Dance as Moving Pictures

Oracular Transmissions weaves together three of the most recent collaborative projects Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby have completed through processes of exchange and translation: Back, Back Again to Paris (2013), The Alhambra (2016), and Transmissions (2017). 

The book also includes poems by Denise Newman, a friend to both Adnan and Kirby, and an introduction by Kadist Foundation curator Jordan Stein presenting their works and performances.

Edited by Astrid Kaminski, Jeroen Versteele, Julie De Meester. A personal and intimate look behind the scenes of Meg Stuart's creative process over more than a decade. 

Since the early nineties, Meg Stuart, and her dance company Damaged Goods, based in Brussels, have produced a remarkable and audacious body of choreographic work. In 2010, Damaged Goods published Are we here yet?, which spans the first twenty years of Meg Stuart's career. In the follow-up book Let's not get used to this place, the choreographer looks back on more than a decade of works through reflections, interviews, scores, and notes on the practice of creating, performing, teaching and living dance. These are mixed with reports, essays and poetry by collaborators and other observers, photos, performance texts and archive material. The book's title, gleaned from one of Stuart's recent video works, ties together these multifarious sources in a desire to discard tried and tested strategies, explore new contexts, and transgress the edge of what we (do not) know. 
Let's not get used to this place gives a sense of the plentitude of motions, inspirations and personalities that energize Meg Stuart's creative cosmos. It offers a personal and intimate look behind the scenes of the creative process, and expands this to include the world around it. As a journey through her more recent career, an inspiring manual and a work of art in its own right, it has a wide appeal to an international base of artists, students and peers, and to anyone who is interested in performance.

Contributions by Jean-Marc Adolphe, Preethi Athreya, Mariana Tengner Barros, Sandra Blatterer, Esther Boldt, Márcio Kerber Canabarro, Varinia Canto Vila, Descha Daemgen, Jorge De Hoyos, Igor Dobricic, Brendan Dougherty, Doris Dziersk, Tim Etchells, Moriah Evans, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Jule Flierl, Alain Franco, Davis Freeman, Ami Garmon, Philipp Gehmacher, Jared Gradinger, Ezra Green, Claudia Hill, Maija Hirvanen, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Astrid Kaminski, Kiraṇ Kumār, Göksu Kunak, André Lepecki & Eleonora Fabiano, Jean-Paul Lespagnard, Marc Lohr, Matthias Mohr, Anne-Françoise Moyson, Anja Müller, Kotomi Nishiwaki, Jeroen Peeters, Alejandro Penagos, Léa Poiré, Leyla Postalcıoğlu, Ana Rocha, Tian Rotteveel, Hahn Rowe, Isabela Fernandes Santana, Maria F. Scaroni, Bernd M. Scherer, Kerstin Schroth, Gerald Siegmund, Charlotte Simon, Mieko Suzuki, Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Poorna Swami, Meg Stuart, Margarita Tsomou, Kristof Van Boven, Elke Van Campenhout, Myriam Van Imschoot, Jeroen Versteele, Doug Weiss, Stefanie Wenner, Jozef Wouters, John Zwaenepoel.

Created by Mary Heilmann in 1999, The All Night Movie beautifully wraps a memoir inside of a monograph, creating an artist book in which each page is designed as though it were a painting. The artist delicately utilizes color, text, candid photographs, reproductions of paintings, and song lyrics that unfold seamlessly to create an immersive visual experience. Heilmann has described the book as “the story of my life, told in words, painted images and photographs.”

Across eight chapters, Heilmann recounts her life, from childhood in California through New York in the 1990s, providing intimate insight into the development of her work, friendships, and formative life experiences. Snapshots by the artist and others provide a portrait of Heilmann’s evolving artistic community, which included Gordon Matta-Clark, Pat Hearn, Dicky Landry, Jack Pierson, Keith Sonnier, Pat Steir, William Wegman, and Jackie Winsor, among others. And this is just the first half of the book. Included with the artist’s memoir is an essay by Jutta Koether and a survey of paintings from 1972-1999. This highly revered and extremely scarce publication was co-designed with Mark Magill and is reproduced here as a facsimile edition. The All Night Movie was originally published by Hauser & Wirth and Offizin Verlag.

Mary Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940. She studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara, San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley before moving to New York in 1968. Heilmann began her career creating sculpture before quickly pivoting into abstract painting once on the East Coast, experimenting with bright colors and unusual geometries that bridge two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements. She has been the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award as well as a Guggenheim Foundation award.

sex and place is a series of workshops and publications exploring score-based and semi-anonymous writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns.

Vol. 1 ‘preliminiaries’ is written by Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen. In the midst of (learning) child care, (unlearning) performance and (experimenting with) sex, the publication interweaves three registers of writing as analogies and interruptions of each other.

