An inquiry into the potential regeneration of democracy: how artists can work towards a sense of collective relevance required to face the future’s dark challenges.

An invitation from Mudam Luxembourg to consider the place, role and future of cultural institutions in the twenty-first century.  

The third of three projects to engage the resource industries of Vancouver Island, this publication responds to oceanic environments through contemporary art and writing.

The act of translation as a pedagogical tool, a political act, and ultimately a gesture of care in these tense cultural times.

A new translation, with a new foreword, of Nicolas Bourriaud’s landmark 1998 work of art theory.

Architect Mark Lee presents a body of work on the basis of five considerations: on history, on cadence, on autonomy, on America, and on point.

An account of an imaginary fashion exhibition that has no clothing, but in its place, sonic responses to garments and cloth act as a series of calls to explore the concept of Fashion Thinking.

Documents artist Liam Gillick’s process in building a functioning weather station for Fogo Island, Newfoundland.

In this anthology of essays, twelve artists explore radically self-reflexive research attitudes integrating embodied experiences within the production of theory.  

This enchanting convening of texts and images, diaries and epistles celebrates a unique voice and ongoing dialogue around the erotics of art.

Thirty international artists, writers, and thinkers consider timely themes found in the work of Anicka Yi, including AI, umwelt, scent and taste, the anthropocene, decay and rot, the animal world, and feminism.

How practices that enact the art of constructing open secrets in markets can be mobilized to unfold magic making.

Written in the stirring style of an intense inner monologue, Isabelle Graw captures the various manifestations and effects of fear in relation to money or the lack of it.

The relationship between quantifiable and experiential knowledge as entanglement of multiple temporalities.

Traditions of realism are brought together with the decolonial and ecological concept of ‘planetarity’ to understand a new realism in contemporary art.

The collected writings of artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, along with the stories behind them told by Alexis Vaillant.

A massive value shift for existing buildings, infrastructure, materials, unbuilt land, earth, and the labor that holds our world together.

A series of propositions and encounters in service to an aesthetic, critical, and poetic experience of living life led by death.

A collection exploring the intersections of gender and religion in post-secular knowledge production and visual culture.

Two lectures from art historian and curator Griselda Pollock address feminist questions and art education in the 1980s and today.

On the advanced knowledge economy, which perpetuates patterns of discrimination and exclusion, and the threat of climate change devastation for both human and nonhuman entities.

An innovative monograph of conceptual artist Agnieszka Kurant’s work, focussed on the phenomenon of collective intelligence, alongside newly commissioned texts by renowned thinkers across science, philosophy, technology, anthropology, and economics.

PhD and postdoc supervisors from Europe and beyond interrogate the existing formal educational pathways for artistic and practice-based research. 

This publication documents artist Leonor Antunes’s new installation at Lisbon’s CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian

A meditation on sound, this book invites us to listen through the nose and open the mind to the musical potential in unpleasant odors.

If discourse is the foundation of democracy, how can the design of our cities empower and enable discourse? In 1981, Richard Sennett delivered six lectures about this relationship, and issued a call to action that remains relevant today.

Through a close examination of the political and aesthetic strategies that artist Ines Doujak employs in her work, this book explores the realities of the current economic, microbiological, and ecological crises.

First global exploration of contemporary forms of filmmaking from political and cultural self-determination movements of Autochthonous communities and peoples.

Twenty renowned international curators write about one of their exhibitions or projects that transformed their ideas about curating.

Cosmos Cinema combines comprehensive visual documentation of the acclaimed 14th Shanghai Biennale with newly commissioned essays reflecting on its themes.

An essay-length book arguing for the autonomy of art in the present

Multivocal and anonymous, A Strange Adventure is oral-history-as-theater—the theater of memory, trauma, and torture.

What gets counted within the category of heritage, and who gets to do the counting?

How machine learning and computer vision generate images.

This critical biography guides readers through artist Magda Stawarska’s practice via a series of journeys—from the streets of Istanbul to the canals of Venice and across the waters of Zanzibar.

How the world—and the world of visual culture in particular—creates itself in a creative act that knows no economic return.

Inspired by how rivers bend and curve connecting ecosystems, Meandering is a case study for community-oriented artistic research into the cultural, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways.

This book on the films of Anton Vidokle features essays and conversations by theorists, curators, and artists exploring themes of technological immortality and resurrection informed by Cosmist philosophy.

This notebook from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna contains 192 blank pages for making your own notes.

The first ever monograph on the groundbreaking work of artist and composer Raven Chacon.

This source book documents five episodes of Martine Syms’ seminal series She Mad – a fragmented imagined television series.

Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval tells the story of an unlikely partnership between June Jordan and R. Buckminster Fuller, and their attempt to reimagine Harlem in the wake of the 1964 riots.

This anthology presents work on cultures of assembly. It stresses the relevance of small-scale and decentralized spatial formats of local knowledge production to community building and embedded political decision-making in the context of the socio-ecological transition. It reinforces the role of both individual and collective action while proposing distributed assembly and proximity as core attributes in the production of the contemporary and future city. It calls for a revised form of spatial politics.

A record of a symposium on the legacy of the late Luxembourgish artist Michel Majerus.

The Monadic Age offers a look into the playbook of the post-liberal mindset and defines how a new paradigm of self-sufficiency is about to force a reinvention of all social parameters.

The 15-year history of the production of a “German scotch” Black Whisky.

A cultural examination of the enigmatically iconic figure of the Dandy, both in history and as a figure for the future.

Tracing the relation between fascism and settler colonialism.

Katrina Daschner takes us on a journey through over two decades of intersectional and queering practices in film, performance, sculpture, community work, and textiles.

How architecture powered European energy politics in the postwar era and paved the way for today’s dependency on coal, steel, and nuclear power.

A publication accompanying the exhibition Nadia Belerique: Body in Trouble at the Fogo Island Gallery.

WONDERFLUX brings together a group of longtime contributors with graphic artists to collaborate on illustrated essays and develop a new pictorial language around some of the emergent consistencies and overarching issues that defined the first decade of e-flux journal.

Imagine art and contemporary as an organ. An organ that produces an experience of inexpressible realities that are fundamental to understand life and its processes.

The artist’s catalogue deals with the hauntings and echoes of Austria’s colonial past and opens a space for Black diasporan artistic practices.

For Farocki, the computer-animated, navigable images that constitute the twenty-first century’s “ruling class of images” call for new tools of analysis, prompting him to ask: How does the shift from montage to navigation alter the way images—and art—operate as models of political action and modes of political intervention?

Exhibition catalogue of Pedro Neves Marques‘s solo project ‘Vampires in Space’ at the Portuguese Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022.

A long-distance correspondence reflecting on the infravoice of a blue whale and other so-called “silent” subjects.

The story of Helen Khal, the woman at the center of a significant group of artists who altered the course of modern and contemporary art in the Middle East and beyond.

The most significant critical, theoretical, and art historical texts by the artist, writer, and filmmaker Aria Dean.

On the themes found in the work of Lorraine O’Grady: Black female subjectivity, intersectional feminism, institutional critique, music, and translation.

The simultaneous emergence of the serial killer and the assembly line as expressions of the rationality of modern production methods.

By taking a conversation between artists Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal as point of departure, this volume collects reflections around the Mediterraneans through art, poetry, oceanic thinking, and activism.

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

The first book-length inquiry into the subject of the twisted romantic ballad, giving a sense of both its history and contemporary currency.

A techno-fiction novel on the uneasy desire for anti-rationalist ideas on the internet, and their intersections with Asian futurisms and reactionary mythologies, conceived in parallel with the video project GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE by Mochu, as part of his solo exhibition at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art

Newly commissioned texts frame extensive visual documentation of a series of exhibition episodes drawing on the legacy of the Eastern European neo-avantgarde and the work of artist Mladen Stilinović.

Curating has evolved into much more than creating interesting exhibitions, promoting artists, and selling artwork. Art worlds have fused with business worlds and transformed capitalism from the inside out. To “curate capitalism” implies new ways of management that go far beyond the simple commercialization of art and artist.

A compelling rethinking of curatorial practice that proposes that Pidgin languages and pidginization offer a decolonialized reinvention of communicative practices; a space in which the boundaries between disciplines of knowledge collapse and sociopolitical, economic, ethical, and spiritual concepts and questions are renegotiated.

The first publication to document Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic’s* artistic work to date. Her* practice offers an aesthetic and political redefinition of gendered relations.

What comes after end-of-world narratives: visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.

On the aesthetic and intellectual affinities between recent art and conspiracy.

A collection of Dan Graham’s interviews and conversations with a wide array of individuals from various backgrounds and disciplines. Includes “The Museum in Evolution,” an essay he finished just before his death.

A diaristic novel on contemporary friendship and its importance.

In the context of INLAND’s Academy at documenta fifteen, Microbiopolitics of Milk presents the grounding basis for a research project around milk as a bio-cultural substance.

The adventures of a French art student as she visits New York to work as an assistant for an established artist.

Textual and visual ephemera along with performative documents stemming from a reading of Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man.

Kafka for Kids contextualizes artist Roee Rosen’s film of the same name, the pilot episode of a TV series that perversely aims to make Kafka’s tales palpable for toddlers–but in fact offers a wild ride through our complex universe, politics, dreams, and traumas.

An exploration of the realities of environmental and social catastrophe through art practices that take apart Western anthropocentric models, legacies of patriarchal violence, and enduring colonial and racist discourses.

A South Korean wellness center designed as a mock prison: on sensory deprivation, monastic life, the wellness industry, the prison-industrial complex, and the history of solitude.

Going beyond tensions between individuals and institutions, Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses and Tools examines avenues for engaged pedagogies, collective learning, and artistic ecologies that can engender new institutionalities.

