Books

An account of an album about Albania by British experimental musicians made in the eighties. Also involving stories about the Albanian Society, William Bland, A. L. lloyd, RCPB ML, and Cornelius Cardew.

From Scratch is a story of Albanian Summer: An Entertainment, an LP album released by Practical Music in London in 1984. The album was composed by Dave Smith—English experimental composer and musician, figure of the British minimalist scene, explorer of Javanese and Albanian musical traditions with the English Gamelan Orchestra and Liria which he co-founded, and a member of The Scratch Orchestra (with Brian Eno, Cornelius Cardew, John Tilbury, Keith Rowe, Michael Nyman, Michael Parsons, etc.)—, and performed by Janet Sherbourne and Jan Steele, improvised and classical musicians.

Through interviews, archival materials, and hard-to-find essays the publication contextualizes the background of British experimental musicians' interest in socialist Albania. It includes new interviews with Dave Smith and Jan Steele, three essays by Smith on Albanian music and culture, an essay by Gavin Bryars on Smith's music, discussions on the influence of A.L. Lloyd and Cornelius Cardew, and the role of the Albanian Society in the UK. The book introduces new insight into the leftist internationalist background of British experimental music influenced by the work of Cardew. 

Apart from the musical internationalism, the book also includes a section of nine abstract slogans depicting the political and artistic contradictions of socialist Albania; annotated bibliography of books published in different languages on Albania; the collection of images taken from the biweekly Zëri i Rinisë (The Voice of Youth) published in 1984 and 1985.

The moral tale is a literary genre that was especially popular in Europe throughout the 18th century. As ways of being and doing were strongly tied to conventions assigned to social roles and genres, the rise of rationality and freethought, characteristic of this era, began re-organizing the so-called “natural order” of established patterns. Through fables and satires, moral tales expressed sharp critical views on the social relationships and hierarchies of the time, often using radical irony and cruelty, as in the tales of Jonathan Swift or of the Marquis de Sade, to decipher the untold rules at play in this early age of capitalism.

The works of the three artists invited to these Three Moral Tales are not that of moralists, but somehow assume a kind of moral dimension, as they present themselves as critical allegories. Joëlle de La Casinière, Ana Jotta and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven make use of fables and sometimes caricatures to observe and criticize the cruelty of human relationships. The “moral tales” narrated by these three artists scrutinize representations of evil, and mock hierarchies, traditions and social order. By doing so, they also follow up on a certain spirit of the iconoclastic avant-gardes of the early 20th century.

French artist Joëlle de la Casinière, Portuguese Ana Jotta and Flemish Anne Mie Van Kerckhoven have in common to pay no fealty to trends of contemporary art. Moreover, they fought unwaveringly throughout their respective careers the need to see their work being given an “official line”. Instead, they stood aside, went underground or remained indifferent to the twists and turns of the art market and institutions. They sometimes created surrogate characters, hid, or playfully modified their names to react to the branding of identity in the artworld, and to the imposed marginalization that they had to cope with as women artists, as did artists living in peripheral geographies. In a way, paradoxically, being marginalized encouraged a calculated versatility of media and styles, and the invention of an idiosyncratic vocabulary, while total freedom remained their one and only rule.

Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative publishes unexpected, genre-bending works by important 20th century writers. Unearthed from personal and institutional archives in the United States and abroad, these materials are edited by doctoral students at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

SERIES III is a collection of 8 chapbooks that authenticate Edward Dahlberg's claim that "There is more political energy in friendship than in ideology."

Langston Hughes & Nancy Cunard cement their personal relationship by penning notes across the ocean throughout the Spanish Civil War. After meeting at Black Mountain, John Wieners & Charles Olson remain in close correspondence until months before Olson's death. In "Old Father, Old Artificer," part lecture and part evocation of Charles Olson, Diane di Prima helps to establish how key figures in "New American Poetry" were processing their own past, while the breathless Olson lecture by Ed Dorn erodes the fictive dualism that pits poetic theory against practical action. In his letters, Michael Rumaker invites you to share his life, its radiant pursuit of love, "dirty realism," literature, and lasting community, and Joanne Kyger booms "communication is essential" in her Letters to & from. In Homemade Poems, a gift-book mailed to a friend in 1964, Lorine Niedecker insists that the handmade chapbook is the material continuation of the poems so carefully nestled in its pages.