The ‘sex and place’ series is part Domestic Anarchism, a project devoted to coalition-building beyond biological, chosen, or national conceptions of family. Dance serves as a set of tools and knowledge that can be applied beyond “the spectacle” to collectively study, write, and move. 

Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen are choreographers and they co-parent three-year-old Penélope Cleo. Andrea and Adriano use dance and choreography to think about the distribution of care and solidarity beyond ‘the family’, and in turn consider how such a distribution could inform their dance practice. Inevitably themes like sex, economy, gender, and class get activated. But also notions such as prefiguration, anarchism, clitoridian* thinking, zones of non-domination and coalition building. They see dance as a knowledge that can be applied to different practices. Some of these include: co-habitations, score based writing and dancing, self-organised study groups and publications, workshops and dance performances. 

David Hoyle (b.1962, Blackpool, United Kingdom) is a performance and visual artist. His work over the last 30+ years has referenced gender, politics, identity, mental health issues and the ongoing fight for equality.

Hoyle came to prominence in the ‘90s as The Divine David, a kind of anti-drag queen whose lacerating social commentary – targeting both bourgeois Britain and the materialistic-hedonistic gay scene, which he called, “the biggest suicide cult in history” – was offset by breathtaking instances of self-recrimination and even self-harm. Following a couple of outré late-night Channel 4 TV shows and a part in the movie Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes, Hoyle killed off The Divine David, during a spectacular show at the Streatham International Ice Arena in 2000 and retreated to Manchester for “a period of reflection”.

He returned to television screens in 2005 in Chris Morris’ Nathan Barley, then began performing live again, under his own name. Hoyle’s biting satire, bravura costumes, wicked comic timing, and compelling charisma remained intact.

Hoyle is also a prolific painter often painting in his live shows. His paintings are deeply personal, and tackle the same themes as his performances, incorporating domestic waste, flyers, newspapers, magazines, wrapping paper, and more, which reinforce his disdain for the ruling-class bourgeoisie.

This is the first book dedicated to Hoyle’s paintings, offering an edited selection of works made between 2010 and 2022. At Hoyle’s request, all of the works are published undated: thus, emphasising their timelessness, timeliness, relevance, and urgency to the desperate age in which we now find ourselves!

Foundlings, a video film, was shot near Wexford, in the south east of Ireland where she grew up. This visual poem without a particular narrative and full of autobiographical elements is set at a very slowed down pace. Floating images and heavy voices are central to the associative strategy that is at work here. The images allow one to listen to a hypnotic voice, while at the same time allowing the eyes to wander... to daydream... to travel over drawn out time. The images are country images, images of repetitive calm, the kind of calm one finds between awake and asleep. The speed of the sea sets the pace, regular yet irregular. The images are inhabited by people who cannot speak. Who are busy doing nothing, except passing time. Silent brothers and sisters of the sea.

The soundsculpture Unsaid, a joint work by Orla Barry and Portuguese artist Rui Chafes (1964), is very opposite to the film. The film is full of open spaces and bright colours. The sculpture is black, closed and claustrophobic and on top of that it is housed in a narrow tower five meters tall. The visitor has to take place on a rather unconventional chair and put his head in a closed off sphere, surrounding himself by darkness and leaving him with his own heartbeat. A voice addresses the visitor directly on highly intimate terms. The seating is hard and uncomfortable. One has to be strong to experience this piece that is a perpetual struggle between body and mind.

At the occassion of Barry’s show argos editions published Foundlings, a combined artist book and catalogue that can be ordered through argos. The book includes a DVD.

Orla Barry (1969) is an artist who centres her practice on language, written and spoken. Her work is strongly poetic and lyrical, crossing a wide variety of media. Barry was born in Ireland, and the rhythm of her phraseology, the pictorial and narrative vernacular on which she draws, somehow evokes her homeland’s topography, climate and literary heritage. At argos the artist presented two new works.

“in the coherence, we weep is both an artist book and an exhibition. The project is about the critical potential of incoherencies. It is an attempt to map methodology across media, while welcoming glitches that allow for moments of critical self-reflection and knowledge production. Developed in parallel, the book and exhibition critically reflect on each other’s approaches. It looks at strategies for how text can be alive and vibrant across various architectural contexts as well as those used in the artist’s family archive, particularly annotation, redaction, indexing, blurring, and learning through reading and writing.” - KW Institute for Contemporary Art

“Multilayering was in that sense an important aspect, which got translated with the material and the design by choosing papers with differents gradients of transparency, as well as interfering and overlapping text layouts. We also designed the cover with a blue scratch off drawing on top of another artwork, so every book might change a bit over time depending on the use. This reflects the artist‘s idea of including the audience and an ever changing oeuvre, where the relation between pieces become important too.” - Studio Pandan

Texts by Dr. Christina Landbrecht, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Sofie Krogh Christensen, Chang Yuchen, Ladi'Sasha Jones

This artist book is published on the occasion of Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research 2022 solo exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2023).