Through four case studies, this publication brings to the fore decolonial and other non-hegemonic approaches to the profession of curating in Sweden from the 1960s to the early 2000s, highlighting the work of Carlos Capelán, Elisabet Haglund, Gunilla Lundahl, and Jan-Erik Lundström.

Conversations with the curators, artists and participants from some of the lesser-known public art exhibitions of the 1980s and 90s in Europe and the US, which de-monumentalized public art, dealt with political, gender and social asymmetries, and introduced forms of non-extractivist curating.

In The Curatorial Condition, Beatrice von Bismarck considers the field of activity and knowledge that relates to the exhibiting of art and culture. The curatorial, in her analysis, is a domain of practice and meaning with its own conditions, rules, and procedures.

This third volume in the annual A Series of Open Questions is informed by themes found in the work of artist Cecilia Vicuña, including ecofeminism, indigenous forms of knowledge, poetry and politics, dissolution and extinction, exile, dematerialization, regeneration, and environmental responsibility.

Drawing on documentation from a community of gardeners, cooks, ceramicists, and creatives, Rochester Square in North London’s Camden is a case study for how urban spaces are finding new life.

Tomo Savić-Gecan’s performance piece for the Croatian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022.

While machine learning—computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning—offers useful insights into racism and racist behavior, a gap is present in the relationship between machine learning and its connection to the racial history of science and the Black lived experience.

Forms of Abstraction engages with abstraction not as a formal option in art, or as an airy theoretical speculation, but as an operational force that has redesigned our world, and continues to do so.

The current ecological crisis brings about a new relational landscape: an unprecedented collapse of distances creates interspecies promiscuities and a crisis of the human scale. In his latest book, Inclusions, Nicolas Bourriaud proposes that artists are the anthropologists of this new era.

A cross-disciplinary and critical inquiry into the forms and practices of assembly-making across histories and geographies, with contributions by artists, architects, activists, and scholars, explores the potential of assemblies to reimagine the way democracy is practiced.

What if art holds solutions to the ecological crises of our time?

Curator without a System brings together, for the first time in English, a rich variety of essays by the Russian curator Viktor Misiano offering an overview of the global cultural dynamics of the post-1989 world, as well as providing a different perspective on Western narratives of institutional critique, relational aesthetics, and socially engaged art.

The essays assembled in this volume were all written during the past twenty years or so—a period in which Ina Blom pursued art critical writing alongside more academic work and when the boundaries between the two genres were at times deliberately blurred.

Published in conjunction with the “metalworks – designing & making” exhibition in the Konschthal Esch, this book uses the production of some twenty international creators to discuss methods of transforming metal in contemporary design.

The notion of the handmade has shifted from the margins to center stage. Craft’s value is increasingly recognized across creative, economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. Because of its widespread appropriation, and the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, the meaning of handicrafts is changing.

What is our future and whose voices will announce it? Museum director, curator, and writer Zdenka Badovinac argues that it is the situated voices of people, artworks, and exhibitions, rooted in the local, that can bring incisive, productive change. The call of these voices, in rethinking art, curation, and institutions, is the subject of this powerful essay.

A lifelong relation to sound and music underlies Latifa Echakhch’s work. On the occasion of her representation of the Swiss Pavilion for the 59th Venice Biennale, she has edited a volume on sound, memory, and perception. In the book, images of her installation in the Swiss Pavilion, The Concert, accompany writings by the artist and by Alexandre Babel and Francesco Stocchi, the co-curators of the pavilion.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In these essays, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishment of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.

In this book, Jacob Lund explores how the conditions for politically engaged art and aesthetic practice, for questioning the present, have changed in recent decades, while considering how our historical present and its temporal quality differ significantly from previous presents.

Valerie Solanas’s rarely published, legendary play explodes social and sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces them through her signature irreverence and wit, incisiveness and camp.

Alienation and dire frustration mount as an unnamed woman—a mother—struggles to survive in the face of state repression, neighborhood surveillance, extreme weather, and familial control.

Over the past decade, a growing number of artists, theorists, curators, and researchers have moved from “institutional critique” to “infrastructural critique,” or toward “infrastructural speculation,” in which they explore the potential of creative infrastructure-related visions and scenarios. In attempts to counter the impasse of “the cancelled future,” art has immersed itself in systemic critiques and propositional thinking, addressing major challenges, such as the rampant financialization of the economy and runaway climate change.

Published on the occasion of Nathalie Du Pasquier’s solo show at MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, this book navigates the space between an exhibition catalogue and the artist book with juxtapositions of photographs of Du Pasquier’s works, installation views of the show at MACRO, and extracts from texts by various writers and figures fundamental to her practice.

Produced on the occasion of Leslie Thornton’s major solo exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center as well as a recent solo exhibition at Kunstverein Nurnberg, this richly illustrated volume is the first monograph on this important artist and filmmaker, offering essential, foundational scholarship on Thornton’s influential work in film and video.

Unpayable Debt offers a black feminist reading of the political architecture of the global present. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, the concept of the unpayable debt relates post-Enlightenment versions of ethical and economic value to colonial and racial subjugation.

YWY, Searching for a Character Between Future Worlds shares the fictional character of YWY with several authors from Brazil, the United States, and beyond, creating a conversation about science fiction and robotics, ecology and gender, Indigenous Futurisms and what it means to be human.

This collection of essays, conversations, and artworks explores how technology now mediates our encounters and, in doing so, forms alternate, networked subjectivities. It asks how intersubjective intimacy might be theorized epistemologically, aesthetically, philosophically, and politically, and considers how such relative intimacy might connect physical matter and cybernetic systems or forge new subjectivities.

Across his works, Zach Blas closely engages the materiality of digital technologies while also drawing out the philosophies and imaginaries lurking in artificial intelligence, the internet, predictive policing, airport security, biometric recognition, and biological warfare.

Topologies of Air and Lesions in the Landscape are two major bodies of work by Shona Illingworth. Informed by the artist’s long-term investigations into individual and societal amnesia, these projects critically examine the devastating psychological and environmental impacts of military, industrial, and corporate transformations of airspace and outer space.

Since 1985, Gregor Schneider has occupied an abandoned house next to one of the largest chasms in the world—the brown-coal surface mine near Rheydt-Mönchengladbach known as the Garzweiler. In the building, which he named Haus u r, he proceeded to build rooms within rooms. With this publication, art historian Raimund Stecker reconnects with his first visit to Haus u r.

What happens when feminist and queer care ethics are put into curating practice? What happens when the notion of care based on the politics of relatedness, interdependence, reciprocity, and response-ability informs the practices of curating?

Training for the Future is a training camp where audiences are turned into trainees to “pre-enact” alternative scenarios and reclaim the means of production of the future. This handbook gathers training manuals, interviews and documentation of the various training camps that took place from 2018 to 2021.

In this book, the renowned art historian and writer maps the institutional and quasi-institutional framework for contemporary art that sprawls across the globe. He then delves into a powerful form of curatorial activism rising up in the exhibitionary complex: Open Strike.

“What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?”—Philip Guston

Frida Orupabo’s first monograph is published on the occasion of her exhibition at Kunsthall Trondheim. The book contains extensive documentation of her work, including social-media imagery the artist has been producing over the past several years, which forms an integral part of her artistic oeuvre.

Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology is devoted to Amazonia, its peoples, allies, and nonhuman spirits, and their myriad material and immaterial practices, from certain cosmopolitics and visual languages to past and present forms of resistance.

This publication extends Studio Experimentelles Design’s socially committed approach to design through conversations, lectures, research, debates, and project documentation. To critically examine design’s current practices, it asks questions of how designers work today, demanding a fundamental reorientation in the issues design addresses and the social actors it serves.

Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden was a kaleidoscopic curatorial project run by Tensta konsthall from 2013 to 2019 that dealt with the history and memory of the Stockholm suburb of Tensta and its inhabitants. The late-modernist suburb can also be said to be part of “New Sweden”—a place of diversity, struggle, contradiction, and solidarity distinct from the image of the twentieth-century social welfare state.

Economic Ekphrasis proposes a new model for arts-based business education. Using the Stockholm-wide exhibition “Standard Length of a Miracle” by conceptual artist duo Goldin+Senneby as a case study, the book rethinks relevant business studies with art created inside the back-office realities of financialized capitalism.

In recent years, new techniques in molecular biology, gene sequencing, bioinformatics, and
remote sensing have transformed scientific understandings of Earth’s oceans. At the same time, fresh political, cultural and philosophical approaches to the seas have increasingly turned to detailing how human history and impacts are legible in our world’s waters.

Fires burn around the world. Systemic discrimination persists, precarity is increasing, and the modern democratic project faces challenges from all sides. Art writing helps us to understand art, which in turn helps us to understand such crises. But art writing itself is in crisis.

This book could have been called “The Contemporary Condition of Sleeping and Reading in the Heart of (and in Spite of) the Logosphere and Various Media Streams,” but frankly, “I Can’t Sleep” sounds better, plus it’s true.

How do the two technologies of blockchain and artificial intelligence actualize and, crucially, automatize the cognition of time? These kinds of machines are increasingly part of both our contemporary present and our prospective future, but how do we really define a present and a future? And more importantly, how do these machines themselves understand, know, and sense time?

Canonical within the Yugoslav New Film of the late 1960s and the 1970s, Želimir Žilnik’s Early Works (1968) follows the female revolutionary Jugoslava as she leaves her lumpenproletariat family to spread the teachings of young Marx and Engels among the peasants and factory workers.

What does the promise of “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about” look like today? What are the politics of hospitality? What are the problematics of “postfeminism,” and how do we challenge the West as the authoritative subject of feminist knowledge? What are the ways that language can be a site of rupture? How do we generate mistrust in the “well-written,” and how can poetry be a radical act of refusal?

