Amateur is the first comprehensive publication about Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s moving-image work and accompanying installations. Developed over the past ten years, these works explore communication and interaction between individuals, often set against the backdrop of a unique public location in order to cast attention towards repressed, incomplete, and unresolved histories. Through the staging of these encounters in film, Van Oldenborgh enables multiple perspectives and voices to coexist, and brings to light political, social, and cultural relationships and how they are manifested through social interactions. The publication is generously illustrated and brings together a wealth of texts by artists, curators, and writers who have been key interlocutors with Van Oldenborgh, and offer in-depth observations and reflections on a work from her oeuvre.

Contributors: Nana Adusei-Poku, Ricardo Basbaum, Frédérique Bergholtz, Eric de Bruyn, Binna Choi, David Dibosa, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Avery F. Gordon, Tom Holert, Nataša Ilić, Charl Landvreugd, Sven Lütticken, Anna Manubens, Ruth Noack, Grant Watson.

Design: Julia Born

Publishers: If I Can’t Dance; The Showroom, London; and Sternberg Press, Berlin

A comprehensive overview of artist Kathrin Böhm's multifaceted, deeply collaborative, and durational practice and networks.

This volume critically profiles, contextualizes, and theoretically elaborates the unique practice of the UK-based German artist Kathrin Böhm. Combining visual and textual material, it offers an overview of Böhm's exceptional modus operandi that is rooted in a highly original artistic synthesis of a range of practices. Over the last three decades, Böhm has expanded the terms of socially engaged ways of working to an unprecedented scale and breadth by producing complex organizational, spatial, visual, and economic forms. These often entail the production of complex infrastructures, manifested via projects such as Culture is a Verb (2018–21), The Centre for Plausible Economies (2018–ongoing), Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks (2014–ongoing) and the Eco-Nomadic School (2010–ongoing). The book follows a major mid-career exhibition at The Showroom, London, in 2021.

Offering a significant addition to debates on contemporary art and architecture, social action, and public culture, Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life brings together critical reflections by internationally acclaimed contributors. Spanning a wide range of critical positions and disciplines, these include Dave Beech, Céline Condorelli, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Wapke Feenstra, Katherine Gibson, Joon-Lynn Goh, Lily Hall, Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Grace Ndiritu, Gerrie van Noord, Paul O'Neill, Doina Petrescu, Gregory Sholette and THEMM!!, Kuba Szreder, Gavin Wade, Mick Wilson, Stephen Wright, and Franciska Zólyom. In addition, material derived from Böhm's international networks and projects provides an in-depth impression of the deeply ingrained collaborative and durational nature of her way of working.

Photographic, diagrammatic, and typographical imagery runs through the book, demonstrating the rich visual and spatial languages embedded in Böhm's work. This visual register of the book is therefore much more than a series of illustrations and acts as a counterpoint to, and extension of, the ideas elaborated in the texts.

Kathrin Böhm is an international artist based in London. Her work takes place in and outside the art world, as she engages with governance, economics and different trans-local communities. Her main interests are the collective (re-)production of public space, trade as public realm and the everyday as a starting point for culture.

In the first monograph on the feminist conceptual artist collective Claire Fontaine, political theorist and somatic practitioner Anita Chari explores the artist's theoretical and political innovations to illuminate a more haptic, embodied approach to the practice of critical theory.

A User's Manual to Claire Fontaine explores the work of the feminist conceptual artist collective Claire Fontaine through the lens of her theoretical and political innovations, both inside and outside the context of contemporary art. Theorizing the ways in which Claire Fontaine's experimental approach can illuminate a more haptic, embodied practice of critical theory, this book delineates a series of theoretical techniques and procedures at the core of the artist's work, among them defunctionalization, Institutional Critique, human strike, tactile mimesis, desubjectivation, détournement, magic materialism, and feminist materialism.

Political theorist and somatic practitioner Anita Chari illuminates a larger field of practice for those working within the world of critical theory with this "user's manual" that seeks to reinvest theory with use value, drawing on the resources of critical contemporary art to engage with critical theory in ways that can become embodied, sensate, and tactile, and thus inform contemporary political practices.

