Books

When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' emotions. Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.

With a new foreword from award-winning author N. K. Jemison.

DEARS is a print magazine for transversal writing practices at the crossroads of art, poetry and experimental writing. It brings together authors and writers from different backgrounds and constitutes a dedicated platform for texts escaping the usual genres and disciplinary boundaries.

DEARS promotes the exploration of new forms of language as a way to foster new forms of living together, and emphasizes the growing relevance of trans- versal writing practices in this respect.

DEARS issue no. 2 / HOPE.FULLY / Spring 2021

With texts by Ann Cotten, Barbara Sirieix, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Heather Phillipson, Ines Marita Schärer, Kayije Kagame, Legion Seven, Leila Peacock, Louise Guerra Archive, Tarek Lakhrissi, and an epigraph by Rebecca Solnit

Editors are Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Nicole Bachmann and Robert Steinberger

Sasha Phyars-Burgess’ first monograph, Untitled. Spanning three bodies of work, this 200-plus page monograph includes poems by Ser Alida and Aurora Masum-Javed, a conversation between Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Juliana Huxtable and Carolyn Lazard, and essay by Bill Gaskins. Designed by Studio Lin.

As recipient of the second annual Capricious Photo Award, Sasha is a vital, emerging voice in contemporary photography, engaging the charged line between documentary and fine art. Her work ranges from affecting studies on diaspora, family and place to revolving social phenomenons in which energy, beauty and power meet.

The second annual jury panel was helmed by Capricious Founder and Publisher Sophie Mörner and Associate Publisher Anika Sabin alongside Lauren Cornell, Katherine Hubbard, JOFF, Matt Keegan, Guadalupe Rosales, Ka-Man Tse, and Lyndsy Welgos.

Mucus in My Pineal Gland is the debut collection of New York-based artist and writer Juliana Huxtable (born 1987). Gathering poems, performance scripts and essays, this startling volume expands Huxtable's critique of gender, sexuality, politics, whiteness and history while establishing her as a singular poetic voice.

Juliana Huxtable is a New York City-based writer, performer, and artist. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including Artforum, Candy, Tropical Cream, and Mousse. She was included in the 2015 New Museum Triennial, curated by Ryan Trecartin and Lauren Cornell.

A vibrant work of lyric, conceptual, and confessional poetic modes pitched to enact a queer politics of liberation.

Active Reception is a book of bottoming lovers, the world around us, and a history of letters, that thinks through a queer mode of writing from the bottom, a kind of coalition based politics of receptivity and expansion that is open to the world around us, its myriad life forms, its systemic oppressions, its hidden ghosts.

Noah Ross is a bookseller, editor, and poet based in Berkeley, CA. Noah is the author of Swell, and an editor of Baest: a journal of queer forms & affects, and Mo0on/IO with Lindsay Choi.

A stunning collection of 260 of Sun Ra's cosmic poems and selected prose.

Sun Ra's poetry leaves everything behind what's called contemporary, and flings out pictures of infinity into the outer space. These poems are for tomorrow.

This book accompanies the 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize exhibition, Nicole Eisenman: Sturm und Drang. The exhibition ran from February 27 through November 15, 2020, at The Contemporary Austin’s downtown venue, the Jones Center on Congress Avenue, with an outdoor sculpture at the museum’s fourteen-acre sculpture park at Laguna Gloria. A related exhibition of Eisenman’s work with a selection of drawings by Bay Area artist Keith Boadwee, Nicole Eisenman and Keith Boadwee, is on view at The FLAG Art Foundation in New York December 12, 2020, through March 13, 2021. 

NICOLE EISENMAN was selected for the prize by an independent advisory committee comprising renowned curators and art historians from across the United States. The artist’s practice blends influences from Western art history and traditional figurative art with elements of punk, feminist activism, queer identity, humor, and emotional rawness to create profoundly unique works. Eisenman emerged in the early 1990s in New York City as a painter, and her creative output for nearly three decades centered on painting. More recently, however, the artist’s three-dimensional objects have overturned expectations of her work and of figurative sculpture. This publication reflects on the sculptural impulses within Eisenman’s work, considering the recent shift in her practice as both a new focus and always-present undercurrent brought to the surface.

Co-published with The Contemporary Austin and The FLAG Art Foundation

Essay by Heather Pesanti
Essay by Stephanie Roach and Jonathan Rider
Essay by Nicole Eisenman
Text by Litia Perta
Essay by Alhena Katsof
Conversation with Nicole Eisenman and Keith Boadwee

This publication comprises four essays and one conversation with contemporary artists and curators discussing their experience of becoming mothers as professionals in the arts, its reality and effects. While their reflections represent a similar strata of art worker in terms of background, class, and career trajectory, the impact of instruments of patriarchy on rendering maternity invisible that they describe is recognizable and insidious.

Contributions by Mai Abu ElDahab, Basma Alsharif, Lara Khaldi, Mary Jirmanus Saba, and Mirene Arsanios with Nikki Columbus.