What ideas and memories do the oceans hold in their depth and reanimate in response to the trembling of earth’s ecosystems? How to escape the silos of research and inquiry that narrow and fragment the knowledge of the oceans? Asking new questions and using multiple registers of sensing can lead to a revitalization of the ways humans engage with the oceans at this precarious moment and create new pathways for reparative justice.

Yannis Tsarouchis was a Greek painter whose multifarious practice spanned seven decades, from the 1920s to the 1980s. More than three decades after his death in 1989, the artist’s immensely rich oeuvre is relatively unknown outside of Greece, where he is unanimously recognized as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century.

For more than fifty years Elisabeth Haarr has been one of the most significant artists in Norway. From early experimentation with tapestry as modern visual art in the 1960s to political works with an activist message in the 1970s, and later sculptural installations of rugs, banners, figures, and drapes, Haarr’s oeuvre has significantly contributed to the consideration of textiles as a material in contemporary art.

Tell It to the Stones presents artistic and intellectual responses to Huillet and Straub’s filmmaking methods and body of work. The book is not only concerned with a general appreciation of Straub and Huillet’s cinema practice but also recognizes their substantial contributions to other arts and political thought.

Today, with the total availability and saturation of images, the museum has lost its privileged status as the exclusive place for the display of art. In our age of digital media, how is a particular artwork selected for a museum collection? Which symbolic criteria must this artwork satisfy for it to obtain value? And in what ways does the institution of the museum remain relevant?

Everything Passes Except the Past takes an artistic and discursive approach to coming to grips with a colonial past that remains present in museums, public space, and image archives. The contributions in this book propose visionary theoretical, practical, and ethical foundations for future museums based on artistic and curatorial remediation of ethnographic collections.

A mermaid dives through the Cold War ruins of nuclear submarine tunnels above the Arctic Circle in Sirenomelia, by artist and filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė. This book, a poetic and scientific meditation on the artist’s iconic work, explores posthuman mythologies, future archaeology, and the invisible structures that enfold us, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political.

In 1989, a great political change awaited Poland: with the fall of the Berlin wall and the flourishing of capitalism, the people behind the Iron Curtain would be set free. Karol Radziszewski was nine years old, living in Białystok, and, in a graph-paper notebook, he drew pages and pages of princesses in corrective eyewear, dogs with mermaid tails, and mysterious seductresses, whose exceptionally firm bosoms would be, sooner or later, bedecked in arrows shot into a heart or a flame.

One of the seminal visual artists of his generation in Eastern Europe, in recent years Ion Grigorescu’s complex body of work has attracted increasing attention in the West. This volume is the second of his translated diaries—the first from 1970 to 1975 was published in 2014—and is assembled like a small literary and art-historical sensation of the period between 1976 and 1979.

As the true urgency of the environmental crises we face becomes clear, architecture requires fundamental reinvention. The assumption that the building industry can only fulfill humanity’s needs with the irreversible exploitation of the environment, of people, and of the future needs to be reconsidered.

This exhibition catalogue and research project delves into the cultural diplomacy of the Cold War, when modernist art became a flagship of freedom and democracy in the West, and took on the role of a symbolic overcoming of fascism.

INTRA! INTRA! details an ambitious and provocative project that explores human and posthuman forms of agency within a context of spatial research. The project situates itself around developments in artificial intelligence and technical advances in the mapping and creation of nonhuman subjectivities in relation to the presence of human and nonhuman bodies.

Faint on stage? Umm Kulthum never did. It was the people who swooned when she sang. What if, overcome by the power of her song, the singer herself had passed out? What would have ensued during the sudden silence? Umm Kulthum faints on stage is the title Polys Peslikas coined for one of the paintings in his exhibition “The future of colour” at the Cyprus Pavilion during the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.

This book is the first comprehensive monograph of the highly accomplished Albanian artist Edi Hila. His vast oeuvre, long overlooked, describes the political and social transformations of Eastern Europe over the last half century—its paradigm shifts, the pitfalls and temptations of consumerism, changes in visual culture—in a way that is markedly different from the familiar strains of pop banalism.

With its capacity to unsettle our sense of the temporal—through montage, doublings, hauntings—visual culture can enable a sense, or theory, of time travel. It invites us to consider the visual outside the realm of art, and to think beyond the technocratic and colonial tropes of science fiction. It can send us tumbling through deep space, into the past, or toward other speculations.

The twelfth volume of the Critical Spatial Practices series focuses on “Don’t Follow the Wind,” the acclaimed collaborative project situated in the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone. The book explores the long-term environmental crisis in the coastal Japanese region through this ongoing, inaccessible exhibition, which maintains traces of human presence amid the fallout of the March 2011 nuclear reactor meltdown that displaced entire towns.

This book takes as its starting point artist Ilona Németh’s extensive research into the history of sugar production in the region, from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century, when northern sugar beet emerged as a competitor to southern sugar cane, to the social impact of the rapid decline of the industry in the era of peak globalization.

Framed by a Zoom background of a rose garden, Jenny Odell spoke about the role of design in a suspended moment marked by uncertainty. Odell’s message, itself a timely reflection on observation, embraces the standstill and its potential to deepen our individual and collective attention and our sensitivity to time, place, and presence—in turn, perhaps, enabling us all, amid our “new” virtual contexts, to better connect with our natural and cultural environments.

Stunning both visually and acoustically, Ho’s works brim with intricate cultural references—concepts, imaginaries, and allusions to the histories of Eastern and Western literature, art, and music. Through in-depth analysis of Ho’s work and the inspiration behind it—in essays by Anselm Franke and David Teh and a scholarly text by historian Marc Opper.

In response to recent discussions about the value assigned to artworks, art critic and theorist Isabelle Graw introduces the term “value reflection.” Rather than an objective quality, value reflection is the potential for the specific artistic labor expended for artworks to be found in them. This book focuses on the artistic production of writer Francis Ponge and artists Jack Whitten and Banksy, and engages with the different types of value reflection detected in their work.

Can objects be traumatized? How does the commercial value of an art object relate to its aesthetic qualities? How do objects interact? These are some of the questions addressed by Graham Harman, the originator of object-oriented philosophy and a central figure of the Speculative Realism school of thought in contemporary philosophy.

Since the late 1940s, the term cybernetics has been used to describe self-regulating systems that measure, anticipate, and react in response to changing conditions. Initially relevant mostly in the fields of administration, planning, criminology, and early ecology, cybernetics has become an economic factor under digital capitalism. In such a cybernetic totality, art must respond to the new situation: a cybernetics of the poor.

Digital and data technologies are actively transforming the archives of contemporary warfare. Bringing together a range of scholarly perspectives and artistic practices, (W)archives investigates digital archiving as an integral technology of warfare and how artists respond to these changes.

Wish A Dream And Dream A Wish, the first in the tranzit.at Glossary series, introduces the work of visual artist Dardan Zhegrova and includes a collection of his poetry, which often sketches scenes of longing for intimacy and queer sexual desire.

Jesse Ash’s multifaceted project Avoidance—Avoidance imagines fictional encounters between two former lovers who meet again years after their break-up and reminisce about their failed relationship. For each iteration Ash adapted the dialogues and settings and created a new body of works to act as both backdrops and props for the unfolding site-specific performances.

For the last two decades, Josephine Meckseper has created large-scale installations, sculptures, paintings, and films that simultaneously expose and encase signifiers such as advertisements, political imagery, and everyday objects to form an exploration into the collective unconscious of our time. The artist’s exhibition at the Frac des Pays de la Loire is her first major institutional survey show in France.

Our series of shared excerpts continues with a fifth installment focusing on issues of democracy and protest. From Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere, philosopher Oliver Marchart proposes an aesthetics of agitating, propagating, and organizing. Artist and researcher Sonia Boyce reconciles the aesthetic strategies of collage and montage with the political address to racism and nationalism in artworks by Rasheed Araeen and Eddie Chamber, included in The Place Is Here: The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain. We turn to artist Amar Kanwar’s video installation The Torn First Pages—referring to the Burmese bookshop owner who was imprisoned for tearing out pages with government propaganda in the books and journals he sold—and scholar and critic Erika Balsom’s essay on this work in Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary: The Commissions Book. Architect Eyal Weizman identifies the role of the roundabout as a site of eruption in recent uprisings and revolutions in The Roundabout Revolutions from the Critical Spatial Practice series. And to conclude this selection of attachments, writer and performer Johanna Hedva steers away from an ableist discourse on political participation and renders visible care as the most anti-capitalist protest there is, in their essay included in Where are the tiny revolts?

This beautifully designed monograph exhibits Elisabeth Wild’s kaleidoscopic and vibrant collages. Using cutouts of commercial imagery from glossy magazines, Wild composes a dimensionless reality that is witty yet menacing, ancient yet immortal. Imagining figures that are structural and anatomical, her work presents a shimmering dream logic.

In this provocative intellectual biography, architectural historian Mark Wigley makes the surprising claim that the thinking behind modernist architect Konrad Wachsmann’s legendary projects was dominated by the idea of television. While architecture is typically embarrassed by television, preferring to act as if it never happened, Wachsmann fully embraced it.

In elegantly written miniatures, Graw captures radical political, social, and cultural changes that occurred between 2014 and 2017, analyzing how these macro-shifts reach into her own life. She addresses topics ranging from the general turn to the political right, as seen in Brexit and Trump, to #MeToo, men with beards, and Balenciaga. While registering the symptoms of a world that clearly feels different, Graw also meditates on irretrievable personal losses.

In 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork for espionage. This incident is the focus of Heba Y. Amin’s The General’s Stork, an ongoing project that investigates the politics of aerial surveillance—against the backdrop of biblical prophecies, drone warfare, and colonial narratives—from a bird’s-eye view.