"Fluently traversing critical theory, political philosophy, and artistic discourse, this is a brilliant, engaging book on the art and writings of Claire Fontaine—'readymade artist' and conceptual provocateur—as well as a vital elucidation of paths toward a transformative mode of living in the present. Writing with and through rather than, as usual, 'on' her subject, Chari provides her readers with a 'how-to' manual to Claire Fontaine's practice, finding in it a model for embodied resistance."—Tom McDonough, author of The Beautiful Language of My Century

Anita Chari is a political theorist and writer based in Portland, Oregon and is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon. Her work explores the significance of aesthetics, artistic practices, and embodiment for critical theory and practice.

Claire Fontaine is a feminist, conceptual artist, founded in Paris in 2004.

Devoted to Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), this monograph appears with an exhibition at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, which brings together around 100 works from over fifteen years of production (1968–1985). The exhibition explores how the artist never ceased to reinvent herself through political and vibrant contemporary work, developing an original, ephemeral sculptural language, at times performative in act and informed by her research into primitive myths and rock art. It reveals her relationship to the visible and invisible, her way of rendering the unspeakable intelligible through traces of the body and its relation to nature.

A career-spanning catalogue featuring excerpts from Raven Chacon’s scores, musical prompts, and drawings interspersed with full-color documentation and descriptive texts of installations, sculptures, and performances. Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among land, space, and people.

In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined. In 2022, Raven Chacon became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2023.

Texts by Raven Chacon, Lou Cornum, Aruna D'Souza, Candice Hopkins, Anthony Huberman, Ingir Bål Nango, Marja Bål Nango, Dylan Robinson & Patrick Nickleson, Eric-Paul Riege, Sigbjørn Skåden, Ánde Somby.

Foreword by Katya García-Antón and Stefanie Hessler.

The first comprehensive monograph devoted to artist Bea Schlingelhoff.

Conceived on the occasion of Bea Schlingelhoff's solo exhibition No River to Cross at Kunstverein München, this publication extends far beyond this to survey fifteen years of her artistic practice through imagery, ephemera, and various texts. Additionally, the publication brings together five newly commissioned pieces of writing, penned by Catherine Chevalier, Gloria Hasnay, Christina Irrgang, Helene Moll, and Sadie Plant, each focusing on a specific body of Schlingelhoff's work. Each book is one of a kind and bound in different endpapers from the private collection of the artist's father.

Edited by Gloria Hasnay.
Texts by Catherine Chevalier, Gloria Hasnay, Christina Irrgang, Helene Moll, Sadie Plant.

Retrospective monograph: a journey through over two decades of intersectional and queering practices in film, performance, sculpture, community work, and textiles.

In Daschner's textile-based works, threads are minimal yet highly visible, akin to the pinch needed to wake up from a dream. These works—as well as her collages—merge with her confronting yet inviting image politics: she cuts and pastes stories of love and pleasure, violence and resilience, death and rebirth.
The written contributions reflect on Katrina Daschner as part of a hardworking generation of queer artists and makers who have been responding to the major conceptual shifts and gender upheavals happening in contemporary art since the 1990s, especially in New York and London. They highlight Katrina Daschner's longstanding line of intersectional queer interest that continues to undermine (neo-)liberal, heteropatriarchal conceptions of sexuality, gender, subjectivity, and relationships

Edited by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu.
Texts by Amelia Groom, Tim Stüttgen; foreword by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu; interviews by Rike Frank.

An overview of John Akomfrah's work, with contributions by Julia Grosse and Nelly Y. Pinkrah, an interview with the artist, along with a foreword by Sebastian Baden.

John Akomfrah creates thoughtful video works of haunting audiovisual intensity. He tells of the radical changes and crises of the present and past on characteristic large-format screens. From November 9, 2023 to January 28, 2024, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting for the first time a comprehensive overview of the artist's work in Germany, featuring a selection of three major multichannel installations from recent years: The Unfinished Conversation (2012), Vertigo Sea (2015), and Akomfrah's new work, Becoming Wind (2023). A co-founder of the influential London-based Black Audio Film Collective (established in 1982), Akomfrah's work interweaves newly shot film sequences with archival material to create multilayered, at times associative collages, frequently in the form of simultaneous narrative structures.