Edited by Mai Abu ElDahab
Published by Mophradat and Archive Books
Text design layout by Valerie Arif
Arabic and English

A verbal articulation of the authors' visionary theory of how the human body, architecture, and creativity define and sustain one another 

This revolutionary work by artist-architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins demonstrates the inter-connectedness of innovative architectural design, the poetic process, and philosophical inquiry. Together, they have created an experimental and widely admired body of work, museum installations, landscape and park commissions, home and office designs, avant-garde films, poetry collections, that challenges traditional notions about the built environment. This book promotes a deliberate use of architecture and design in dealing with the blight of the human condition; it recommends that people seek architectural and aesthetic solutions to the dilemma of mortality.  

In 1997 the Guggenheim Museum presented an Arakawa/Gins retrospective and published a comprehensive volume of their work titled Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not to Die. Architectural Body continues the philosophical definition of that project and demands a fundamental rethinking of the terms "human" and "being." When organisms assume full responsibility for inventing themselves, where they live and how they live will merge. The artists believe that a thorough re-visioning of architecture will redefine life and its limitations and render death passe. The authors explain that "Another way to read reversible destiny... Is as an open challenge to our species to reinvent itself and to desist from foreclosing on any possibility."  

Audacious and liberating, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of 20th-century poetry, postmodern critical theory, conceptual art and architecture, contemporary avant-garde poetics, and to serious readers interested in architecture's influence on imaginative expression. 

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent.

By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin, body, and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle. 

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Poetry Foundation, and lives in Minneapolis.

A mystery murder artist's novel by Alex Cecchetti, in which the artist and narrator realises he is dead and decides to investigate the causes of his own death.

“I am dead. Homicide, assassination, accident, suicide, the detectives have come up with nothing. The labels in my clothes, my fingerprints, my shoe size, everything has been unstitched, erased, wiped away, blanched, bleached, and consigned to oblivion. As the only clue, in a secret pocket sewn into my trousers, the detectives found a flimsy slip of paper torn from the pages of a book. On that folded bit of paper just two words, Tamam Shud, “this is the end.” Experts, antiquarians, and opium smokers have been consulted, and all agree that these are the last two words in the Rubaiyat, an ancient collection of esoteric poems written by a Persian poet named Omar Khayyam. What the hell do I have to do with poetry, Persia, and hidden pockets? I can't even sew on a button. My identity is still unknown and not even I remember much. This is why I have decided to investigate my own death.”

The Tamam Shud narrative emerged through a series of episodic performances and an exhibition by Alex Cecchetti at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. For two years the writing process and the artistic process were interwoven, feeding each other as they evolved. The art project and the artist's novel are linked together as much as the life of the victim is connected to the piece of paper found in his pocket.

Artist, poet and choreographer, creator of performances and idiosyncratic objects, Alex Cecchetti (born 1977 in Terni, Italy, lives and works in Paris) has developed a unique practice, difficult to classify, that could be called art of avoidance: tactical and poetic, aesthetic and materialistic, its system leads to produce specific situations or objects that can exist both inside and outside the traditional exhibitions. It is in this double movement of representation and conceal that it's possible to inscribe his staging of invisible choreographies of hidden nudes and sleeping dancers. His work is focused in the construction of specific narratives that are experienced both mentally and physically by the audience.

In collaboration with cross-disciplinary artist Bianca Casady of music duo CocoRosie, 2013 brought the release of a new print magazine entitled Girls Against God (GAG). A boldly feminist exploration and multi-generational endeavor, GAG deploys the arts to illuminate the oppressive, obsolete nature of traditional, male-defined religions and other patriarchal institutions—“We must resist and reinvent,” Casady declares.

Created in partnership with artist Anne Sherwood Pundyk, GAG’s now out-of-print debut issue is a lushly colorful tabloid-sized print publication, showcasing provocative, original artwork alongside comprehensive interviews and essays with an international cadre of artists.

Issue #1—Antony / Gabby Bess / Melanie Bonajo / Vaginal Davis / Yasmine Hadan / Emely Neu / Kembra Pfahler / Marguerite Stern / Alexyss K. Tylor / Johanna Constantine / Mary Hanlon / Julie Higonnet / Molly O’Brien / Chloe Olewitz / Alice O’Malley / Kara L. Rooney / Jean Marc Ruellan

Framed as inescapable, indescribable, uncontrollable and essential, economies are everywhere. Oppressive and enabling, lucrative and undervalued, there are economies that trade our emotional labour, desires, love, fertility, time, minds, queerness, politics and clicks. There are economies that we can control and that control us, and those that we can subvert to serve our collectives. A mark, a yen, a buck or a pound, in a conversation with a cat, an app-enabled journey through a rainy Shanghai night, in the margins between intimacy and power, in the kitchen, with your record collection, under the tip of the iceberg, at the foot of a tower she built, dancing at the lesbian bar.

