Books

day pulls down the sky is the title of Okpokwasili’s first (and simultaneously released) LP initiated by Danspace Project’s executive director and chief curator Judy Hussie-Taylor who brought the idea of a recording to Okwui during one of their meetings about Danspace’s Platform 2020 and research institute. These songs were written by Okwui between 2012 and 2018, some specifically for her interdisciplinary performances. Four of the songs were first performed by Okwui at Danspace Project, including “sam’s song” on the occasion of Sam Miller’s memorial on September 15, 2018.

FORMS OF LIFE OF FORMS brings artistic research into form – not merely as an aesthetic question but as a social and political one. Indeed, there are no politics without form! With Forms of Life, Rob Ritzen curated several “Moments” that assembled works, collective readings, and other references into a single installation. This publication reshuffles documentation of these “Moments” as a visual reflection of the trajectory of this research.

Rob Ritzen works as a curator with a background in philosophy. His curatorial practice is focusing on self-organized and cooperative formats. Consciously positioned at the margins of established institutions and outside of market-oriented spaces, his practice is placed in close association with communities of cultural practitioners. His initiatives are attempts to reconfigure the politics of making art and alternative forms of production and presentation.

ROT is a publication reflecting the research “Wicked technology/Wild fermentation,” by Sara Manente that focuses on forms and practice of fermentation as ways to rethink bodies and their making. This glossy magazine performs research, aiming to infect the reader, and questioning how to spread, publish, and help the work survive. 

Sara Manente is a performance artist, dance maker and researcher born in Italy and living in Brussels. She is interested in narrowing the distance between the performer, the audience, and the work. Her research starts from a dance practice that problematizes perception, translation, and ways of doing. Her work comes out in hybrid forms: book launch, 3Dfilm, written text, interview, choreographic piece, workshop, telepathic experience, collaboration, et al.

ZOOLOGICAL VANDALISM by Sina Seifee in collaboration with editor Renan Lauran and designer Foad Farahani, is immersion in the compiling and composing of Seifee’s notes on medieval bestiaries, and placing them in sequential order. It is the first chapter of a series that creates context and opens small descriptive steps towards (what Latour might call) “knowing interestingly” about bestiaries. It is a speculative adventure in bio-techno tales and old styles of knowing. As an “ecology of obligation” with Iranian sensuality and its ardent materiality, somewhere in the menagerie of found and feral animal videos on Whatsapp and Telegram, is Seifee’s undisciplined grounding in visual crafts.

Sina Seifee researches as an artist in the fields of narrative, performance, and knowledge production. He has been working on the question of technology and storytelling in the arts and sciences of the middle ages and the past-present of material reading practices in collective life. He studied Applied Mathematics in Tehran, received his MA in Media Arts in KHM Cologne. In 2017 he finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.

Written in the style of a sarcastic and irreverent guidebook, How to Suppress Women's Writing explains how women are prevented from producing written works, not given credit when such works are produced, or dismissed or belittled for those contributions they are acknowledged to have made. Although primarily focusing on texts written in English, the author also includes examples from non-English works and other media, like paintings. Citing authors and critics like Suzy McKee Charnas, Margaret Cavendish, and Vonda McIntyre, Russ aims to describe the systematic social forces that impede widespread recognition of the work of female authors.

A character called X journeys through a present that is neither here nor there, but feels oddly proximate. She moves through landscapes of words, ever-shifting to host the groundless present, a place and time driven by her motivated, yet contextless pursuit. Narrative is always under construction. The preferred medium for X's peregrinations: a sentence, as capacious as a three-second video, a ten-year nap, or an unexplored hard drive. In this suspended world, X's sensorium is curious and alert, but also anguished, hesitant, and precarious: she feels around for sympathetic energies and familiar faces along the way. Along what way? A book like a body might be a room for waiting, a machine for memory, a sensuous thing, an image quickly glimpsed...

Working across a range of media including video, sound, performance, sculpture, collage, and installation, New York-based artist Sara Magenheimer disrupts, manipulates, and defamiliarizes language with bold combinations of image and text. Her videos incorporate traditional filmic editing techniques alongside those inspired by music and collage.

Life not as singular and individual, but entangled and connected. 

