Books

Textdemic | A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments” Ed. by A.L. Steiner and GenderFail, a publication based on A.L. Steiner + Friends on Jenny Holzer at Dia Chelsea. This book is based on the Artists on Artists Lecture Series when the Dia Art Foundation invited Steiner to curate a public program based on a work of the artist's choice.

Steiner chose Jenny Holzer’s Laments and invited Morgan Bassichis, Riel Bellow, Gregg Bordowitz, Alexander Chee, Malik Gaines, Guadalupe Maravilla + Alexa Mishell Guillen, Lucas Michael, Eileen Myles and Pamela Sneed to present in Dia’s first in-person program after the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2021. This publication features records of the poems, lectures, and performances during this memorial program. The book's design plays homage to the 1990 Laments publication by the Dia Art Foundation.

For this publication, Steiner and GenderFail invited Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Associate Curator at Dia Art Foundation and the organizer of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series, to write an afterword for the book. In this, she states: "Dispensing altogether with the monographic formula that characterizes the institution, for her Lecture A.L. Steiner convened a group of artists, writers, and activists to join her in responding to Jenny Holzer’s 1989 text-based installation, Laments. Holzer identified the thirteen texts that comprise Laments as 'voices of the dead,' a visual choir in response to the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic and government inaction. Over the protracted COVID-19 lockdown, Steiner developed the idea to organize an evening for the voices of the living to lament today's crises.”

Through creative nonfiction, poetry, and the printed image, the publication considers the playful and purposeful self-actualization of a bicultural queer identity while navigating grief as a landscape to address themes of (be)longing, futurity, and place. Alongside a collection of their works and research, Abigail Lucien weaves written and visual offerings by fellow Caribbean and queer artists, including works by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Justin Chance, Cielo Felix-Hernandez, Sucking Salt, and Tamara Santibañez, to create an expanded context for their work rooted in friendship and radical love.

Abigail Lucien (b.1992) is a Haitian-American interdisciplinary artist, educator, auntie, lover, and friend. Working in sculpture, literature, and time-based media, Lucien’s practice addresses themes of (be)longing, futurity, myth, and place by considering our relationship to inherited colonial structures and systems of belief/care. Past exhibitions include SculptureCenter (NY), MoMA PS1 (NY), Deli Gallery (NY), MAC Panamá (Panamá), Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), UICA (Grand Rapids, MI), and The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA). Residencies include Amant Studio & Research Residency (NY), Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (Madison, ME), the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts (Wrocław, Poland), The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM), ACRE (Steuben, WI), and Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency (Saugatuck, MI).

Lucien has taught as a full-time faculty member and professor in the Department of Sculpture & Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Interdisciplinary Sculpture Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In the fall of 2023, they will join the Department of Art and Art History as an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Hunter College in NYC. Deli Gallery represents Abigail Lucien.

If Aurora Mattia is a switchboard operator, then Unsex Me Here is her call log. Please hold. There’s someone on the other line. A spider, a sibyl, an angel, a mermaid, a goddess, or an ex-girlfriend.

Unsex Me Here is a prayer book tied together by the strings of a corset. Glamorous ramblers, haunted by the sense of another world drawing near, wander in and out of its inexplicable twilight. From a West Texas town with a supernatural past to a stalactite cavern in the birthplace of Aphrodite, from hotel rooms to gardens to the far horizon of a thought, they seek the source of the disturbance in their minds. Heartbreak is not so far from rapture; holy babble is another kind of gossip. Every pilgrimage is as dense with symbolism as it is refined by desire.

From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.

Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land.

Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

Abandoned by their Dutch partner after giving up their home and their job to follow him to the Netherlands, humanities scholar Seasonal finds themself single in a strange place for the first time in a decade. 

Dipping into the rabbit hole of digital eroticism, Seasonal soon meets László, a male sub who volleys back their cerebral sexts and is seeking a  dominant guide. His dating-app profile—a photo of Foucault and the  ingenuous greeting “Hello, World?”—thinly veils his desire to be annihilated. It's a desire that Seasonal senses they can fulfill. But to do this means crossing the frightening gap between their desires and capacities.  