In Exhibition-ism, theorist and artist Mieke Bal develops the idea that exhibiting is a significant form of the contemporary. In an exhibition, visitors are in the actual company of artworks that can perform. Looking at art as process, Bal makes the case that the being-together-in-time of an exhibition visit encourages and, if the curation is well thought-out, can heighten the sense of the contemporaneity—art being more capable of this than anything else.

In the form of a conversation with the filmmaker and artist John Akomfrah, this book sets out to explore how his work with montage can be understood to articulate contemporaneity in sensuous ways.

Bringing together visual and written material from TBA21’s commissioning practice and history of exhibitions and live events, The Commissions Book also goes beyond the foundation’s archives to present new works and commissions by Cecilia Bengolea, Claudia Comte, SUPERFLEX, and Territorial Agency, among others.

The Currency is a vinyl EP of rap music written and performed in French, Mandarin, and German by Musquiqui Chihying (Taipei/Berlin), Elom 20ce (Lomé, Togo), and Gregor Kasper (Berlin).

Our series of shared excerpts continues with a fourth installment focusing on issues of representation and decolonization. The late Senegalese artist and poet Issa Samb questions the “representativeness” of race and art in a 1989 text reprinted in his monograph WORD! WORD? WORD!; art historian Nomusa Makhubu writes about depictions of South African eco-racism in Uriel Orlow’s monograph Theatrum Botanicum; artist Pedro Neves Marques looks toward alternative Indigenous science fiction in the anthology Futurity Report; artist and theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva identifies the disco’s black light as a device for Black feminist thought in Otobong Nkanga’s monograph Lustre & Lucre; media theorist Andrea B. Braidt turns to queer subjectivity and affect in the anthology On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency; and art historian T. J. Demos links global geopolitics and visual culture in Against the Anthropocene.

This book arises from the 2019 activities of the MA Fine Arts program at the Zurich University of the Arts. It reflects the conviction that an arts school can be a pedagogical nexus dedicated to the transmission of knowledge, experimentation, and research as much as a locus for civic and critical debate and exhibition, involved in its community, locally and globally.

Published on the occasion of the inaugural Prague biennale, considers the present via counter-hegemonic readings of the past. The book explores various perspectives of class, race, and gender differences in post-socialist states, past and present.

Camnitzer explains his trajectory since 1960s Uruguay in the introduction to this volume of texts, many published here for the first time. A singularly authoritative, yet anti-authoritative gathering of a life’s work in art, education and activism.

The (non)human voice has always been part of modern art, notably within performance art, sound art, and conceptual art. However, Master of Voice temporary master program at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, mutated from this history, examining the voice as a unique “discipline.”

Hannah Beachler is known as an award-winning production designer, but she tells the audience that she considers herself to be more of a story designer. As film stills and concept art from a few of those stories—Moonlight, Miles Ahead, Creed, Lemonade, and Black Panther—flash across a screen, Beachler engages in a conversation with Jacqueline Stewart and Toni L. Griffin about set building and curation, urban design, location scouting, Afrofuturism, fictional histories, and Black feminist narratives, and elucidates her role: a designer behind on-screen tableaux that provide not only visual feasts of artistry and imagination but also intimate spaces of emotion, humanity, and constructed memory.

Our third packet includes art-historical chapters from Sven Lütticken’s Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Revolution and Josephine Berry’s Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry; “On Passive Resistance,” a conversation between Vanessa Joan Müller and Cristina Ricupero in New Ways of Doing Nothing; and Mark Fisher’s “We’re Not All in This Together: Public Space and Antagonism in the Wake of Capitalist Realism” from Caring Culture: Art, Architecture and the Politics of Public Health, edited by Markus Miessen and Andrea Phillips.

Drawing on original documents, photographs and detainee artwork, this book offers a unique insight into the experience of immigration detention in the UK. Together, the authors, from interdisciplinary backgrounds in art, design and criminology present views of everyday life under this form of border control. In offering a glimpse of life within these hidden sites, they explore fundamental questions about coercion, censorship and control, as well as belonging and resistance.

The second packet includes chapters from Hubert Fichte’s The Black City: Glosses, Ingo Niermann’s Solution 295–304: Mare Amoris, and Charlotte Birnbaum’s Bon! Bon! On the Charms of Sweet Cuisine, as well as the introduction to Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai, edited by Maria Lind, Michele Masucci, and Joanna Warsza. 

Not long ago, a melancholic left and a manic neoliberalism seemed to arrive at an awkward consensus: the foreclosure of futurity. Whereas the former mourned the failure of its utopian project, the latter celebrated the triumph of a global marketplace.

Can contemporary art’s practitioners change the way we perceive nature? Employing a variety of forms that include speculative essays, poems, pencil sketches, and photo essays, twenty authors challenge the exclusive human claim to intelligence by pointing to, or inventing, new forms of coexistence for all life-forms. Far more complex than the necessary and continuous exercise of critique, these contributions introduce new ways to experience culture.

From Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich to Basma Alsharif and Pauline Oliveros, Deux Soeurs brings together a chorus of voices that explore representations of parenthood, friendship, and disobedience. Turning to the figure of the poet as a guide in times of chaos, Deux Soeurs presents a framework for an ethics of artistic and social collaboration.

The first selection of Social Distances includes María Belén Sáez de Ibarra’s “Cosmopolitics of the Living” from What about Activism?, edited by Steven Henry Madoff; Martin Herbert’s “On and Off the Grid: Agnes Martin,” from Tell Them I Said No; as well as Fernando García-Dory’s “Inside Us: A Dinner as an Aesthetic and Agro-political Excursion” and Chris Fite-Wassilak’s “Species of Specialties: St. Louis’s Provel Cheese”—both featured in Politics of Food.

Driven by the central question “What are we learning from artists today?” the first volume of the new series edited by Anthony Huberman and Jeanne Gerrity at the CCA Wattis, A Series of Open Questions, is informed by themes found in the work of Dodie Bellamy, such as contemporary forms of feminism and sexuality, the rebirth of the author, and ways in which vulnerability, perversion, vulgarity, and self-exposure can be forms of empowerment.

Shadow Citizens offers an insight into the radical film praxis and extensive oeuvre of filmmaker Želimir Žilnik. From his beginnings in the lively amateur film scene of Yugoslavia in the 1960s, Žilnik has gone on to make more than fifty films. The notion of shadow citizens, conceived as different minorities that are increasingly becoming majorities everywhere, runs through Žilnik’s oeuvre.

Rehousing is the title of a series of works by Peter Friedl which comprises a selection of individual, intricate, and true-to-scale models of houses. Collectively, these structures materialize as constructed environments that reflect the recent past, different biographies, and ideologies in diverse ways; they are “case studies for the mental geography of an alternative modernity.”

This book contextualizes the Creativity Exercises—an amateur art course led by neo-avant-garde artists Miklós Erdély and Dóra Maurer in Budapest from 1975 to 1977—within the postwar intellectual networks that connected artists, architects, educators, sociologists and other socially engaged professionals, fostering the exchange of ideas and concepts and making connections between different fields of knowledge.

What is the role and function of contemporary art in economic and political systems that increasingly manage data and affect? Knowledge Beside Itself delves into the peculiar emphasis placed in recent years, curatorially and institutionally, on notions such as “research” and “knowledge production.”

This publication offers an overview of how creative practices are modifying the ways we think about both knowledge production and research in the cultural sector and in academia. This exploration enquires the invention of manifold research methodologies and contributes to think of strategies to de-universalize and de-neutralize the rigid epistemic schemata of inherited disciplines.

Tomato Target takes a comprehensive look at the unique artistic work of Annette Kelm and the visual idiom she has developed over the course of her career. The publication contextualizes Kelm’s profound practice—that deftly probes the medium of photography and portrays a simultaneously heterogeneous yet decisive use of subjects to signify and act as telling abstractions within her visually opulent object worlds.

Unfold This Moment explores the work of Carol Bove, one of the most inventive and protean artists of her generation, whose practice has expanded—via numerous stylistic evolutions over two decades—from ethereal drawings of Playboy models to towering crushed-metal sculptures.

For three weeks in October 1968, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet was transformed into a sprawling adventure playground that was free to access for children: Gunilla Lundahl and Palle Nielsen’s The Model: A Model for a Qualitative Society concatenated art, research, and urban activism into a visionary hybrid framework.

On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the Work of Joyce Campbell offers a number of portholes into the relations between photography, philosophy, ecology, material history, science fiction, and the care and reading of sacred and symbolic landscapes, as they have been engaged by artist Joyce Campbell over her near three-decade career.

How have artists over the past 150 years related to migration and exile? And what role can a museum play in times of mass migration?

Fusing disparate, seemingly incompatible visual languages to create “synthetic folklore,” Janek Simon’s work presented in this catalogue raises the question: How do we cherish the particular while constructing a global value system with the use of new technologies?

In this book, the animation of commodity objects magically ties together erotic frolics and political horrors: from a DC07 vacuum cleaner to a detention center for refugees, from little irons, socks and sweaters to the particulars of post-Soviet power and Vladimir Putin.

It was the concept of the ocean as a global commons, free for everyone—first formulated by Hugo Grotius in his 1609 treatise, Mare Liberum—that stimulated a free global market. Today, the free market and the free ocean both suffer from rigorous, exploitive use. Solution 295–304: Mare Amoris proposes nine new practical, technological, and metaphysical scenarios of how to fall in love with the sea, and, eventually, have the sea fall in love with us.

The book’s contributions explore how exhibitions can be read and understood across different social and cultural contexts, highlighting differences within the region, whilst also inviting new approaches and methodologies to pin-point areas for comparative forms of research.