Breaking up the monolith of the historical lens, Series III continues to track individuals as they tell their stories, cast their lifelines, and position themselves in relation to the times they lived in—and the times we live in—through intimate journals, letters, lectures, and friendships. Edited, annotated, and with accompanying essays, The London Review of Books calls this "a serious and worthy enterprise." Diane di Prima calls the series "a gold mine" and Joanne Kyger writes: "What a brilliant cast of characters. Just exactly what one (myself) would like to read."

SERIES III includes:

Lorine Niedecker: Homemade Poems (John Harkey, editor)

John Wieners & Charles Olson: Selected Correspondence (Parts I & II) (Michael Seth Stewart, editor)

Diane di Prima: Charles Olson Memorial Lecture (Ammiel Alcalay and Ana Božičević, editors)

Edward Dorn: The Olson Memorial Lectures (Lindsey Freer, editor)

Michael Rumaker: Selected Letters (Megan Paslawski, editor)

Letters to & from Joanne Kyger (Ammiel Alcalay and Joanne Kyger, editors)

Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard & Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics & Friendship in the Spanish Civil War (Anne Donlon, editor)

Published in conjunction with an exhibition at Kunstverein München, this catalogue is presented as an integral part of the show, augmenting it through the presentation of subjects, aspects, and themes which are better suited to the printed medium or demand another kind of involvement. Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven’s works involve painting, drawing, digital media, and video, and reflect her fascination from a female point of view with the representation of women in mass media, the connections between sex and technology, different knowledge systems, and the unconscious. Besides numerous works, projects, and images, the book includes insightful explanations by the artist.

‘Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist’ is a series of small chapbooks designed to bring collaborators, audiences, and readers together as part of the project ‘Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th-Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape’, initiated by South African artist Wendy Morris. Through speculative investigations of plants-as-archive and storytelling-as-method, the project focuses on retrieving a library of botanical-medicinal knowledge that perhaps informed Morris’s enslaved ancestor. The ‘Fieldguides’ invite collaborators to shed light on this from multiple angles. Joshua Cohen and Johanna Lot are the guest contributors of the third edition.

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa: Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers catalogues the trajectory of a cycle of performances of the same name, through which the artist Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa attempted to exhaust his interest in the Guatemalan Civil War as a recurring subject of his work. Designed by Studio Manuel Raeder and published by If I Can’t Dance with Bom Dia Books, the publication documents the six performances in the cycle via foldout colour posters of each work, and an essay by Frédérique Bergholtz and Susan Gibb which offers descriptions of each performance alongside a reflection on the cycle as a whole.

Four zines, documenting and continuing a series of four exhibitions that took place last summer, also known as the summer of 2021 at Klosterruine Berlin. Digging up what’s always already left behind, this series reframes the exhibition as an excavation site and engages archeology as a speculative and aesthetic procedure. A map, a notebook, a calendar and a dream diary, these four zines allow you to become your own archeologist.

First monograph on the durational performance artist Melati Suryodarmo, one of the pioneers of performance art in Indonesia.

Published on the occasion of the presentation of the Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Art, BACA 2022, to Melati Suryodarmo, and in conjunction with her solo exhibition at the Bonnefanten Maastricht in 2022.

Melati Suryodarmo (born 1969 in Surakarta, Indonesia) is a versatile artist, but is particularly known for her compelling performances. Suryodarmo's performances reflect her own ideas and cultural background, and concern the relationship between the human body, the defining cultural traditions to which the body belongs and the context in which it lives. She focuses on concepts like home, spirituality, family and personal history, interweaving them with socio-political, activist and mainly feminist ideas.