Seasonal and László embark on an experiment in remaking intimacy outside the Republic of Gender. But as it continues, the two realize they are staging separate confrontations with domination: Seasonal finds they must confront their own relation to the violence and anger that marked their upbringing in working-class, small-town Australia, while László stages his own confrontation with his  decision to leave Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. As they attempt to improvise a  theater of domination that opens up possibilities of reciprocity, the energies of their sexuality stalk this collaboration, threatening to give them exactly what they bargained or begged for. 

A feminist paean to perversity in the tradition of Pauline Réage’s Story of O and Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus, Anna Poletti's hello, world? dares to fully inhabit female power, and to fully face the violence, beauty, and uncharted territories of human sexuality.

A fragmented reflection on movement, absence, and the unraveling of identity within the shifting landscapes of departure and return. Tarren Johnson explores the tension between private longing and public expression, where moments of love and vulnerability emerge in transient encounters.

Tarren Johnson grew up in North County San Diego, where she began dancing and writings a child. She continued her studies at CalArts in Los Angeles before moving to Europe, where she built a decade-long career in the performing arts. Her debut book of poetry, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, also serves as the foundation for the stage work of the same title.

2 poems written with AI assisted neural network.

as the non-world falls away is set of fragmented poetic compositions, created through iPhone scans of the artists notebook that have then been worked over digitally, testing the boundaries between image and text in a palimpsestic manner

WITHOUT THE E is a series of pamphlets responding to a presence or an absence felt in contemporary digital culture.

A weaving draft is a kind of notation for planning and sharing woven textil structures. The threading, along the top, shows how the warp is threaded through the heddles and frames; the treadling, along the right-hand side, show the order in which the treadles of the loom are to be pressed; and the tie-up, in the upper right-hand corner, shows how each treadle interacts with the loom’ frames. The drawdown, in the lower left, shows whether the warp or weft will be on top at any particular intersection of threads—thereby providing a “preview” of the completed textile. Often a draft diagram will indicate the intended color of the warp and weft threads, and the drawdown will show the completed textile’s color patterns. In “Drafts,” Allison uses letters instead of colors, melding digital weaving with writing.

WITHOUT THE E is a series of pamphlets responding to a presence or an absence felt in contemporary digital culture.

The theme was built around the idiom “VOSTOK”, the title given by Stéphanie Pécourt to her cycle dedicated to performative semantics, in which carte-blanches signed by guest curators at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles are deployed. Buried beneath several kilometers of ice, Lake Vostok acts as an invitation that both fascinates and refuses us. This sub-glacial lake on the edge of Antarctica, the largest identified, becomes the mirror-object of our desires and fears for the abyssal depths. The title of the program, Now I am a Lake, is taken from Sylvia Plath's poem Mirror (1961).

This booklet includes the scripts and texts of the performances, translated exclusively into French for the occasion, as well as images from the videos presented at the eponymous event. The compilation focuses on Sylvia Plath's poem Mirror, and includes an introductory text by curator Pauline Hatzigeorgiou. 

edited by SB34
graphic design by Raphaëlle Serres / Solid Éditons

Contributions by Signe Frederiksen, Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, Margaux Schwarz, Hagar Tenenbaum, Sylvia Plath & Eleanor Ivory Weber

A text on speaking, listening and being understood made in conversation with iOS speech-to-text software.

An experimental essay on voice, narrative, literature and translation. In this text Daniela tunes into the hums of voices heard within books, to the recollected csitation, to singing with stitched lips.

‘A Tone or Two’ comes in the form of a text score and a melodic voice work. Noticing a shift in her voice in recent years, Thams tracks how within the last decades female voices have lowered 23hz in pitch. Tuning into the shift toward more gender equality, vocal pitch is explored in relation to authority, electability, courage and rhythmicity.

With link to online sound work.

‘Five Devours’ is a short essay in five parts about need and food as a part of speech, about speech’s relationship to nourishment and hunger; the currency between eating and speaking, expending and consuming.

12 pages
150 x 200mm
risograph printed 
edition of 150

The Weight of the Concrete explores the legacy of the Turinese artist and publisher Ezio Gribaudo (1929–2022), examining his multifaceted oeuvre at the confluence of image and language. This publication, named after Il Peso del Concreto (1968)—a seminal work that featured Gribaudo’s early graphic creations alongside an anthology of concrete poetry edited by the poet Adriano Spatola (1941–88)—places Gribaudo’s work in conversation with approximately forty artists and poets from different generations, all of whom similarly engage with explorations of text, form, and visual expression.