Akomfrah's immersive installations critically examine colonial pasts, global migration, and the climate crisis. He addresses one-dimensional historical representations by allowing multiple perspectives to emerge in the narrative, disrupting the notion of linearity and the illusion of a one and only truth.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 2023-2024.

John Akomfrah (born 1957) is a British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator. His works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, cultural identity, temporality and aesthetics and often explores the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside the artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, who he still collaborates with today.

A volume assembling new and existing documents that revisit, mix and remix moments in the work of artist Christian Nyampeta.

The volume is composed of affections, alliances, appearances, material, and memories that exceed singular authorship, in the form of dedications, documents, elegies, film stills, footnotes, photographs, poetry, presences, and translations. Together they draw a biography of research: the journeys of engaging with art learning and making in, with, and against the worlds of today.

This stream of existing documents is sequenced alongside new contributions by Omar Berrada, Binna Choi, Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski, Natacha Nsabimana, and Isaïe Nzeyimana.

The publication emerges from a close collaboration with GfZK (Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig) over the last three years. During this time, two projects were held at GfZK: A Flower Garden of All Kinds of Loveliness without Sorrow, 2018–2019, and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, 2021.

Literature, history, theology and philosophy, as well as insights from experiences and encounters in practice between contemporary art and design percolated into the two exhibitions; public programs; and an ongoing scriptorium, in which the artistic works staged gatherings of artists, theorists and mythologists from Rwanda and further afield who would otherwise never meet.

Titled Togetherward, a word invented by philosopher and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva to describe the rhythm of Nyampeta's method, the volume preludes a series of publications in images, writing, sound, film, and musical recordings that revisit the layers and sediments of the global events of the previous decade—all driven by the burning question of how to live together.

Edited by Vera Lauf and Christian Nyampeta.

Chronicling an epic multimedia project 10 years in the making, A.K. Burns' first monograph grapples with climate change, community and sociopolitical agency

Deploying science fiction, material feminism, eco-anarchism, queer theory and technoscience, New York-based artist A.K. Burns (born 1975) explores the fraught relationships between humanity and nature in an epic multimedia work, Negative Space (2015-23). This nonlinear allegory provokes questions about marginalized bodies, environmental fragility and technology. Developed as a cycle of four video installations, Negative Space imagines new relationships to the spaces we occupy and the impact of our bodies in these spaces through imagery, research and critical and creative writings. Set in a speculative present, the tetralogy envisions a new materialist cosmology wherein hierarchical relations are transformed.

Edited by Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder
Text by CA Conrad, Mel Y. Chen, Aruna D’Souza, Megan Hicks, Simone White, and a conversation between the artist and Karen Archey

Le cinquième numéro de la revue d'art et de recherche « rétro-prospective » est consacré à l'artiste et performeuse Andrea Fraser, figure clé de l'art des années 1990 et 2000 et du courant de la « critique institutionnelle » (une monographie complétée par une grande enquête sur l'espace critique réalisée auprès d'une cinquantaine d'artistes, critiques et philosophes internationaux).

Avec contributions de Kader Attia, Eva Barto, Sophie Bonnet-Pourpet, Marie de Brugerolle, Gregory Buchert, Daniel Buren, Marie Canet, Gregory Castéra, Inès Champey, Thierry Chancogne, Claire Fontaine, François Cusset, Judith Deschamps, Paul Devautour, Philippe Durand, Joao Enxuto & Erica Love, Andrea Fraser, Nicolas Frespech, Dora García, Romain Grateau, Emmanuel Guez, Thomas Hirschhorn, Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quirós, Béatrice Josse, Franck Larcade, Ju Huyn Lee, Sven Lütticken, Fabrice Mabime, Bartomeu Mari, Chus Martínez, Gwenael Morin, Claire Moulène, Jean-Luc Moulène, Yan Moulier Boutang, Vincent Normand, François Pain, Gerald Petit, Anne Querrien, Thierry Raspail, Sinziana Ravini, Delphine Reist & Laurent Faulon, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Phillippe Roux, Jean-Baptiste Sauvage, Thomas Schlesser, Ida Soulard, Fabien Steichen, Michel Surya, Emmanuel Tibloux, Vier 5, Ulf Wuggenig, Italo Zuffi.