Literally crumbling under our own weight, several metric tonnes of shells speak up from the ground, causing a sensation remote from that of walking on a gallery floor. Yet, crushed calcite from marine molluscs is an essential ingredient in concrete, a major constituent of our built environment. In Muscle Memory, a sculpture by Nina Canell, the biomineral forms that feed the construction industry gradually break down over the course of the exhibition. Material stress gives way to a sounding, durational sculpture, inviting us to consider the ineffable number of broken bodies that holds us up. Shell Reader calls on the material vitality of calcium carbonate, detailing broken pieces of shell from Muscle Memory. By foregrounding these fragments, each page echoes a crack, snap, split, or splinter.

Like a donkey dressed in zebra’s clothing, criticism can appear in a borrowed coat; perhaps it can even reveal itself in stolen poems. Here, among fables of donkeys, shoemakers and barricades, German angels and non-German angels, and a few lines from Emily Dickinson, the transformative possibilities of art are unfolded in the figure of labor.

Poems and Parables on the Political Utility of Art is a small book. It looks like poetry, but it is better described as a kind of criticism. Taking up some recent disqualifications of art’s political potential, it refutes them in a threefold movement: against the notion of commodification of works of art; against the act of denouncing art as always-already reified from the safe position of a pure, untouched theory; against the notions that art must either reveal our alienation, or produce immediate effects on the social sphere. Outlining art’s transformative possibilities in the figure of a certain labor, the argument is shaped among fables of donkeys, zebras from Gaza, apes from Adorno, and a particular barricade from the Paris Commune.

Fake Calligraphy is a mobile sculpture consisting of a simple set of metal frames, batik, and tools that are used in repeated collective performances. The sculpture serves as a workshop where patterns based on pseudo-writing are collectively produced. The publication documents a joint making process along with some of the techniques that are applied here, such as dyeing with natural dyes and wax batik.

Fake Calligraphy is an ongoing work made by many participants, developed and facilitated by Ada Van Hoorebeke, Maartje Fliervoet, and the artistic platform manoeuvre. Amongst other places Fake Calligraphy was performed and shown at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Kunsthal Gent, (Ghent) and at homes and studio’s of contributors in Ghent, Serekunda, Brussels, The Netherlands, and Berlin.

The motifs produced during time-intensive dyeing processes – which uses indigo, urine, and extracts of natural waste materials – are neither conventional fabric nor lace patterns, and they have only a distant relationship to batik painting. Yet, they are simulations and portraits of both.

Pattern Nor Painting starts in a batik Workshop in Bantul, Indonesia where an artist reconnects with her blank canvas and the batik techniques she learned from an artist in Serekunda, the Gambia many years ago. As documented in this publication Van Hoorebeke’s installations and performances deftly combine unique textiles and ceramics with production-chain goods, ranging from car parts to strawberry jam. Engaging with ages-old traditions of batik production for present-day communities and settings, her work embodies ancient craft, story-telling, time, female thinking, and above all, a connection to the natural world.

This publication El Plástico, the Sun that lives inside the Rock is an observation on evolution of material plasticity, it is a story about plastic whose native land is Mesoamerica. It explores the past, present and future of plastic through encounters with various people — a weaver from Oaxaca, a taxi driver, a sociologist working on trash collection in Mexico City and the owner of a small family-run plastic factory. The book contains a polymorphous project resulting from several years of research by artist Viktorija Rybakova and designer Goda Budvytytė, it also includes a conversation between philosophers Kristupas Sabolius and Catherine Malabou, and essays by Post Brothers and Chris Fitzpatrick.

Editor: Goda Budvytytė and Viktorija Rybakova
Texts: Goda Budvytytė, Chris Fitzpatrick, Catherine Malabou, Post Brothers, Viktorija Rybakova, Kristupas Sabolius

“The artist’s experience of being inside art institutions, starting from the effort made to be accepted in order to develop one’s art practice, then the experience of going through them, and while in them, the many ways of having to learn how to be inside. This will in several ways inform the development of an artist’s practice, for the good or for the bad. Making this publication has been an attempt at recognizing and dealing with, rather than avoiding, the tensions that exist in the relationship between artists and art institutions at a time when most art institutions themselves are under the pressure of austerity-politics.”