Reflecting the editorial premise of Il Peso del Concreto, The Weight of the Concrete revisits the influential anthology, including archive material that documents its production, and reimagines it, pairing Gribaudo’s graphic work with a new selection of historical and contemporary concrete and experimental poetry.

At the heart of the volume is Gribaudo’s emblematic Logogrifi series, developed from the 1960s onward. The Logogrifi reveal his deep engagement with the art of bookmaking and fascination with industrial printing processes, relief matrices, typefaces, and language games.

In this new edition, the editors take the opportunity to revisit Gribaudo’s pioneering work, examining previously overlooked dimensions—gendered, geographical, and technological—and exploring contemporary associations beyond the original context. The book also includes essays that elucidate the poetic and political interplay between image, language, and materiality.

This publication is released following Ezio Gribaudo – The Weight of the Concrete, an exhibition held at the Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria (2023–24), and at the Museion—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy (2024).

Edited by Tom Engels and Lilou Vidal
Published by Axis Axis and Grazer Kunstverein

Contributions by Anni Albers, Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Irma Blank, Al Cartio, Paula Claire, CAConrad, Natalie Czech, Betty Danon, Constance DeJong, Mirtha Dermisache, Johanna Drucker, Bryana Fritz, Ilse Garnier, Liliane Giraudon, Susan Howe, Alison Knowles, Katalin Ladik, Liliane Lijn, Hanne Lippard, Sara Magenheimer, Françoise Mairey, Nadia Marcus, Giulia Niccolai, Alice Notley, Ewa Partum, sadé powell, N. H. Pritchard, Cia Rinne, Neide Dias de Sá, Giovanna Sandri, Mary Ellen Solt, Alice Theobald, Colleen Thibaudeau, Patrizia Vicinelli, Pascal Vonlanthen, Hannah Weiner, and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt

Essays by Alex Balgiu, Tom Engels, Nadia Marcus, Luca Lo Pinto, Mónica de la Torre, and Lilou Vidal

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.

Dreaming Water is the most thorough monograph dedicated to the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña to date. Vicuña coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s as a new category for her works composed of debris and structures that disappear in the landscape, and which also include her quipus (“knot” in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space.

Dreaming Water brings together over 200 works—including paintings, drawings, screenprints, collages, textiles, videos, photographs, installations, poetry, artist books and performances—created throughout the artist’s remarkable career. It also features several stimulating texts—a lengthy epistolary piece by curator and editor Miguel A. López as well as new essays by anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli, curator Catherine de Zegher and art historian José de Nordenflycht. Vicuña herself contributes two texts, reflecting on her drawings from the “Palabrarmas” project and the activism of the group Artists for Democracy, which she cofounded in 1974. A rousing conversation between Vicuña, anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena and curator Camila Marambio also figures in the book, blending the artist’s voice with those who are experts in fields pertinent to her practice.

Inspired initially by Jerome Rothenberg’s translation Flower World Variations, which Cecilia Vicuña first encountered in 1985, Deer Book brings together nearly forty years of the artist’s poetry, “poethical” translations, and drawings related to cosmologies and mythologies surrounding the deer, and sacrificial dance in cultures around the world.

Woven like one of her quipu installations, Vicuña’s texts—which include original compositions in Spanish as well as English translations by Daniel Borzutzky—become meditations on translation, not just of the sacred nature of this animal but on how our understandings of ceremony and ritual are transformed, by this ongoing process. Taken as inspiration rather than conundrum, the impossibility of translation opens up poetic possibilities for Vicuña as she continues her lifelong exploration into the nature of communication across eras and distant lands, languages and shared symbols within Indigenous spiritualities.

The fourth in a series of publications, featuring writing by graphic design students of EKA GD MA. Typing... includes essays, scripts, translations and stories on a wide range of topics: killing vowels and milling fonts, personal knowledge management, shortcuts, tedious/careful/tiring/joyful typesetting, type of Georgianness, typing in 3rab(izi) and typing in all lowercase.

With contributions by Anna Wittenkamp Rich, Archil Tsereteli, Fa(tima)-Ezzahra El Khammas, João (Juca) Pedro Nogueira, Karthik Palepu, Laura Martens, Linnea Lindgren, Rok Ifko Kranjc.