A scrapbook on Baillie's life and career, with stills, ephemera and writings by filmmakers across generations.

This is the first book on the West Coast avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Baillie (1931-2020), famed for the films Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964), Castro Street (1966) and All My Life (1966) and for his influence on directors such as George Lucas (one of Lucas' charitable foundations helped fund the digital transfer of Baillie's films) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Alongside stills from Baillie's films, the book fosters a dialogue between Baillie and filmmakers and writers across several generations, including experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton, filmmaker and anthropologist J.P. Sniadecki and Jonas Mekas, along with suites of images by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, British artist and experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers and Brazilian artist and filmmaker Ana Vaz, among others. Reproductions of correspondence and other ephemera are also included.

First monograph of the Franco-Iranian artist.

This monographic catalogue looks back over the first 15 years of work by Iranian artist Elika Hedayat through more than 110 reproductions. Two of these are on a 1:1 scale, and a detailed set offers a comparison of the dimensions of the works in relation to each other.

Françoise Docquiert introduces the issues at stake in her practice with an essay, complemented by an interview with Joana P.R. Neves.

"Elika is a Parisian-Iranian artist. This cultural blend  is  slightly  ironic  though  very  significant, as it nourishes her artistic work and practice. Inspired by her childhood, her life, and the violence in her native country, she makes films, videos, and drawings always filled with beauty, scathing humour and cruelty." - Annette Messager

Born 1979 in Tehran, Elika Hedayat lives and works between Paris and Tehran. Arriving in France in 2004, she was admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in Annette Messager's studio, from wich she graduated with the Jury's congratulations in 2008.

For her works, Elika Hedyat often uses testimonies and experimental documentaries stage in a dreamlike and imaginary universe. Her stories are contemporary and her characters are real. All of her works revisits historical references, transferring them to the field of personnal experience, mainly using the various possibilities of her repertoire as a narrative document and memory retrieval tool. Reality, memory and imagination come together in a personal story under different forms : drawing, video, documentary, painting and performance. 

Text by Françoise Docquiert.
Interview with Elika Hedayat by Joana P. R. Neves.

Dear Jean Pierre collects David Wojnarowicz’s transatlantic correspondence to his Parisian lover Jean Pierre Delage between 1979 and 1982. Capturing a truly foundational moment for Wojnarowicz’s artistic and literary practice, these letters not only reveal his captivating personality—and its concomitant tenderness, compassion, and neuroses—but also index the development of the visual language that would go on to define him as one of the preeminent artists of his generation.

Through this collection, readers are introduced to Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud series, the band 3 Teens Kill 4, the publication of his first photographs, his early friendship with Peter Hujar, his participation in the then-emerging East Village art and music scenes, and the preparations for the publication of his first book. Included with these writings are postcards, drawings, xeroxes, photographs, collages, flyers, ephemera, and contact sheets that showcase some of the artist’s iconic images and work, such as the Burning House motif and Untitled (Genet, after Brassai).

Beyond these milestones, the book offers a striking portrayal of Wojnarowicz as a twenty-something, detailing his day-to-day life with the type of unbridled earnestness that comes with that age and the softness of love and longing. This disarming tenderness provides a picture of a young man just beginning to find his voice in the world and the love he has found in it.

Although the two exchanged letters in equal measure, Delage’s correspondences have largely been lost, leaving us with only a revelatory glimpse into the internal world of Wojnarowicz during what turned out to be his formative years.

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. Wojnarowicz channeled a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories and lived experiences into a powerful voice that was an undeniable presence in the New York City art scene of the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. Through his several volumes of fiction, poetry, memoirs, painting, photography, installation, sculpture, film and performance, Wojnarowicz left a legacy, affirming art’s vivifying power in a society he viewed as alienating and corrosive. His use of blunt semiotics and graphic illustrations exposed what he felt the mainstream repressed: poverty, abuse of power, blind nationalism, greed, homophobia and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications on July 22, 1992 at the age of 37.