The Artist Job Description, for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institutionconstitutes the result of Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s PhD research in the arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, University of Antwerp and a.pass, advance performance and scenography studies, Brussels.

Authors for the research seminar ‘Descriptions Change, The Artist Job Description: ADRIJANA GVOZDENOVIĆ, EVI OLDE RIKKERT, FELIX RAPP, JOEP VOSSEBELD, JULIA DAHEE HONG AND PIA LOUWERENS 

Copy-editor for ‘The Artist Job Description, For the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution’: HEMANT SAREEN 
Co-Editor for thickets: FABIEN SILVESTRE SUZOR
Proof-reader: SARAH PREDDY
Graphic design: NINA BAČUN AND ROBERTA BRATOVIĆ (OAZA, ZAGREB)
Printer: SVEUČILIŠNA TISKARA, ZAGREB

Edition: 400

Referring to Gloria Anzaldúa's notion of 'wild tongue' (Borderlands/ La Frontera, 1987), the publication departs from the questions: How to tame a wild tongue? How to carry language? The verbs 'taming' and 'carrying' imply certain dynamics of permission and restriction of movement, and suggest the entanglement between language and the body. The project delves into the notion  of 'tonuge' as an archive: the 'tongue' as a muscle shaped by the physical practice of moving/ talking, having memory; the 'tongue' as a 'cultured' part of the body. It addresses accent as part of our linguistic identity, but also something that defines access or restriction. (From Monika Charkowska's preface to the publication)

Artists: Bianca Hisse, Laura Cemin
Curated by: Monika Charkowska

Texts by: Monika Charkowska, Claire Goodall, Kübra Gümüsay, Bianca Hisse, Laura Cemin
Edited by: Monika Charkowska

Translations: Epp Aareleid (ENG to EST), Ksenia Krimer (ENG to RUS), Keiu Krikmann (ENG to EST), Anita Kodanik (ENG to RUS)
English Proof-Reading: Epp Aareleid
Graphic Design: Kersti Heile

Edition of 200.

‘Kamer I - Oesters’ is een kort verhaal geschreven in het kader van het kunstproject Beste Anna,. Hierin fungeert de figuur van de openlijk lesbische Rotterdamse schrijfster Anna Blaman als motor voor vragen, gesprekken en correspondenties rondom feminisme, schrijvende vrouwen en de canon, anders zijn, eenzaamheid en vriendschap.

Ook verkent Katinka met dit onderzoek Anna Blaman als personage voor een toekomstige roman. In ‘Kamer I - Oesters’ betreedt de hoofdpersoon Anna’s met een rolkoffer vol boeken van andere schrijvers, fluistert ze hun woorden in de kieren in Anna’s muren en verleidt ze Anna met een pauwendans.

Anna Blaman (1905-1960) was openlijk lesbisch, in die tijd een groot taboe, maar zag zichzelf niet als voorvechter van een beweging. Een belangrijk thema in haar werk is de vraag of we een ander werkelijk kunnen kennen. De personages in haar romans zijn vaak alleen en verlangen naar een ander, die altijd onbereikbaar blijft. In 1948 publiceerde Blaman de roman Eenzaam Avontuur, die erg veel stof op deed waaien vanwege enkele (homo-)erotische personages die in het boek voorkomen. 

Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts enlivens a personal archive of visual and verbal offerings written and organized by poet, performance artist, educator, and curator Jaamil Olawale Kosoko. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography, Kosoko mixes personal history, biography, and mythology to tell a complex narrative rooted in a queer, Black, self-defined, and feminist imagination. 
 