Designed by Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas and Laura Martens
Cover by Hanafi Gazali

In The Rebound, a short story by author Natasha Stagg (Surveys, Artless), a young woman takes a work trip in the wake of a humiliating break-up, and agrees to be set up on a blind date...

The erotic works of Anaïs Nin started out as a freelance job. To support their bohemian lifestyles, Nin and her writer friends earned a dollar a page writing pornography for an anonymous client. The writers hated The Collector, as they called him, for his repeated instructions to “Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry”.

The Collector, a new series of short stories published by jouissance, seeks to pay homage to writers, like Nin, who explored the erotic, the taboo and the connection between jouissance and the creative process. It also honours their chosen, but much maligned, genre. By commissioning some of our favourite female writers to compose erotic short stories, we begin what we hope will be an ever-growing collection of compelling and provocative fiction that will inspire conversation, debate and further creative expression.

Munken Pure 80gsm paper publication with red Singer Sewn binding. Featuring an illustration by Emma Rose Schwartz.

Guest edited by artist Helen Marten and literary agent Harriet Moore with Matthew Stuart, this volume of the journal considers what it means for a publication to be an allegorical container. A simple box in which to gather multiple things, an economical set of permutations — rational in one sense, yet defiantly flexible to move. Contributors were approached with an open invitation; some explored the multiplicities of containing or containers, while others filled the printed vessel with their own ongoing preoccupations. The following pages perform as envelope, bag, shell, net, fold, alarm, letter and instruction. There are holes to disappear within; smoke to knot and wind; shadows to unfold — a context that takes in and binds, finding new kinships from unforeseen proximities.

THE FIRE FLOWERS AND THE FLOWER LIGHTS UP –
Lucy Mercer
(spine)

WE SHALL GREET THE MOON AGAIN
Walter Price
(front cover)

BACK PAGES OF ALGIERS DIARIES 2018
Lydia Ourahmane
(inside front & inside back cover)

AN INTRODUCTION TO / NOTES ON / INSTRUCTION FOR THE FRONT NOVEL
Eliza Barry Callahan
(pp.1–16)

SATURDAY MORNING
Kathryn Scanlan
(pp.25–29)

KILLDEER
Jason Schwartz
(pp.33–38)

ALARMS AND EXCURSIONS
Rosmarie Waldrop
(pp.45–61)

"THE BATHROOM"
Najwa Barakat
(pp.67–76)

ARMY ROLLS, A CIRCUMSCRIPTION
Roy Claire Potter
(pp.81–91)

CONCHOMANIA
Felix Bernstein
(pp.95–109)

O-POEM
Line-Gry Hørup
(pp.113–129)

THIS MUSCLE
Cally Spooner
(pp.133–153)

STERLING PARK IN THE DARK
Susan Howe
(pp.159–179)

COCONUTTERY
Mathelinda Nabugodi
(pp.183–193)

YOUR SELF CONFIDENT BABY
Aurelia Guo
(pp.197–206)

BIOGRAPHY OF A NET: HOLDING A VOLUME
Daisy Hildyard
(pp.211–225)

A GUIDE TO THE POETRY OF LI HO
Eliot Weinberger
(pp.229–235)

WOMEN SMOKING
Charline von Heyl
(throughout & p.239)

INFRATHIN
Marcel Duchamp
(throughout & p.239)

THE MAZED WORLD
Rachael Allen
(bookmark insert)

UNTITLED
Helen Marten
(back cover)

Edited and selected by the brilliant Leo Boix and with poems in Spanish and English from across Latin America. There’s more than 30 poets featured, covering poems about what it is to be queer in contemporary Latin America. These poems cover gender, sexuality, politics, nature, and everything in between.

Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes — and dead calm — of grief. It is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author’s searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of a mother’s death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modelled the book’s formless form on Bourgeois’s Cells sculptures – at once channelling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.

Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorisable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past.

Written in the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, and inspired by the lectures of Roland Barthes, Anne Carson, and Jorge Luis Borges, Appendix Project collects eleven talks and essays. These surprising and moving performances, underscored by the sleeplessness of the first year of their child’s life, contain their dazzling thinking through the work of On Kawara, Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Marguerite Duras, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois, Doris Salcedo, Jenny Holzer, and more.