Alexandra Kollontai was a writer, a revolutionary, and after the 1917 October revolution the people’s commissar of social welfare as well as one of the first female ambassadors in the world.  This reader, in which artists and thinkers revisit Kollontai’s legacy, asks: How to read Kollontai’s vision of love today and relate it to current feminist struggles?

Does art possess the power to cause structural and meaningful changes in daily life? By means of a critical essay, correspondence with kindred spirits from the field, and visual impressions, this book reflects on the possibility to merge art and life, fiction and reality, and on the importance of this process for the future of artistic practice.

The publication was realized on the occasion of the exhibition “Lin Tanmiao: Systems” in collaboration with Consultant Curator Alexandra Munroe and Assistant Curator X Zhu-Nowell, at the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), Shanghai, 2018.

The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of artists and artist collectives interrogating the global politics and ethics of food production, distribution, and consumption. As an important document of new research and thinking around the subject, this book, published with Delfina Foundation, contains reflections on food by prominent artists, anthropologists, chefs, and activists, among others.

Investigating the economic value of one of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s most lucrative exports (namely, poverty), Renzo Martens’ provocative film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008) remains a landmark intervention into debates about contemporary art’s relationship to exploitative economies.

Exhibitions are tightly intertwined with the processes of historiography, creating dynamic and plural relations between and beyond all participants, both human and non-human. Thus they are able to connect different histories while writing history themselves, their reciprocal relationships making them a complex object of and transforming agent in historical research.

In 2009, Leonard Cohen was scheduled to perform at the Ramallah Cultural Palace in Palestine. As a result of the cultural boycott of Israel, the concert was canceled but the story, as Rakowitz’s eponymous work amply demonstrates, did not end there.

Heirloom documents the development of the artistic research for Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour’s project for the Danish Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. It explores how recurrent notions in Sansour’s oeuvre, such as memory, trauma, identity, and belonging, intertwine with the discourses of science fiction and environmental disaster narratives.

Engaging the histories of art, architecture, and design, Leonor Antunes reflects on the functions of everyday objects, contemplating their potential to be materialized as abstract sculptures. She investigates the values and ideas embedded in things as well as in vernacular traditions and craft.

Dizziness is more than feeling dizzy. In this multidisciplinary reader, artists, philosophers, and researchers from a range of experimental sciences and cultural studies trace dizziness not only as a phenomenon of sensory input impacting our vestibular system, but also as a twofold phenomenon of “sense”—creating meaning and triggering emotions.

In The Language of Secret Proof, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik challenges the conditions under which Indigenous rights to protect and regain traditional lands are currently negotiated in United States legal frameworks. The tenth volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series responds to the urgent need for alternative modes of evidentiary production by introducing an innovative system of architectural drawing and notation.

The questioning of thingness is an integral part of presentation and has informed and shaped the social relevance of the field of the curatorial. Immanent to presentation as a mode of being (public) in the world, the curatorial has the potential to address, visualize, and question the central effects of the changing status and function of things.

This volume brings together a wide selection of writings by exhibition maker and writer Jens Hoffmann and outlines his deep understanding of the interconnections among art, curating, theater, film, and literature. The nearly fifty texts include essays on artists, exhibitions, and curating; reviews of large-scale international group exhibitions; catalogue texts from exhibitions Hoffmann curated; and conversations with artists and other cultural practitioners.

This is a subjective chronicle of contemporary art from 2011 to 2017. During this period, the curator, writer, and educator Maria Lind regularly wrote a column for the print edition of ArtReview. The writings focused on individual art works and exhibitions, extending to conversations and debates that were developing in the art world and beyond during these seven years.

In Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, writer and musician Jörg Heiser argues that context switching between art and pop music is an attempt to solve the contradictions faced in one field of cultural production by moving to another. Exploring the intertwined histories of pop music and art from the early 1960s on, Heiser shows that those leading double lives are often best equipped to detect such contradictions while pointing toward radical alternatives. 

The Mill is the second of three projects to engage the resource industries of Vancouver Island (mining, forestry, and fishing) through contemporary art and writing. This publication responds to forestry: a mobile industry of logging camps that follow the trees; prices that rise and fall; mills that open and close; communities that boom and bust.

Fredrik Værslev’s work has always been about expanding the possibilities and the field of painting through the interlacing of technical experimentation and conceptual framing. Tan Lines aims to do the same: to represent an artistic practice in the form of a book.

Lassen sich die ethnologischen Beobachtungen und Empfindungen eines deutschen Schriftstellers zu afro-diasporischen Kulturen „restituieren”? Welche Möglichkeiten eröffnet und an welche Grenzen stößt der Einsatz von Selbstreflexion und schwuler Sexualität als Forschungswerkzeuge? Das Ausstellungs- und Publikationsprojekt Hubert Fichte: Liebe und Ethnologie  diesen Fragen entlang Fichtes Romanzyklus nachgegangen.

Can the ethnological observations and feelings on Afro-diasporic cultures of a German writer be “restituted”? What are the possibilities and limits of using self-reflection and gay sexuality as research tools? The exhibition and publication project Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology has followed these questions through Fichte’s cycle of novels.

A penchant for abstraction when it comes to complex social conditions, a drive to effect change, and a resilience of analysis and representation are all characteristic of Hungary’s art scene since the 1960s, and especially of its “abstract artists.” The abstracted visual language of Hungarian artists is thematized by the Künstlerhaus in the 2019 exhibition “Ábstract Hungary.”

This volume investigates the cut-up as a contemporary mode of creativity and important global model of cultural production. The term cut-up thereby serves as an open container for a long list of terms and actions that describe the combination and reassembly of existing motifs, fragments, images and ideas from diverse and disconnected origins into newly synthesized entities.

In The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky looks at the different directions that painting has taken since the turn of the millennium. He deflates the twentieth-century belief that abstraction and figuration in painting are dichotomous. Instead, Schwabsky argues, they are methods of asking or answering the questions: What is painting?

The Museum Is Not Enough is the result of collective reflections on architecture, contemporary social concerns, institutions, and the public undertaken by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in recent years.

Drawing is thinking, thinking is moving. These words summarize the layered work of Belgian artist Ronny Delrue (b. 1957). For many years, drawing has been central to his oeuvre. On the one hand, a drawing is an autonomous artwork, but on the other hand it is the direct crystallization of a fleeting line of thought that systematically opens the door to new work.

Jolly Rogers is a collection of Peter Wächtler’s latest short texts, written in preparation of his two solo exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall and Kunsthalle Zürich (both 2019), and combined with a nearly complete collection of the artist’s drawings and prints from recent years. The texts operate like vignettes to a larger story, and the images as unreliable illustrations to the narrative.

Artists who belong to Algeria are caught between a national mythology that does not represent them and a historical space blanked out by state-sanctioned amnesia on both sides of the Mediterranean. Waiting for Omar Gatlato presents the work of twenty-five such artists.

In 1985, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated “Les Immatériaux” at Centre Georges Pompidou. Through its experimental layout and hybrid presentation of objects, technologies, and ideas, this pioneering exploration of virtuality reflected on the exhibition as a medium of communication, and anticipated a deeper engagement with immersive and digital space in both art and theory.

An Exhibition Always Hides Another Exhibition is a collective portrait of Hans Ulrich Obrist composed by friends, collaborators, admirers, and inquisitors. From personal anecdotes to analytic estimations to visual representations, the contributions respond to the questions that frame the book: Who is HUO? What does HUO do? What has HUO done?

Through four essays by critics and curators, as well as texts and images of the works on exhibit—more than eighty works by nearly sixty artists—the book aims to present a vital component of the Chinese art world which is under-represented on the global art scene, namely the contemporary art production from the Pearl River Delta.

New Good Luck presents a new series of photographic works by Shirana Shahbazi. Taken during the artist’s three-month stay in India, the photos, often of solitary people in architectonic space or a landscape, have been taken apart and reshaped through a digital collage technique, their color removed or reconfigured.

As the Cold War gained momentum in Europe, Tito’s break with Stalin led to Yugoslavia being expelled from the Eastern bloc in 1948. Confronted with this new reality, the Yugoslav government decided to bridge the indeterminacy of its cultural politics through a creative strategy: it commissioned young artists and architects to draft the aesthetics of a non-Soviet form of socialism.

This volume both gathers and expands on the results of the research project “Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions” held at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, and proposes to draft a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of art institutions.

With the global rise of a politics of shock driven by authoritarian regimes that subvert the rule of law and civil liberties, what paths to resistance, sanctuary, and change can cultural institutions offer? In this book, more than twenty leading curators and thinkers about contemporary art present powerful case studies, historical analyses, and theoretical perspectives that address the dynamics of activism, protest, and advocacy.

From November 2017 to September 2019, res·o·nant, a conceptual light and sound installation by Mischa Kuball, pulsed throughout the architecture of the Libeskind building in the Jewish Museum Berlin.

As Oliver Marchart claims, there has always been an activist undercurrent in art. In this book he traces trajectories of artistic activism in theater, dance, performance, and public art, and investigates the political potential of urbanism, curating, and “biennials of resistance.”

One of the most significant shifts in contemporary art during the past two decades concerns artists and collectives who have moved their artistic focus from representation to direct social action. This publication shows why this transition might change our understanding of artistic production at large and make us reconsider the role of art in society.

“Standstill” could be the name for the exact kind of experience that is the hiatus between social expectations and real possibilities of agency. The essays of this book transverse these dimensions of standstill as an in-between of time. The book includes essays by Georges Didi-Huberman, David Lapoujade, Peter Osborne, Jacques Rancière, Christine Ross, and others as well as conversations with Via Lewandowsky, Aernout Mik and Marcel Odenbach.