This collection of intertextual performance acts captures the ephemeral data often lost or edited out of Kosoko’s live performances. Developed alongside their ongoing, multi-media live art project, American Chameleon, and elaborating on the artist’s unique practice of Socio-Choreological Mapping as a means to explore queer theories of the body and its "hydraulics of grief," this book offers critical-creative frames to consider the fluid identities and lifeworlds embedded inside contemporary Black America. 
 
With an introduction by editor Dahlia (Dixon) Li, and contributions by Sara Jane Bailes, mayfield brooks, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Ashley Ferro-Murray, Nadine George-Graves, Nile Harris, Ima Iduozee, Lisa Jarrett, Bill T. Jones, Jennifer Kidwell, Malkia Okech, Ada M. Patterson, Tracy K. Smith, and Jillian Steinhauer. 

J. Taylor Bell’s first chapbook, Hello Cruel World, solicits the reader’s undying companionship while navigating late capitalist dystopia. These poems are a downward-facing dogma set in a world catching more on fire each day; to the blaze, they offer neither gasoline nor water. Instead, they are an elegy to barely getting by, against the arrogance of solutions, and they are extremely in favor of seeking solidarity in Outback Steakhouse’s famed Bloomin’ Onion dish.

To want to reveal; to want to reveal enough; to desire; to desire in the right way, the right amount: in her debut book, Rachel James narrates the desiring subject’s nuanced and entangled intimacies with histories of power. How, in other words, under patriarchy, against misogyny, within capitalist strictures, is knowledge shaped, contained, and transferred? Tracing traditions of theater, pedagogy, and faith, An Eros Encyclopedia offers up desire and the attunement to its many objects as the atmosphere of a life—a method to navigate, perceive, and relate against the illusion of separation.

Nico Vela Page’s Americón is a collection of poems in Spanglish that weaves a space for the queer, trans body to know the land, and itself, as extensions of each other. The land is the desert of Northern New Mexico, the forgotten Pan-American Highway, the space between our thighs, the quaking cordillera of Chile, the moans of elk, and the ripe fruit waiting to be picked. Through archive, attention, and erotic ecopoetics, Page’s debut collection of poems extends far across the page, the gender binary, language, and the Americas to find out who we are by asking where we are.

Covering the past thirty years of William Scott's practice, this monograph offers the largest comprehensive selection of paintings, drawings, masks and architectural models, as well as an unique insight on his creative and transformative approach.

Published on the occasion of Malmö Konsthall William Scott's exhibition at Mälmo Konsthall en 2022.

William Scott (born 1962 in San Francisco) has developed his own artistic practice while working at Creative Growth, an art center in Oakland where people with development disabilities are given the opportunity to work and advance creatively as artists. Combining image and text, his colourful paintings tie in stylistically with current popular culture. Scott's vividly graphic and highly detailed paintings, drawings, and sculptures explore the intersections of community, cultural memory, faith, and science fiction. "Rebirth" is a constant subject for the artist, who reimagines the social topography of his native San Francisco as well as new, interstellar organizations. His portraits depict family members and neighbors, and celebrate Black actors, musicians, and civil rights leaders. For Scott, painting is a transformative as well as a documentary tool; a way to re-craft his personal narrative and even undertake extraordinary acts.

Edited by Nicola Wright
Texts by Carson Cole Arthur, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Helen Delaney, Tom di Maria, Simona Dumitriu, Nathan Hamelberg, Kathleen Henderson, Matthew Higgs, William Scott, Nicola Wright

As a cofounder of Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, Emmy Hennings, with her partner, the Dadaist Hugo Ball, is recognized as having established and environment for collective experimentation. This book gathers an extensive collection of Hennings's writings, ephemera, and art, to give shape to a practice and an individual so ofter flattened for the sake of art historical narrative.