Pippa Garner’s Better Living Catalog, originally published in 1982, takes the form of a mail order catalog featuring clever and whimsical inventions that parody consumer goods while simultaneously critiquing America’s obsession with ingenuity, efficiency, leisure, and comfort. These works, which were made as prototypes and photographed for the publication, take the form of improbable accessories, clothing, footwear, home appliances, and office gadgets.

For example, the “Reactiononometer,” a portable wristband, instantly measures social success, while the “Digital Diet Loafers” display the wearer’s weight with every step. If the “Munch-o-Matic” reduces deskwork interruptions by flinging a snack right into the user’s mouth, other items promise financial solvency (the controlled cash flow “Autowallet”), sustainable waste management, or mess-free companionship (the “Pet-a-Vision” TV console). The artist asserts that all of the products in the book are “absolute necessities for contemporary survival.”

The Better Living Catalog was a pop hit when it was published, earning Garner spots on nighttime TV talk shows and attention from magazines like Vogue and Rolling Stone. In a meme-filled culture, the works still resonate today, finding their analog in widely-circulating consumer products, and—in the case of the “High Heel Skates”—even appearing unattributed in the runway collection of a major luxury fashion brand.

A few years after the Better Living Catalog was published, Garner began her gender transition, which she has characterized as an artistic project that draws conceptual parallels to the altered consumer goods she has continued to create since the 1970s. The artist’s practice has always been about hacking—gender hacking, she stated, was “an excellent premise for maverick conceptual art and diametrically opposed to anything I’d ever done.”

Many of the prototypes Garner created for the publication were repurposed or recycled, making this previously rare gem of an artist book one of the artist’s few works to now be widely available.

Born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, Pippa Garner (formerly known as Philip Garner) began her practice in the late sixties as a member of the highly regarded Transportation Design department at ArtCenter, California, with plans to become a car stylist, and was drafted to Vietnam to serve as a combat illustrator. In the mid-80s, Garner began her gender transition, which she considers a conceptual artwork, marking an extension of her practice from twenty years of altering cars, garments, and consumer products to using her own body as raw material. Garner appeared on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and other talk shows, showcasing her satirical consumer product inventions, and her artwork has been featured in Car & Driver, Rolling Stone, Arts & Architecture, and Vogue, among other publications. In the 1980s, her performance, design, and video work was exhibited in institutions including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; since 2015, she has had exhibitions at STARS, O-Town House, Redling Fine Art, and Parker gallery in Los Angeles; Jeffrey Stark in New York; JOAN, Los Angeles; Kunstverein München; 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Art Omi, Ghent, New York. She is the author of three other books: Utopia… or Bust! Products for the Perfect World (1984), Garner’s Gizmos & Gadgets (1987), and the zine Beauty 2000 (1992/2021).

'Inserts in Real Time' is the first monograph on the performance work developed by artist Dora García over the past twenty years. The book contains a conversation between the artist and curator Joanna Zielińska; a selection of her performance scripts; her performances to date, listed, illustrated, described, and contextualized; and three newly commissioned texts – by art historian Sven Lütticken, performance theorist Bojana Cvejić, and Dora García. The publication is co-published with M HKA, Antwerp, and accompanies Dora García’s exhibition 'She Has Many Names'.

Published by Courtisane festival in collaboration with Open City Documentary Festival, Alia Syed: Imprints, Documents, Fictions (ed. María Palacios Cruz) is the first monograph to be devoted to Syed’s work and features new essays by Jemma Desai, Inga Fraser, Peter Gidal, Rahila Haque, Salima Hashmi, Anjana Janardhan, Ruth Noack and Henrietta Williams, as well as writing by Syed herself.

First monograph in French: from Rod Stewart to the Industrial Revolution, Art is Magic collates all of acclaimed artist Jeremy Deller's cultural touchstones into one lovingly curated volume, balancing these artistic inspirations with examples of Deller's visionary work.
 
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Jeremy Deller: Art is Magic at Frac Bretagne, Musée des beaux-arts and La Criée art center, Rennes, in 2023.