Featuring a poem by Hanne Lippard, an interview with Dope St Jude, 6 Q&A's with IG Meme LGBTQ+ accounts, Selected Objects from the Museum of Trans Hirstory’s ‘Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects’ by Chris E. Vargas, an interview with Marilyn Waring, BUTCHCAMP, an essay Nina Lykke, (radical) self-care: biography of a network, a fashion shoot 'Gluck, Hig, Tim, Grub, Peter' photographed by Ilenia Arosio, an essay by Nadia Hebson, WICKED TECHNOLOGY/WILD FERMENTATION by Sara Manente, a Second Skin Harness by Sara Manente, Inju Kaboom and Gunbike Erdemir, Feminism, He-Yin Zhen and Reconceptualizing China’s History: A Brief Comment by Rebecca E. Karl, Thunderclap by Amy Suo Wu, an interview with Amy Sillman by Melissa Gordon, Some Women Want to Have Their Cock and Eat It To by Jill Johnston, (Post)Menopausal Graphic Design Strategies by Rietlanden Women’s Office and the essay Sex in Texas, anticipated by Lili Reynaud-Dewar.

By means of a dialogue between the text and the visual material from the videos, Steyn Bergs and Emma van der Put want to take a critical look at how images are mobilised, not only to illustrate certain visions of the future, but also how they contribute to the creation of such visions—which are never ‘neutral’—in the present. On the basis of the videos made by Van der Put, this publication focuses on the specific working and politics of images in the Noordwijk and the Expo area in Brussels. Within these locations, developments that are currently taking place throughout Europe (from property speculation to migration flows) manifest themselves in a concrete and local manner.

With contributions by: Rebecca Jagoe, Erin Eck, Skye Arundhati Thomas, Samuel Kenswil, Daniella Valz-Gen, Alex Margo Arden, Artun Alaska Arasli, Stacy Skolnik, Laura Morrison, Benjamin Edwin Slinger, Harman Bains and Audry B.

With contributions by: Georgia Patience Anderson, Hans-Christian Dany, Ruth Angel Edwards, Liv Fontaine, Sarah Gail, Adam Gallagher, Penny Goring, Harmony Grunge, Tiziana La Melia, Aaron Lehman and Thomas Laprade, James Loop, Rosanna McNamara.

The Interjection Calendar is an on and offline project, devised and hosted by Montez Press. Each month an artist or writer is commissioned to produce a new piece of work for release on our website. The PDF can be downloaded for free and there are 12 releases per year. At the end of the year the collection is published, demonstrating a diverse range of collaborations and experimental works, mapping the year in contemporary art writing, with equal space held for the emerging and the established. The Calendar reflects the current importance of online content media, pushing the relationship between image and text in this domain. 

Contributors: Kerry Campbell is a freelance curator and producer. She currently works as the Public Programmes Curator for Bloc Projects gallery (Sheffield) and is the founder and curator of TMT Projects - a contemporary arts platform based in Luton Town. 

vei darling is a first generation Liberian-American multidisciplinary artist and activist, who grew up in the D(M)V. vei moved to New York City when she was 17, and began an intense path of spiritual reconfiguration. vei positions herself within social justice and humanitarianism, whilst being infused with magick and spirituality. Her ultimate desire is to subvert the current paradigm in lieu of one that respects and reflects life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Caspar Heinemann is a writer, artist and poet. Their interests include critical occultism, gay biosemiotics and countercultural mythologies. Some of the time they teach and read things at institutions, a lot of the time they cook potatoes in different shapes and listen to Alan Watts lectures. They were born in London, UK, roughly 2.5 months after the release of Green Day’s seminal album Dookie. 

Douglas Kearney has published six books, most recently, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). His work has been exhibited at the American Jazz Museum, Temple Contemporary, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and The Visitor’s Welcome Center (Los Angeles). He studied at Howard University, Cave Canem, and California Institute of the Arts. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family just west of Minneapolis and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Douglaskearney.com 

Cara Levine - with: Khadija Tarver, Christine Wong Yap, Eliza Myrie, Greg Boyle, Rodney Lu- cas, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Ashley Stull Meyers, Sidony O’neal, Kambui Olujimi Jadelynn Stahl, Amanda Eicher, Jessica Angima, Faye Gleisser, Quenton Baker, Sam Aranke, Jade Thacker, Ekaette Ekong, Christopher Johnson, Marvin K White, Kemi Adeyemi, Constance Hockaday, Kate Johnson, Bayete Ross-Smith, Leila Weefur, Kirat Randhawa, Angela Hennessy, Elizabeth Dorbad, Prophet Walker, Shamell Bell, Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle and Ann Lewis. Cara Levine lives in Los Angeles, CA and is an artist exploring the intersections of the physical, metaphysical, traumatic and illusionary through sculpture, video and socially engaged practice. 