In the exhibitions held at Cabaret Voltaire and at the Swiss Institute in 2020, Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi made evocative displays that created space for a deeper engagement with Hennings's life and art. For this publication, she has made new collages, combining found materials and working tools suck as adhesive strips, supplemented by graphic gestures and subjective indexes such as cigarette butts. By bringing the Hennings archive into dialogue with her own work, Ghaznawi considers the manner in which an individual's multiple identities guide the accumulation of personal experience, be they her own or those of a woman she never met. Commissioned on the occasion of her exhibitions, and published together here for the first time, are texts by Ghaznawi's friends and collaborators Michael Zimmerman, Samuel Lala, Nils Amadeus Lange, Sophia Rohwetter, Der Serpas, Olamiju Fajemisin, Samiran Istifan, Timur Akhmetov and Furqat Palvan-Zade.

Published following the exhibitions Emmy Hennings / Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, and the Swiss Institute, New York, in 2020-2021.

Emmy Hennings (1885–1948) was a writer, actress, cabaret artist and co-founder of the artists' bar with Hugo Ball, and probably the most present figure at Cabaret Voltaire. The fact that she received little attention as a writer and artist may be due to various reasons. Perhaps it was the distinct language, or the general uneasiness at dealing with her Catholicism; whatever it was, her trace is missing in the male-dominated Dada historicisation. Only recently has Hennings received recognition, and indeed beyond the role of cabaret star. Whoever reads her novels, poems, and reviews will encounter a woman for whom writing was a survival strategy. She astutely analyses her existence and stages herself as a multiple.

Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi (born 1995 in Ghazni, Afghanistan) lives and works in Zurich and Obwalden. Her assemblages transgress forms and space, revealing a questioning of institutional structures and accepted ideas of craft and taste. In her sculptural transformations her processes insist on maintaining the visibility of the lowly beginnings of her materials, forming strong, shameless and rigorous poetries.

Edited by Simon Castets and Salome Hohl.
Texts by Salome Hohl, Laura McLean-Ferris, Michael Zimmerman, Samuel Lala, Nils Amadeus Lange, Sophia Rohwetter, Der Serpas, Olamiju Fajemisin, Samiran Istifan, Timur Akhmetov, Furqat Palvan-Zade.

An artist's book disguised as a medical publication written by six fictional women characters from Morocco in free wheeling, Narrative Machines clothes truth with falsehood. With wry irony and Google English it comments on paranoia, fake news, patriarchy, power and media ganging together in the Maghreb (and everywhere else). But it also shows a chosen community of women who confide, support each other and laugh a good load.

Are there weird questions that have been haunting you all your life? Do you wonder why you pass out each mother in law comes to your place? Do you smell fish when you cook meat? Do you know of miraculous medical machines that have been forgotten by official history? What's your take on alternative medicine? Have you ever heard about the Markar, the cardiological device invented by King Hassan II of Morocco? Do you love watching Noujoum Al 3ouloum (Stars of Sciences)? Is your herbalist your best friend? Do you ever wonder if you should wax your arms? In your daily life, do you struggle sometimes with your feminist ethic? Do you put snail cream on your face? Write to us! Join our community! Be part of the Narrative Machines family!

Ghita Skali (born 1992 in Casablanca) is an artist based in Amsterdam. She studied in France, first at Villa Arson, Nice then at the post-graduate program of the Fine Arts School in Lyon. She was a De Ateliers (Amsterdam) resident between 2018 and 2020. She notably exhibited recently at Kunsthal extra City (Antwerp), Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and at the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).

Texts by Kaoutar Chaqchaq, Ayla Mrabet, Ghita Skali
Graphic design: Roxane Maillet

An anthology of Pettibon's drawings.

Reprint of the book first published in 2014.

Raymond Pettibon (born 1957 in Tucson, lives and works in Venice Beach) is mostly known for his comic-book-like drawings to which he appends disconcerting and sarcastic texts. His work embraces a wide spectrum of American “high” and “low” culture, from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, literature, sports, religion, politics, and sexuality. Taking their points of departure in the Southern California punk-rock culture of the late 1970s and 1980s and the “do-it-yourself” aesthetic of album covers, comics, concert flyers, and fanzines that characterized the movement, his drawings have come to occupy their own genre of potent and dynamic artistic commentary. As well as artist's books, fanzines, and prints Pettibon's production includes animations and large wall installations.