings with painterly interventions. The materiality is lost through the superimposition of print and oil paint; what remains is pure color and gesture. Also present here are stills from an animation developed by Sillman to be exhibited alongside Panorama and an insert made especially for the book by the artist. Alongside essays by Manuela Ammer, Yve-Alain Bois and Sillman herself. The book includes a conversation with the artist by Fabian Schöneich.

Ranging from figurative representation to gestural abstraction, monumental landscape paintings to more intimate portraits, the oeuvre of American painter Leidy Churchman (born 1979) channels his artistic and literary influences, friendships, moods, surrounding landscapes and the visual iconography of divergent religions and philosophies.

Crocodile highlights the artist's investigations into consciousness in his renderings of anthropomorphic animals and psychological states; his appropriation of existing artworks and aesthetics; and his recasting of various signs and symbols, from his depiction of the Buddhist symbol of the protector deity in Mahakala (2017) to the Mastercard logo in Mastercard (2013).  

Churchman, who divides his time between New York and Maine, emerges here as a dynamic protagonist of contemporary American painting. In addition to collecting 90 reproductions of works, the book features artwork made especially for it, plus texts by Ruba Katrib, Alex Kitnik and Arnisa Zeqo, in addition to a conversation between Churchman and Lauren Cornell.

In 1979, JEB self-published her first book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians. In a work that was revolutionary for its era, JEB made photographs of lesbians from different ages and backgrounds in their everyday lives—working, playing, raising families, and striving to remake their worlds. The photographs were accompanied by writings from acclaimed authors including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Joan Nestle, and others. Various women pictured in the book also shared their personal stories. Eye to Eye signaled a radical new way of seeing, moving lesbian lives from the margins to the center, and reversing a history of invisibility. More than just a book, it was an affirmation of the existence of lesbians that helped to propel a political movement. Reprinted for the first time in forty years, Eye to Eye is a faithful reproduction of a work that still resonates today. This edition features additional essays from artist and writer Tee A. Corinne, former World Cup soccer player Lori Lindsey, and photographer Lola Flash.

A fantastic comic-book collaboration between the artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet Anne Carson, based on Euripides’s famous tragedy.

The Trojan Women, follows the fates of Hekabe, Andromache, and Kassandra after Troy has been sacked and all its men killed. This collaboration between the visual artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet and classicist Anne Carson attempts to give a genuine representation of how human beings are affected by warfare. Therefore, all the characters take the form of animals (except Kassandra, whose mind is in another world).