Texts by Jeremy Deller; interview with Jeremy Deller by Daniel Scott, Alan Kane, Mary Beard, Jonny Banger, Cheerio. Translated from the English by Sandra von Lucius.

This first publication of the artist Melike Kara, emphasises her work of the last two years and thus on a specific body of work that represents a shift in the artist’s methodology.

Her paintings have undergone a change, as they are less figurative and more abstract (although Kara’s abstractions reveal forms here and there).

Some of these forms are reminiscent of limbs, hybrids between bodies and dissolution. Her focus has also changed in terms of subject matter.

It is now less a matter of consciousness, and more about identity and questions of origin. She thus complements, or rather expands, the presentation of these paintings in exhibitions with site-specific installations.

Published after the exhibition, ‘Melike Kara: Where We Meet’ at Jan Kaps, Cologne (4 June – 22 August 2020).

With contributions from Jana Baumann, AnneClaire Schmitz & Fabian Schöneich.

A multimedia meditation on the many meanings of the ocean across history.

This volume closely follows the development of Joan Jonas' (born 1936) multiformat project Moving off the Land. The artist's most recent body of work, it encompasses three years of research into the significance of the ocean throughout history, and features sculptures, drawings, sound and new video productions. Jonas combines poetry and prose by writers such as Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville with texts by Rachel Carson and Sy Montgomery, and with moving images filmed in aquariums and in Jamaica, where algae bloom and over-fishing pose urgent threats to the ecosystem. The monograph includes the complete script for the performance along with annotations, images of Jonas' live performance, and a complete chronology with documentation of the performance's history.

A fully-fledged artistic project expanded with writings, poems, and aphorisms by the artist alongside various interviews.

Traveling in the Dark is an exhibition and a publication by the world-renowned film director, poet, writer, music composer, literary critic, and art theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha. The book is a fully fledged artistic project conceived by Trinh from the script and visuals of her film What about China? and expanded with her writings, poems, and aphorisms as well as various interviews that investigate "a relationship to infinity," "memory of the mirror," and the "in-between." The book offers an experience with many possible entries, words, voices, thoughts, images, and pauses. As a visual, poetic, and philosophical experience, Traveling in the Darkinvites us to rethink and experience "reality" differently from an approach mainly based on knowledge and re-presentation that we already possess or that is imposed on us. In other words: How can we learn to see our world without a priori seeing and knowing? In a time when the "all-seen" and "all-told" invade and control our daily lives, our private spheres and urban spaces, where are the areas of invisibility and shadows that leave us autonomy to see and to think, to say and to represent, to remember and to imagine? Traveling in the Dark engages the visitor and reader in an open montage of visual, sonic, and poetic textures, whose resonances, vibrations, recollections, exchanges, brushes, reflections, and passages undermine any pretense of fixed identity, historical truth, or prescribed territory.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, in 2022-2023.

Born in Vietnam in 1952, Trinh T. Minh-ha is an artist, writer, music composer, filmmaker, and literary theorist, teaching as Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in the departments of Gender & Women's Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco.

For more than three decades, Tony Cokes (b. 1956, Richmond, USA; lives and works in Providence, USA) has been exploring in his work the ideology and affect politics of media and popular culture as well as their social impact. Starting from a fundamental critique of the representation and visual commodification of African-American communities in film, television, advertising, and music videos, Cokes has developed a unique form of video essay that radically rejects ­representational imagery. These fast-paced works consist of found text and sound material from diverse sources such as critical theory, online journalism, literature, and­ popular music.

The US artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany also marks the first ­comprehensive collaboration between Kunstverein München and Haus der Kunst. The thematic starting point for Cokes’s new productions is the ideological and propagandistic entanglements of both exhibition venues during the Nazi era as well as their cultural-political role in the context of the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972.

The publication Fragments, or just Moments accompanies the eponymous exhibition and translates stills from the newly produced video essays into a book format while examining the significance of Cokes’s work in terms of a contemporary approach to institutional critique. The essays are written by Tina M. Campt and Tom Holert, with an introduction by Emma Enderby and Elena Setzer (Haus der Kunst) as well as Maurin Dietrich, Gloria Hasnay, and Gina Merz (Kunstverein München).