In Design by Accident, Alexandra Midal declares the autonomy of design—in and on its own terms. This meticulously researched work proposes not only a counterhistory but a new historiography of design, shedding light on overlooked historical landmarks and figures while reevaluating the legacies of design’s established luminaries from the nineteenth century to the present.

Stop and Go: Nodes of Transformation and Transition is a research project by architect and artist Michael Hieslmair and cultural historian Michael Zinganel that focuses on the transformation of the informal hubs, terminals, and nodes along Pan-European transport corridors in Eastern Europe and Vienna.

Linguistic and visual representation intersect in Irma Blank’s pastel-colored, script-like “Eigenschriften” (Self-Writings, 1968–73), a series of drawings considered the starting point of the artist’s mature work.

How to Make a Mask borrows its title from one of Pedro Barateiro’s performances in which the artist reflects upon the role of the individual within the sociopolitical situations of the collective through references ranging from psychological tests to the history of theater.

Templates is a new publication which accompanies Slaattelid’s exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall (2019) and Kunstnernes Hus (2020). In Kystverket Slaattelid repeatedly depicts a prosaic yet charged motif, consisting of a coastal landscape with a lantern (navigation marker) and—in silhouette against the sky—an operator adjusting the light signal.

How do we design our cities when our most intimate experiences are incessantly tracked and our feelings become the base of new modes of production that prioritize the immaterial over the material?

Resonating with the ethos of open dialogue and the experimentation of women artists’ collectives in the ’70s and ’80s, Of Other Spaces constructs a dynamic, open, and collaborative arena that foregrounds practices of resistance, collectivity, and self-organization. The book seeks out the lodestone of a volatile politics that calls for and instigates urgent alternatives to the cultural, political, and economic machineries of power that haunt this world.

Taking its point of departure in an “anachronic” exhibition, “Soulèvements” (2016–18), this book is a theoretical exploration of how the notion of contemporaneity—understood as the coming together of different times in the same historical present—relates to the end of a certain history of art.

The artist as entrepreneur has become a common topic of discussion. Here, however, we put forward the notions of “self” and “system.” First, every artistic practice is self-reflexive and self-contextualizing. Second, each system an artist builds allows for innovation. Let’s construct a space where we inevitably find ourselves together with others, even if we feel lonely, like a witch lost in a library of artists’ books.

When making things without prior knowledge of “the material,” how should such naive and potentially brutal behavior be interpreted, and what does it represent and generate?

at Fifty is the first catalogue dedicated to Stephen Sutcliffe. Both a microcosm and macrocosm of the processes at play in his works, it is also something of an artist’s book, one that, typical of the artist’s critical practice, formally addresses questions about the value of the monologue, the archive, and the status of the artist.

Cable cuts, energetics and gunk: moving back and forth between a group of core subjects, Reflexologies converts the past five years of sculptural work into a 384-page book. It is interrupted throughout by a lagged conversation and three new texts: Martin Herbert reflects on subsea cable stumps and the generative potential of gaps; Jennifer Teets considers flexible pneus and viscous processes; while Robin Watkins tackles a slow real-time collaboration.

The publication developed from the exhibition and research project The Place Is Here (2016–19), which traced the urgent and wide-ranging conversations taking place between black artists, writers, and thinkers in Britain during the 1980s. Within the context of Thatcherism and a racist art establishment, a new generation of black artists and intellectuals produced some of the most compelling ideas and images in recent British cultural history.

The publication, like the exhibition itself, presents a variety of approaches that, through specific events and historical contexts, survey the theories and practices of radical leftist politics of the 1960s and 1970s and the relationship between politics and aesthetics.

In today’s increasingly digitalized and neoliberal societies, debates on universals and specifics have gained new momentum. This volume situates the contemporary return to universal claims and concepts in the fields of art, architecture, and urbanism, and highlights the interrelation of the specific and the universal in diverse historical situations from the nineteenth century to the present.

Igor Grubić has been active as a multimedia artist from the beginning of the 1990s. His work includes site-specific interventions in public spaces, photography, and film. Grubić’s project for the 58th Venice Biennale, Traces of Disappearing in Three Acts (2006–19), is already thirteen years in the making. It consists of three interrelated photo essays and an animated film, set in a specially designed mise-en-scène.

Travis Jeppesen’s Bad Writing is a collection of interconnected essays and “fictocriticisms,” many appearing in print for the first time, that etches a pathway for a truly radical “bad” modernism in art and literature. Erudite, witty, and occasionally controversial, Bad Writing reinvigorates the too-often staid medium of art criticism as an iconoclastic and inventive literary art form.

In Hecker’s multichannel installation Resynthese FAVN, the auditory stimuli produced from the objects within the exhibition space and the synthetic sounds he composed were designed to subliminally override the mechanical processes of human sense. The result was an intervention into the psychoacoustics of the audience, dramatizing their subjective experience through auditory hallucinations.

Jill Johnston—cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon—was renowned as a writer on dance, especially on the developments around Judson Dance and the 1960s downtown New York City scene, and later as the author of the radical-feminist classic Lesbian Nation (1973). This book collects thirty texts by Jill Johnston that were initially published in her weekly column for The Village Voice between 1960 and 1974.

Hardly a gray matter of catching the spirit of our present. From the sun-drenched-ness of the Dubaian atmosphere, to the feathery encounter in a secret printing workshop, words and materials are discreetly—spectrally, outspokenly—put forward: a bunch of residents cruising the seas of nine temporary realities, the result of an ongoing swapping of facts and speculations from the earthly realm.

The publication I can’t nail the days down documents Newby’s eponymous exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien and includes a photo essay by the artist as well as detailing previous projects. Christina Barton, Juliane Bischoff, Chris Kraus, and Nicolaus Schafhausen contribute texts to the book that explore the influences, tools, ethical aspects, and poetics of Newby’s artworks, as well as the personal relationships the artist folds into her projects.

The seventh volume in the Fogo Island Arts publication series accompanies the eponymous exhibition curated by Alexandra McIntosh and Nicolaus Schafhausen and presented at the Fogo Island Art Gallery in 2016.

Titled Divided We Stand, the 9th Busan Biennale in South Korea focused on the theme of divided territories caused by war, conflict, or colonization, and also considered individuals’ feelings of separation, anxiety, fear, or paranoia that result from such geopolitical traumas.

Burial of the White Man is a bildungsroman about the friendship between artist Erik Niedling and writer Ingo Niermann. While in their thirties, they begin collaborating on a series of projects of ever-increasing ambition and scope: a tomb for all humans, a dissident replica of the U.S. Army, a German-Mozambican liberation movement… Each failure is answered with an even more outrageous endeavor.

John C. Welchman’s compelling study reassesses Italian Futurism; the words and images in Dada and Surrealism; affect in the work of Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger; the delirious splits and metaphorical ricochets of Salvador Dalí; the social and philosophical ideas mobilized by René Magritte; “whiteness” in the work of Günter Brus; postwar US–UK exchanges on sculpture; and relations between writing and seeing in the work of Rémy Zaugg.

Around the world, place-based projects are drawing increasing attention to the pillars of art, design, and economics as important players in the development and redevelopment of the so-called periphery. This publication poses the question: How plausible and effective are these ventures?

Steering her analysis from the newspaper obituary in and out of literature and past cinema, Melissa McCarthy investigates a fundamental aspect of the human condition: our state of being between life and death, always in precarious and watery balance. Sharks, Death, Surfers observes how sharks have been depicted over centuries and across cultures, then flips the lens (and dissects the cornea) to consider what sharks see when they look back.

This book tells the story of Katarina Taikon’s life in three parts. The first is a 2012 biography by journalist Lawen Mohtadi. The second is Taikon in her own words: the first volume of her autobiographical children’s book series, Katitzi.

Richard Roe is the fictional memoir of a legal person. The name is one of the oldest used in English law when the real name of someone is withheld, or when a corpse can’t be identified. Divided into seven fragmentary sections, this memoir gives voice to the legal fictions that creep around the margins of selfhood—and that increasingly dictate the terms of economic and political process.

This publication collects writings on the art scene of Kosovo over the past twenty years. In the 1990s Kosovars felt the urgency to shape their own scene: in a search for identity, for nation building, in continuing or ending political conflicts, by trying to find a language to grasp recent social and political developments, or simply by continuing their practice in new, unstable times.

This publication was realized on the occasion of Song Dong’s solo show “I Don’t Know the Mandate of Heaven”, co-curated by Liu Yingjiu and Xu Tiantian at the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), Shanghai, 2017.

“Sisterhood” is a key concept and an impulse to work with imagination; built on the foundations of second-wave criticism of the patriarchal exploitation of women, it poses questions about the future from the perspective of feminist economics and ethics of care.

Herewith the Clues continues Boy Vereecken’s research into mass-market literary culture, which began with Signature Strengths (2016). The volume includes two text contributions: a contemporary take on the whodunit novel by Shumon Basar, followed by a tour of the history of the Crime Dossiers by Laura Herman. The book is illustrated with a photo series from Antoine Begon who has unpacked and photographed the pieces of evidence.

The publication Deliquescing accompanies Steve Bishop’s 2018–19 solo exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Both the exhibition and publication reflect a body of research that focuses on the fragility of memory and the potential for its preservation, defying the gradual breakdown of matter through the effects of time.

Para-Platforms investigates the social, spatial, and material reality of right-wing populism. Three case studies—presented in a symposium at the Gothenburg Design Festival in November 2017—form the core of this collection: journalist Hannes Grassegger on Trump and Brexit; architectural theorist Stephan Trüby on spaces of right-wing extremism in Germany; and Christina Varvia on Forensic Architecture’s investigation of the murder of Halit Yozgat. 

This book outlines a critical global fashion theory from a postcolonial perspective. It analyzes fashion as a cultural, historical, social, and political phenomenon involved in and affected by histories of colonial domination, anti-colonial resistance, and processes of decolonization and globalization. Stemming from a range of different disciplines, the contributions in this book reflect the multidisciplinary and diverse nature of postcolonial fashion research today.