We want a future outside of straight time. A future in which all our friends and lovers and their lovers are coming over for dinner around a table we built together. We want a future that is fair, fun, furry, fabulous, fierce, free and not fucked up. We want futures.

Dear Lovers, Sisters, Brothers, Mothers, Adopted Aunts, Long Lost Fathers, Half-cousins, Wives, Black Sheep and Partners In Crime

As you know, we have a soft spot for collectives, collaborations, friendships and support structures. People doing things with other people: loving, working, organizing, living. These strategies for surviving together form an underlying thread throughout all our issues. This time we wanted to look more closely at one way of naming these friendly constellations: FAMILY.

120 pages exploring the body and bodies, inside out and outside in. Bodies that dance and move. Bodies making waves. Body double. Bodies at work and working with the body. Using the body as an instrument. The body as medium and massage of touch and being touched. The single, singular body as the very basis for a ‘we’.

Interviews with image ingenue K8 Hardy, filmmaker Babette Mangolte, writer Jina Khayyer and documentarist Mariah Garnett. Essays by Derica Shields and Crystal Campell. Plus 7 Q&A's with healers, herbalist and modern witches. Beautiful bodily artists series and last but not least – horoscopic aphrodisiacs.

A secret can be a private space for self-creation – or a shared site of pleasure.

We explore secrets in a plethora of forms and contexts. From layered accounts of mediaeval ecstasy to the unexplored sensory experience of smell. From camouflaged play to queer readings of astrological charts and the hidden history of house music. From a very analog point of view to the outskirts of the internet.

These days, if you call someone to go for a drink or a walk in the park, the obvious answer is: 'Sorry, I'm too busy'. Too busy with what? What do you do all day in your studio or office, bar or dancefloor, spending precious time on 'work'? And what makes it different from labouring? Do we slave for money – or no money – building on a system that is doomed to collapse? Or do we build on a new future where work and play are equal? When we work on our own initiatives and with a self-generated goal, would that still be called work? In this issue: other voices, other routes.

Featuring Alice Carey, Anna Franceschini, Lizzie Fitch, Devin Blair, Kim Gordon, Annika Henderson, Melanie Bonajo, Marie Branellec, Elizabeth Orr, Holli Smith, Joke Robaard Litia Perta and Marie Karlberg.

The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers blends the narratives of the travelog and the coming of age novel. It is written by a young Indian woman whose travels take her between homes in two countries, India and England, and through parts of the United States. These short pieces reveal new ways of belonging in the world and possibilities for an art grounded in a localized cosmopolitan culture.

Bhanu Kapil has written three full-length prose/poetry works, THE VERTICAL INTERROGATION OF STRANGERS (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), INCUBATION: A SPACE FOR MONSTERS (Leon Works, 2006), and HUMANIMAL [A PROJECT FOR FUTURE CHILDREN] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009). Born in the UK to Indian parents, Bhanu lives in Colorado, where she teaches in The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. 

Published 2001

This bootleg edition collects scanned copies of Monique Wittig's writing. It includes; The Lesbian Body, Les Guérillères, The Opoponax, and Lesbian Peoples: material for a dictionary— In true bootleg style, punk enough to carry the truly radical words of Wittig: scans, a little grainy, with marginalia of unknown origins. Now, we can dress ourselves in the ravishingly erotic, violent splendorous brilliance to become baby Wittigs.  

This edition was assembled out of a deep love of Wittig's work by Chloe Chignell.

Monique Wittig was a French author and feminist theorist particularly interested in overcoming gender and the heterosexual contract. She published her first novel, L'opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.

This publication takes the form of a cinema program, CINEMA DIVA # 1 describes and illustrates 4 movies. The texts are both poetical and critical, expressing two different views from women authors. Let's experiment the female gaze through old and current movies that you must see! Let's talk about women directors and more! 

Texts : Marine Forestier & Aurora Desq.
Illustrations : Laura Automne

How can art libraries be generative resources and sites of action for all who identify as queer, as women, as Black, as Indigenous, as people of colour? What does it mean to consider the art library as a collective practice that spans multiple scales? In shelf documents artists, writers, curators, teachers, and librarians reflect on their engagements with books, libraries and art-library-as-practice.

Between a reader, an artist’s book, a project documentation and a catalogue, shelf documents might recall a pamphlet, a roadmap, or a recipe book that doesn’t tell you what to do. It is a book that gets mis-shelved.

With drawings by Heide Hinrichs

Edited by Heide Hinrichs, Jo-ey Tang and Elizabeth Haines, and designed by Sara De Bondt.

shelf documents: art library as practice features contributions by Sara De Bondt, Rachel Dedman, Elizabeth Haines, Heide Hinrichs, Laura Larson, Samia Malik, Melanie Noel, Marisa C. Sánchez, David Senior, Jo-ey Tang, Ersi Varveri and Susanne Weiß. 

Published by Track Report, Antwerp and b_books, Berlin.

Published in January 2021