How to spell the fight

Navina Sundaram is sitting in the editing room in Hamburg. She has managed to reduce the complexity of the Kemal Altun case to the required 2 minutes and 40 seconds for the political magazine; a journalistic feat considering the legal terminology and the international political situation, which must be presented in simple terms. She places her interview with the judge at the back. The audience therefore first gets an impression of perhaps the best-known deportation prisoner of the republic on trial here. The phone rings. I imagine she is displeased about the disturbance. It’s the day of the broadcast; the report still needs to be approved. It rings again. She answers. Peter Boultwood is on the phone and says, “Did you hear? Kemal jumped out of the window in the courtroom. He’s dead.” 

Merle Kröger lives in Berlin where she works as a novelist, screenwriter and dramaturg. She was a member of the Berlin film collective dog film (1992–1999) and founded pong  lm in 2001. Kröger is the co-author of Philip Scheffner’s internationally awarded films Revision (2012), Havarie (2016) and Europe (2022). Kröger has published five novels to date, including Grenzfall (2012), Havarie/ Collision (2015) and Die Experten/ The Experts (2021). Her novels have received numerous awards, including Best Crime Novel of the Year, the Radio Bremen Prize for Crime Fiction and the German Crime Fiction Prize.

Translated by Rubaica Jaliwala 

M was exasperated by her friend's frivolous attitude toward the tragedy of losing a role. She was not trained to read the potential in R's wild imagination. Was it a commitment to realism, trained by the ideological morality of activism, that made her unresposive to the fantasy genre and vigilante characters? R's instinct was to court the unfamiliar, whereas M's training was to engage with criticality. Both these attributes could have interfaced in interesting and colourful ways, with sparks and currents, if and only if the social conditions of the time had been conducive to the arrival of a vigilante.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator and author based in Mumbai and Berlin. She has been the executive director of Majlis Culture, a centre for rights discourse and art initiatives in Mumbai, 1998-2016; and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, 2018-2021. Her areas of interest are documentary practices, urban cultures, migration movements, transient identities, and lived-in hybridity.

This publication coincides with the exhibition Until Due Time, Everything Is Else by Pan Daijing. It is the sixth entry in a series of compact volumes featuring visual contributions, correspondence, responses, and conversations accompanying the Grazer Kunstverein exhibition program.

The images within this book are exerpts from a video created by Pan Daijing. This publication is intended to act as a sixth screen, aligning with a five-channel video installation on display in Until Due Time, Everything Is Else at Grazer Kunstverein.

Editor: Tom Engels
Image: Pan Daijing
Graphic Design: Julie Peeters

BILL 5 contains 192 offset printed pages printed in CMYK, silver,
black and white on a dozen different paper stocks with
some Japanese bound signatures.

Sand, wind, tide, bills, tulips, LA, parking lots, waves, thoughts, bagels, prints, Tokyo, orchids, horses, backs, balm, magazines, updates, shadows, Elena's shoe, two mudbaths and a garage door...

by Boyle Family, Jochen Lempert, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Gillian Garcia, Beat Streuli, Takashi Homma, JP, Adrianna Glaviano, Mimosa Echard, Rosalind Nashashibi, Gerald Domenig, Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham, Martiniano, Blommers Schumm

This publication coincides with Curtis Cuffie's New York City, an exhibition presenting Curtis Cuffie's work as captured in photographs by Katy Abel, Tom Warren, and Cuffie himself. Unlike the exhibition, this book exclusively features Cuffie's photographs. It is the eighth entry in a series of compact volumes featuring visual contributions,  correspondence,  responses, and conversations accompanying the Grazer Kunstverein exhibition program.

Curtis Cuffie (1955-2002) was an artist based in New York City's East Village. Originally from Hartsville, South Carolina, he moved to Brooklyn at the age of fifteen and eventually settled in Manhattan, first near Bryant Park and later around the Bowery where he lived unhoused for long stretches of his life. Cuffie was integral to a dynamic circle of artists and intellectuals, marking his place within New York's Black avant-garde. 

An account of Spring Brakers, a project launched during the so-called First Wave. Spring Brakers was an online platform hosting video performances by a different artist each week alongside podcasts on various topics focusing on other labels or musical persuasions.

For this publication, all of the musicians who participated in the project are profiled, resulting in a grounded and oddly inspiring collection of testimonies of how artistic practices are shaped by an era that is still ongoing.

Artists include locals such as Bear Bones, Lay Low, Quanta Qualia, Vica Pacheco, KRAMP, Orphan Fairytale, and more, as well as far-out friends like Ka Baird, MSHR, Jung An Tagen, Eric Frye, and so on.

Each profile has a handy QR to redirect to each artist's video, and each copy includes a code to download a compilation made especially for the publication.

Exit Ambition is a catalogue of practices, documents, videos, and other projects - virtual & actual. The book operates as an incomplete index of a series of installations, instructions, anti-plays, performance scores, descriptions, etc.

Jake Reber lives and works in Buffalo, NY, where he co-curates hystericallyreal.com.

Gabrielle Civil's Experiments in Joy celebrates black feminist collaborations and solos in essays, letters, performance texts, scores, images, and more. Following her explosive debut Swallow the Fish, Civil now documents her work with From the Hive, No. 1 Gold, and Call & Response—whose collaborative Call inspired the title. The book also features her solo encounters with artists and writers, ancestors and audiences. Here you will find black girlhood, grief, ghosts, girls in their bedrooms, lots of books, dancing, reading, falling in love, fighting back, and flying. With lots of heart and the help of her friends, Civil keeps reckoning with performance, art and life.