Daisy Parris was born in Kent, 1993, and graduated from Goldsmiths in 2014. She currently lives and works in South London. Daisy Parris’ work raises questions about identity politics as well as the limits of what it means to be human. By using various formats such as portraiture, roomscapes and text, Parris focuses on identity struggles as well as the worry, guilt, numbness and the violent encounters of everyday existence. 

Porpentine Charity Heartscape is a writer, game designer, and dead swamp milf in Oakland. Her work includes xeno-femme sci /fantasy, cursed video games, and globe-spanning sentient slime molds. She has exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, EMP Museum, and the National Gallery of Denmark, and has been commissioned by Vice and Rhizome. 

James Lawrence Slattery is an artist, critic and academic living and working in London. They hold an undergraduate degree in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London and a masters in Film Aesthetics from St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. 

Gjergji Shkurti is a New York based author. His writing explores architecture as fiction and incorporates a filmic imagination. The writing stems from a yearning to push history forward. 

Chanel Vegas is an artist who works in London. She writes poetry, makes paintings, and regularly performs as part of her work. Chanel graduated from Goldsmiths in 2017 and was the first student to be the recipient of the university’s Artist Award. 

Punch Viratmalee currently lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand. Viratmalee graduated Chulalongkorn University in 2015 with a BA in Communication Design. She previously worked at a commercial gallery in Bangkok and is now working as a curatorial assistant for the first Thailand Biennale. She also writes. 

The White Pube is the collaborative identity of Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente under which they write criticism an occasionally curate. The White Pube is based at thewhitepube. com and on Twitter and Instagram as @thewhitepube.

The meaning of the word ‘error’, in its origin, is neutral. In Latin ‘errare’ means both ‘to wander freely’ and ‘to wander from the right path’. After the seventeenth century, however, the word ‘error’ lost its ambiguity within English usage and became clearly understood as wrongdoing, as defect, as a way of missing a desired effect. The ninth issue of Pfeil Magazine focuses on the potential of erroneous processes to redefine the meaning of malfunction and takes a look at movements that are aimless or non-productive. Through this reflection, ‘error’ is introduced once again as the possibility of wandering freely. 

Contributions by: Mitchell Anderson, Christiane Blattmann, Adam Christensen, Tyler Coburn, Hans-Christian Dany, Michael Dean, Gina Fischli, Flaka Haliti, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Lina Hermsdorf, Judith Hopf, Karl Larsson, Clare Molloy, Susan Morgan and Thomas Lawson, Mense Reents, Stacy Skolnik, Paul Spengemann, Ramaya Tegegne 

Editors: Anja Dietmann, Nadine Droste

Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif. 

The tenth issue is dedicated to Mainstream, this volume questions exercised motions of majorities, practiced over long or short distances and timeframes, that can become patterns, sometimes taken for granted, sometimes followed unconsciously, automatically, or even mechanically. 

Contributions by: Alice Creischer, Annette Kelm, Charlotte Simon, Dodo Voelkel, Emily Pope, Hans-Christian Dany, Harry Gamboa Jr., Heike-Karin Föll, Holly White, Jan Matthé, Jannis Marwitz, Karl Holmqvist, Kevin Gallagher, Lars Bang Larsen, Magdalena Los, Marina Pinsky, Merle Radtke, Nicola Gördes, Pablo Schlumberger, Penny Goring and Stella Rossié.
Editor: Anja Dietmann

‘Masturbation in between the crimes against you will become a deciding matter in the kangaroo court. Philosophical questions will be answered without inquiry.’ 

If you have ever wondered how a cross between a funding application gone wrong and a tabloid column about the art world would read, this is it. Mellor presents a unique combination of novel and image, creating a polymorphous narrator who moves between personifications. Perhaps the most hazardous of these is Tippy Rampage, who is satisfyingly livid with the state of, well, everything. 