Curatorial projects are increasingly understood as research projects with extended time frames and complex interactions across diverse sectors. This book presents “100 Years of Now,” a research project taking place at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2015–19), as a critical investigation into the temporality of contemporaneity—both in terms of its structure and content.

For a number of years, the work of Andrea Pichl has centered on the oft-derided architecture of mass-produced buildings and their position in wider architectural and historical contexts. Pichl is interested in the utopian potential of modernity that these forms convey. In her installations, photography, and paper work, the artist focuses on the question of what became of these utopias.

Iman Mersal intricately weaves a new narrative of motherhood, moving between interior and exterior scapes, diaries, readings, and photographic representations of motherhood to question old and current representations of motherhood and the related space of unconditional love, guilt, personal goals, and traditional expectations. What is hidden in narratives of motherhood in fictional and nonfictional texts as well as in photographs?

How to spell the fight follows a thread that has been running from centuries past till the present day, morphing from the tangible string figures that join our hands in childhood to the more elusive computational algorithms that engage our fingers today. What follows is a conversation about collective agency emerges with the aim of rethinking current paradigms of cognition, education, and power.

Had this book been titled “How to listen” or “How to be all ears,” the title would have been appropriate to the content and directly explained the book’s focus. Why, then, does the title prefer to obscure its subject rather than reveal it, running counter to a title’s traditional function? This book is grounded in the experience of the unseen listener. Speakers are seen when they speak, whereas listeners recede into the background of the scene dominated by speakers.

Iman Mersal intricately weaves a new narrative of motherhood, moving between interior and exterior scapes, diaries, readings, and photographic representations of motherhood to question old and current representations of motherhood and the related space of unconditional love, guilt, personal goals, and traditional expectations. What is hidden in narratives of motherhood in fictional and nonfictional texts as well as in photographs?

Prototypes by Doireann O’Malley is a multi-screen film installation, a series of dreamscapes interrogating trans* semiotics through psychoanalytic practices, speculative technologies, and live action role-playing. O’Malley’s work references scientific and medical investigations into the human psyche that address wider philosophical concerns relating to biology, gender embodiment, sexuality, utopianism,  and biomolecular advancement in human evolution.

In 2014, Paul McCarthy installed the massive inflatable sculpture Tree at Place Vendôme in Paris. The sculpture’s shape was at once reminiscent of a sex toy, a Christmas tree, and a Hans Arp artwork. It caused a public outcry, the artist was attacked, and the work vandalized and ultimately removed. This book brings together conversations with scholars, artists, curators, and writers, which reflect on McCarthy’s work.

Jumana Manna’s work in film and sculpture explores how power is articulated through relationships, often focusing on the body and materiality in relation to narratives of nationalism and histories of place. This book includes stills from her film Wild Relatives (2018), a meditative documentary capturing the transit of seeds between the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway and the fields of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.

This Is Television addresses the increasingly obsolete medium of television by way of the medium of the book—by extension commenting on media’s continuous changes of form and format. Through an interplay of theory and artistic research material, the book extends Judy Radul’s ongoing investigation of media with an idiosyncratic perspective on television—while still feeding off collective experience.

How can we feel the realities of war, conflict, and violence? What are the cultural and social implications of war and violence, and how does society respond to war? Giving Voices features four of Erkan Özgen’s video works dealing with war, violence, and trauma—beyond the boundaries of the political, within the dimension of the private and the human. By deciding not to show images of violence and war, Özgen gives a voice to individuals and objects. 

The words on the cover of Aslan Gaisumov’s first monograph are names of places no longer inhabited. One of these words, Kayçu-Yuxe or Keicheyuhea, names the birthplace of Zayanu Khasueva, the artist’s maternal grandmother. It is also the title of his film from 2017, in which Khasueva returns to the site of her ancestral village for the first time in seventy-three years.

Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry analyzes modern and contemporary art’s drive to blur with life, and how this is connected to the democratic state’s biologized control of life. Art’s ambition to transform life intersects in striking ways with modern biopower’s aim to normalize, purify, judge, and transform life—rendering it bare. This book finds the answer to the question: How did autonomous art become such an effective tool of the capitalist state?

The second in a series on intersubjectivity, this collection of essays considers the relationship between performance, subjectivity, and human agency. Contributions explore the ways in which performance is decoupled from human embodiment via forms of mediation, mechanical reproduction, or simulation. 

Translated into English for the first time, The Black City is a portrait of New York written by Hubert Fichte between 1978 and 1980. Fichte researched the city as the center of the African diaspora, conducting interviews and composing essays about syncretism in culture and the arts, material living conditions in the city, and political and individual struggles based on race, class, and sexuality. 

How do you tell the story of a friendship? How do you trace the roots of one of the most significant cross-disciplinary unions in fashion today? Artist Sterling Ruby and fashion designer Raf Simons did just that when they sat on stage with curator Jessica Morgan at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. This is a story, and an exchange, that is beyond collaboration.

Selected Writings, 1998–2015 is a collection of texts by Babette Mangolte in which she reflects on her practice as a photographer and filmmaker and her collaborative work with filmmakers, artists, dancers, and choreographers. She provides insights into the techniques and methods she created as well as her relationships with notable collaborators such as Marina Abramović, Chantal Akerman, Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer.

The catalogue Ornament and Crime accompanies the group exhibition curated by Meg O’Rourke at Eykyn Maclean gallery in New York. With Adolf Loos’s eponymous 1908 diatribe against excessive ornamentation as its guide, the exhibition draws on the tenets set forth by Loos—simplicity, purity, freedom—with particular attention to their philosophical implications and their persistence into the latter twentieth century.

The catalogue please listen hurry others speak better accompanies solo exhibitions by Amalia Pica at three venues: “ears to speak” and “please open hurry.” Two threads in Pica’s practice are brought together: communication between humans and exchange between species. The artist raises questions of mutual understanding through constructing forums that address shared experience.

The artist Rainer Ganahl has been creatively adapting the writings of Karl Marx to his own work since the 1990s. The German philosopher’s ideas have galvanized projects such as Ganahl’s irreverent fashion show Commes des Marxists, a series of obscene food sculptures inspired by the “credit crunch” of 2008, and a Karl Marx fire extinguisher.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the two group exhibitions “The only performances that make it all the way…” and “Yes, but is it performable? Investigations on the Performative Paradox” which were shown at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien in 2013 and 2016.

“Xeno” speaks to the turn away from “what is” toward “what could be”: the (as yet) unknown, the alien—having been employed in recent years through such speculative-political approaches as xenofeminism and xenopoetics.

In the artistic activities of Philippe Thomas, there was a determination to disappear. In this book, Elisabeth Lebovici elaborates on Thomas’s strategy to cede and fictionalize authorship and suggests a reading of his work that incorporates questions of gender and reproduction, the multiplicity of the subjects involved, and the unbearable disappearance of Thomas.

Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi) brings together the work of five anthropologists and five artists/collectives researching and responding to the dramatic rise and fall of Mongolia’s mineral economy. The publication features visual documentation of multiple art-anthropology exchange processes, ethnographic texts, and further written contributions that introduce contemporary Mongolia as a dynamic site for conceptual and creative experimentation.

This publication accompanies Torbjørn Rødland’s exhibition “Fifth Honeymoon,” produced as a collaboration between Bergen Kunsthall; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; and Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma, and featuring thirty new photographs and a new video work, his first in eleven years.

This book is the fourth volume in Vincent Meessen’s publication series “Prospectus” and published following the artist’s solo exhibitions at WIELS and Centre Pompidou. The book is structured around the installations that made up these shows, and are placed in parallel with untold histories of the Situationist International, modernity’s last international avant-garde.

As her first comprehensive publication, this catalogue surveys the multi-facetted oeuvre of the Greek artist Georgia Sagri. It collects both current documentation of Sagri’s work and rich archival material since 1999; together they are juxtaposed against an interview conducted with Silvia Federici, and a conversation between the artist, Bettina Funcke, and John Kelsey.

Guy Mees’s (1935–2003) photographs, videos, and above all his fragile works on paper are characterized by a formal rigor combined with sensitivity and delicacy. The uniqueness of his oeuvre lies precisely in its avoidance of conventional aesthetics and discursive classifications.

Contemporary Research Intensive was an event organized in the context of the 57th Venice Art Biennale to investigate the concept of “contemporaneity.” The book is both part and result of the intensive sharing of ideas to produce something that captures the spirit of both discussions at that time and the publication process as a temporal form.

Hegel after Occupy is a Western Marxist analysis of different attempts to understand the present historical situation and the way theories of postmodernity, globalization, and contemporaneity implicitly or explicitly conceptualize the relationship between the historical present and political action.

“The contemporary” is an established term in a range of scholarly and disciplinary discourses, but what does it mean? Margaret-Anne Hutton sets out to expose the inconsistencies and ambiguities in its terminological usage, and to unpick some of the knots which bind the substantive and adjective.

This publication accompanies two exhibitions of recent sculptural work by the artist Magali Reus: “Hot Cottons” (2017–18) at Bergen Kunsthall and “As mist, description,” (2018) at the South London Gallery. Featuring an essay by writer and curator Laura Mclean-Ferris and a poetic response by writer and poet Quinn Latimer as well as a fully illustrated overview of Reus’s work, this catalogue provides an in-depth exploration of the artist’s recent sculptural practice.

Writings, Conversations, Scripts is the first survey of text works by Ane Hjort Guttu. Written between 2003 and 2018, the texts range from public statements, poetic short prose, and film scripts to reflections on the role of the artist and essays on art for children. With a special focus on the significance of “image-text constellations,” this anthology suggests connections between artistic writing and curatorial publishing.

