Ian Burn: Collected Writings 1966–1993

A collection of interrelated short stories by Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael. First published in private limited edition, it was intended as a cheap holiday read to titillate and entertain summer visitors to the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, and as a piece of site-specific work; the location of the action and the place in which it is read being the same.

The visual art subsequently generated by Unlawful Assembly includes work by Josephine Pryde, with whom the artists collaborated to produce this second edition’s cover image.

Featuring coloured pencil, watercolour, ink, airbrush, acrylic and graphite, alongside other more unusual media like sand, silicone or olive oil, this book is a sumptuous, visual document of Marten's drawing and painting practice on paper. Designed as an unruly "artist's book", Treatise of a Coat has multiple physical and linguistic folds. The title is a forcing of the homonymic similarities of coat: the literal jacket that is unfurled to expose the naked and unruly shame of human forms; the fur or hair of an animal; the verb-function of to coat, with its intentional building up of visual desire - the acts of lacquering, spreading, enclosing, flooding, directing, or husking that line and colour expedite when creating an image. The constituent materiality of this book is designed with the physicality of making a work on paper in mind.

“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).

Eshkol and Wachmann focused dance on its basic element: the movement of the human body. They treated the different parts of the body as separate instruments, similar to the musical instruments of an orchestra–each with its own rules for the movements to be performed. This new edition of the 1958 publication is supplemented by contributions from Eshkol’s companions and further archive material, which contextualizes and supplements the history of the 'EWMN’s‘ origins and embeds it in contemporary discourses on dance and movement. 

The publication is published in the context of the performance 'Pause: The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group‘ at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (August 2023), as well as the exhibition 'Noa Eshkol: No Time to Dance‘ at the Georg Kolbe Museum (15 March–25 August 2024). The new edition was developed together with the 'Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation‘.

Jack Smith presented his performance Irrational Landlordism of Bagdad as part of the Cologne Art Fair fringe in the summer of 1977. Many other events were documented photographically and can now be found in the Cologne Art Fair archives - not so Smith's performance.

This book shows him in his fair stall and during his performance for the first time. The pictures are perfect documents of a completely eccentric transaction by this pioneering director and performance artist.

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Sands Murray-Wassink (b. 1974, Topeka, Kansas) is a painter, writer, and performance artist based in Amsterdam. A long-overlooked cult figure in the city’s art scene, his work spans decades, touching on themes of gender, desire, intimacy, mental health, and self-exploration. Deeply influenced by intersectional feminism and queer theory, his practice revolves around, and is shaped by figures such as Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Adrian Piper, and Eva Hesse.

Since 2014, Sands has predominantly focused on what he calls “Horse Drawings,” utilizing mostly watercolors and often incorporating quickly drawn texts, on A4 and A3 formats, both on white, colored paper and found material such as newspapers. These drawings, while sometimes devoid of actual horse imagery, all bear the title and embody the spirit of equine grace, symbolizing a personal journey towards healing. The horse, a figure the artist was once restricted from engaging with by his grandfather due to its perceived femininity, has evolved in his work as an emblem of transformation and healing. The book includes a broad selection of over 700 drawings printed in full color, and the short text Investment by Sands. 

Extensive survey of the politically outward-looking Conceptualism emerging from Art & Language in the UK. Especially considering its critique of the norms of Modernist art practices in contemporary art, particularly practices of art education.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood, Biting the Hand: Traces of Resistance in the Art & Language diaspora is about a dissident formation of artists active in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.

The book tells the story of artists engaging with a critique of then-contemporary modernist art education, who have embarked on a series of theoretical investigations which became increasingly politicised under the pressures of an evolving social crisis. Increased racism, unemployment and attacks on the organised working class all raised questions about how a critical art might respond.

By the late 1970s, these radical artists, mostly in the orbit of the Art & Language group, were producing posters and leaflets for a wide range of left-wing causes, as well as analyses of the politics of art and design education and the role of cultural ideology in maintaining consensus. In the 1980s, as Thatcherism tightened its grip, those involved went their separate ways into areas as diverse as media work, trade unionism, health and education.

Biting the Hand has three parts: a retrospective introduction setting the formation in its historical context, and two annotated documentary sections presenting examples of the work as both text and image, written and edited by Paul Wood.

It also includes a foreword by Sezgin Boynik, publisher, and an afterword by Ann Stephen, curator and art historian, further expanding on the book's subject.

For many years Paul Wood worked for the Art History Department of the Open University. His publications from that period include Conceptual Art (2000), Western Art and the Wider World (2013), and the four-volume anthology Art in Theory (1990-2020), co-edited with Charles Harrison and others.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood.
Foreword by Sezgin Boynik; afterword by Ann Stephen.