In a series of paintings, female police officers from British television shows such as Happy Valley and The Bill are positioned in an array of apocalyptic settings: freezing, burning, and backdropped by flooding. The accompanying text chronicles an acute feeling of being watched, what it feels like to watch whoever is watching you, or, as Mellor writes, how it feels to be kettled in your own flat, by your own paintings. 

Fragmented accounts map the protagonist’s shifting relationship to crime, gender, class and sexuality from multiple perspectives: as a child in Gamesley in the ‘70s, a lesbian performer in sex clubs in the mid ‘90s, an artist with and without gallery representation, and as a lecturer within an academic institution. These changes of position mix the language of a rally cry with an acerbic satire of the authorial voice and everyone they encounter. 

Published by Montez Press, Sirens is the first novel by Dawn Mellor and includes the complete set of the Sirens paintings. 

Dawn Mellor (b.1970) is an artist based in London, who has been exhibiting internationally since the 1990s. Solo exhibitions and special projects include Sixty Years at Tate Britain; London, Vile Affections at Studio Voltaire; London, Dawn Mellor at The Migros Museum; Zurich, Sirens at Team Gallery; New York, Madame X and The Party Tricks at Victoria Miro; London, Michael Jackson On The Wall at The National Portrait Gallery; London (touring), What Happened to Helen? Focal Point Gallery; Southend and Malerei, Böse at Kunstverein; Hamburg.

The eleventh issue of Pfeil Magazine looks into the multitude of meanings behind the word love: a positive affection and strong physical feeling which can be addressed to a friend, family, food, God, an object, or to an amorous partner or partners. Furthermore, it questions the expectations which go along with love, whether that love is returned or unanswered. Relationship patterns and role distributions are surveyed, vulnerabilities are assessed, but besides that the Love issue is also about a pregnant male seahorse, an infatuation with a smiling rock, sports and much more. 

Contributors: Adrian Williams, Anneli Schütz, CAConrad, Ceyenne Doroshow, Cyd Nova, Dan Kwon, Emily Pope, Eva Illouz, FORT, Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann, Gina Fischli, Hanna Fiegenbaum, Hans-Christian Dany, Keenan Jay, Maria Jakobsen, Mette Sterre, Monika Baer, Nick Oberthaler, Lindsay Lawson, Stine Sampers, Suné Woods, Theodore Barrow, Thomas Laprade, Vanessa Place and Vincent Ramos.

For the Interjection Calendar each month Montez Press invites an artist, a writer, a poet or a doer of some sorts to say things. All 12 pieces have introspection and reflection in common. They are a subjective overview of writing in the expanded field of contemporary art and writing in the year 2019. This is the Interjection Calendar 2019, the fifth collection in this series. 

With contributions by sabrina soyer, Lisa Robertson, Hatty Nestor, Adrianna Whittingham, Sondria, Claudia Pagès, Laetitia Paviani, Bella Milroy, Georgina Tyson, Son Kit, Alix Jean Vollum, Rene Matic and bleubaglife. 

Find the last 12 PDF's on montezpress.com.

"Gender as a concept is not only applicable to humans. When the idea of gender is applied to the cables, its meaning is reduced into a relationship of insertion. As a non-binary individual and designer, I find this problematic that such way of classifying gender violently erases the existence of everyone that doesn’t neatly fit into those categories. However, instead of insisting on abolishing those terms, I discovered that the idea of gender that we applied to the electric cables functioning in very queer ways that we couldn’t expect." More on www.d-act.org.

Neighbor’s mutable, shifty narrator alternately reifies and attempts to refuse the constricting, separating, culture-load bearing wall between lovers and neighbors. As antagonisms and intimacies converge, Levitsky troubles the divisions within urban space, and between spatial and ethical frames: “I live on a street where / people turn (on) each other / into a theory.”

This second edition, printed a decade after Neighbor‘s original publication, features an expanded version of the play, “Perfect California: A Family Affair.”

Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. Yusoff initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between feminist black theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.

The book Writing Scores is the result of 3 months of written dialogues produced within the group of artistic researchers of a.pass during the Block I /2014 curated by Lilia Mestre. Questions on art, dreams, politics, violence, research, life, practice, bureaucracy, resistance, etcetera, … are addressed and later on re-addressed, revisited and assembled into a book with (at least) three faces… 

BUBBLE SCORE – The Relation between Performance and Writing is the third book of the ScoreScapes publications series. The book contains texts by a.pass researchers, collages as well as Scores for the Reader inserted at the back of the book. 

The book Perform Back Score is the result of 3 months of performed, sketched and written dialogue produced within a group of artistic researchers, each plunging into a study about the Conditions for the Emergence of Poetics. Poetics used here as ‘acts’ that transform our ways of perceiving, as situations that invite another understanding of ‘things’.

ANOTHER VERSION: Thinking Through Performing approaches performance as a method of producing different versions of the self, referred to as ‘versioning’. It explores technologies and processes that produce such versions, and asks the question of how to understand the self within this multiplicity. ANOTHER VERSION: Thinking Through Performing proposes strategies of versioning as a means of attaching gesture, speech or lived experience to research questions or problems. 

It is comprised of 7 cahiers containing games, scores, short stories, images, quotes and reflections that are often products of collaborative practices. Each cahier opens up a particular territory or lens, indicated through its title: CAHIER I Multiplicators, CAHIER II Pandiculators, CAHIER III Arena, CAHIER IV Objectaffilia, CAHIER V Animalities and CAHIER VI Ledger. 

The content of each cahier is structured into eight categories: conversation, image as score, notes, quote, reference text, report, score and short story. These can be used as the reader/user sees fit, a story, an image or a quote can be used as a score, a score can be reversed or a reflection can be cut up and transformed into a new text. 

Cahier 0 reflects and expands on the content of the publication and the research from which it springs. It contains a conversation Multiplicity, Multiplicators and the Supermarket Scorebetween Philippine Hoegen and Sebastian Olma, and an essay Ecstatic Methods — Seven Vectors Addressed to Philippine Hoegen by Kristien Van den Brande.

Anna Barham’s Return To Leptis Magna is a book which compiles anagrams of the title sentence. We designed the rules which allowed the artist to compose the book, including a typeface which has different letterforms for characters that appear more than once, so that each letter is unique. 

Design by Anna Barham & Julia. Typeset in Leptis, designed by Julia.

The material in Poisonous Oysters was generated during a live production reading group held in Newcastle University’s Fine Art Department on 26.01.18. Passages from the texts listed below were read aloud by the participants and interpreted by speech recognition software over and over, creating a poly-vocal feedback loop with the machine. The output is rewritten here as a score, flattening the time of the event and aligning the different versions of the texts to reveal the sound mutations between them.

Precarious Life, Judith Butler
The Waves, Virginia Woolf
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, Vilém Flusser
Body Pressure, Bruce Nauman
Testo Junkie, Beatriz Preciado
The Politics of Translation, Gayatri Spivak 
Creating trance and hypnosis scripts, Gemma Bailey 
Untitled document, John Latham

“Xeno” speaks to the turn away from “what is” toward “what could be”: the (as yet) unknown, the alien—having been employed in recent years through such speculative-political approaches as xenofeminism and xenopoetics. Perhaps It Is High Time for a Xeno-architecture to Match documents a conversation series from January to March 2017 that explored what an intervention of the xeno might bring to bear on contemporary and future (infra)structure. 

This book aims to unpack the prefix, probing what it entails—not merely rhetorically but also as a means of practice, in an attempt to bring the ideas it contains more concretely into the domain of architecture. It proposes to link the more philosophical discussions on the notion of xeno with questions of instrumentalization and governance that are necessarily involved in the praxis of architecture. And it relates the significance of legal architecture and technologically driven transformation in the metaphysics of law back to the agenda of xeno-architecture. By researching how architects, artists, thinkers, and activists operating in the spatial field might endorse a process of “alienation” to confront global issues, this project attempts to re-radicalize spatial practice. 

Contributions by ARMEN AVANESSIAN, BENJAMIN BRATTON, KATHLEEN DITZIG, DANIEL FALB, ANKE HENNING, VICTORIA IVANOVA, MARKUS MIESSEN, LUCIANA PARISI, PATRICIA REED.