Gilbert & George never cook and always eat out. Back in 1969, however, the artist duo hosted The Meal, an elaborate dinner party that included thirteen guests, Princess Margaret’s butler, a chef who prepared a meal from a Victorian cookery manual, and the guest of honor, artist David Hockney. Birnbaum took a trip to London to visit the immaculately dressed pair to discuss The Meal and other curious projects from their fifty-year collaboration.

The Tamam Shud narrative emerged through a series of episodic performances and an exhibition by Alex Cecchetti at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. For two years the writing process and the artistic process were interwoven, feeding each other as they evolved. The art project and the artist’s novel are linked together as much as the life of the victim is connected to the piece of paper found in his pocket.

This publication surveys the work of Italian critic, architect, and visual artist Gianni Pettena. Focusing on a rich ten-year period of production that began in the mid-sixties, it brings new attention to the artistic and intellectual practice of a figure known primarily as one of the main exponents of the Radical Architecture movement.

This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum (2015–18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation, which looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history.

The practice of Su-Mei Tse involves issues such as time, memory, musicality, and language. Like her exhibition, “Nested,” this publication was conceived to be like a notebook: a form that brings together impressions that have occurred in everyday life—be they visual, sound, or memory related—and blends them in a subjective and intuitive way, allowing a whole network of echoes and correspondences to be deployed.

In the body of work documented here, Pryde combines a series of color photographs of hands touching objects with a scale-model freight train and track, replete with miniaturized graffiti, that took visitors in a short ride through the exhibition. Through photography and sculpture, Pryde pays close attention to the nature of image making and the conditions display, subtly reworking codes and conventions to alter our cultural perception.

Profit over Peace in Western Sahara examines the role of natural resources in the occupation of the Western Sahara, a territory considered by the United Nations to still be awaiting decolonization. Its liberation from colonial rule has come to a standstill due to Morocco’s continued military occupation of a part of the territory. Meanwhile, the EU has ignored basic principles of international law in the region due.

The way we see the world has changed drastically since NASA released the “blue marble” image of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. No longer a placid slow-moving orb, the world is now perceived as a hothouse of activity and hyper-connectivity that cannot keep up with its inhabitants.

Merlin Carpenter considers how “The Outside Can’t Go Outside” has been inserted into contemporary art theory following the financial crisis of 2007/8. The book focuses on the idea that the value of art is located in unpaid mental, educational, and communicational labor that is gradually accrued and then exploited according to the logic of Marx’s central thesis on exploitation.

“What’s my DNA?” Virgil Abloh asks to an overflowing auditorium at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Abloh goes on to provide his audience with a “cheat code”—advice he wishes he had received as a student. He then unpacks a series of “shortcuts” for cultivating a “personal design language.”

How do artists work today? Has the pluralism of art given way to a pluralism of roles that artists may occupy? What are the contemporary conditions of labour producing this new state of affairs, and what re-skilling does it ask of artists? These are some of the questions addressed in The Artist As.

Lines towards Another is the first anthology on the work of Australian contemporary artist Tom Nicholson. Spanning drawing, sculpture, public actions, sound, installation, video, and performance, Nicholson’s work since the 1990s has engaged with critical questions around history, politics, narrative, and representation.

Prints by Jennifer Bornstein gathers together a body of work encompassing her latest projects in printmaking during a recent fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. These works are contextualized by earlier projects in drawing, film, and artist books that span the 1990s to the present.

Following the tradition of classical theories of painting based on exchanges with artists, Isabelle Graw’s The Love of Painting considers the art form not as something fixed, but as a visual and discursive material formation with the potential to fascinate owing to its ability to produce the fantasy of liveliness.

Ellen Cantor (1961–2013) combined ready-made materials with diaristic notes and drawings to probe her perceptions and experiences of personal desire and institutional violence. This book is concerned with, and a document of, Cantor’s work through the lens of Pinochet Porn (2008–16) and its making—an epic experimental film embodying and radically extending her multifaceted artistic practice.

Departing from Marcel Odenbach’s eponymous exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, Beweis zu nichts / Proof of Nothing examines new works by Odenbach and contextualizes them within a broader context.

This publication was created on the occasion of Dutch designer Ineke Hans’s first institutional solo exhibition in Austria. The exhibition—its title a pun merging the German phrase for “What’s going on?” with the name of architect Adolf Loos—provided an overview of Ineke Hans’s recent work while also exploring the present and the future of design.

Myths of the Marble documents a group exhibition that took place in 2017 at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Curated by Alex Klein and Milena Hoegsberg, the exhibition reflects upon how the “virtual” has been engaged by contemporary artists as a way to consider the world as a site of possibility and limitation that both permeates physical space and online experience.

With (1770–25k) Cécile B. Evans presents materials from three recent video works included in her 2016 solo exhibition “Timeline for a Copy without Origins” at the Bielefelder Kunstverein. The amalgamations of text and image appear in the form of audiovisual transcripts, much of the material scavenged verbatim from popular culture and the user-generated web content of platforms like YouTube, Craigslist, and Reddit.

The Museum of Rhythm is a speculative institution that engages rhythm as a tool for interrogating the foundations of modernity and the sensual complex of time in daily experience. This book, and the exhibition upon which it is based, is an outcome of durational research that sees art as one of the means by which the ideologies of rhythm are implemented.

The choreographic turn in the visual arts from 1958 to 1965 can be identified by the sudden emergence of works created by different visual artists around the world. Dedicated to the renewed encounter between dance and performance and the institutions of global contemporary art, this publication proposes that a “new performance turn” has emerged in the second decade of the century.

Border Thinking: Disassembling Histories of Racialized Violence aims to question and provide answers to current border issues in Europe. Central to this investigation is a refugee crisis that is primarily a crisis of global Western capitalism and its components: modernization, nationalism, structural racism, dispossession, and social, political, and economic violence.

What Is Different? is the title of 2017’s edition of the Jahresring, guest-edited and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans. Circling around contemporary issues of newly resurfaced right-wing populism, the phenomenon of fake news, and the backfire effect, Tillmans, rather than analyzing the status quo, focuses on what has changed in the past ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. Why are societal consensus and institutions now under attack?

Organized by curator Pierre Bal-Blanc, the experimental architectural program “Project Phalanstère” consisted of a series of site-specific artworks in the Parisian suburbs.  This book extends the recollection and mental reconstruction of the artworks and reconstitutes the project’s political aims.

Walking, that most basic of human actions, was transformed in the twentieth century by Surrealism, the Situationist International, and Fluxus into a tactic for revolutionizing everyday life. Each group chose locations in the urban landscape as sites—from the flea markets and bars of Paris to the sidewalks of New York—and ambulation as the essential gesture.

Botanical Drift explores the hermeneutics, historicization, semiotics, and symbiosis of plants—past, present, extant, and extinct—around the globe. Plant histories are explored by significant and diverse feminist, art-historical, and anthropological voices—from Germaine Greer to herman de vries—bringing new perspectives through photo-essays, fiction, performance, and interventions in ecological, film, and translation archives.

With Sundry Modernism, Oraib Toukan presents an informal register of modernist Palestinian architecture—an assemblage of images and stories collected from 2013 to 2015 in the cities of Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Jericho.

The “economization of art” began to take shape in the wake of the crisis of capital in 2009. In this book, first delivered as a lecture at Kunsthalle Bern in April 2016, Diedrich Diederichsen follows Marx’s labor theory of value and counters the symbolic economies dominating the art field, as well as economic exceptionalism or calculation, with systems of recording and reading out.

In this anthology, a mixture of new and established names in the fields of contemporary art, media theory, philosophy, and speculative fiction explore the diverse ways fiction manifests, and provide insights into subjects ranging from the hive mind of the art collective 0rphan Drift to the protocols of online self-presentation.

This book is the first survey of the art and practice of Art+Positive, a significant affinity group of ACT UP New York during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Staging self-initiated actions, and also participating in larger demonstrations organized by ACT UP, Art+Positive practiced an improvisational approach to activism at the intersection of the AIDS crisis and the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Armen Avanessian chronicles his stay in Miami as an experiment in writing about our times of individual optimization and digitization. An inventory of the self in the second person—and a philosopher’s reflections in the infinity pool of the art world—this book reckons with a new time complex as well as the aesthetics and infrastructures of the contemporary. 

In 1987, Peter G. Rowe published his pioneering book Design Thinking. In it, he interrogated conceptual approaches to design in terms of both process and form. Thirty years later, in a lecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Rowe offered a reappraisal of his earlier work, describing ways in which the capacities of the digital age have changed the way we perceive and understand creative problem-solving in architectural design.

Was ist anders? ist der Titel der 64. Ausgabe des Jahresrings, die Wolfgang Tillmans als Gastredakteur konzipiert und gestaltet hat. Der Jahresring stellt sich der Problematik eines neu formierten Rechtspopulismus, dem Phänomen Fake News und präsentiert psychologische Forschungsergebnisse wie beispielsweise den Backfire-Effekt.

Communists Anonymous understands the historical incarnations of communism as substantially incomplete in thought and practice, and places communism where it originated—in the realm of fiction. Only as fiction can communism manifest itself again beyond doubt.

SSS: How to imitate the sound of the shore using two hands and a carpet is, at first glance, exactly what it claims to be: an in-depth manual for staging a private (or public) performance, in which one uses both hands and a carpet to imitate the sounds of water making contact with land. Istanbul-based artist Cevdet Erek’s book also addresses theoretical and methodological issues related to the representation of nature.

A compendium of essays, scripts, poems, and proposals, in relation to a Spectator: was compiled by Studio for Propositional Cinema—an anonymous artist collective founded in 2013—for their eponymous exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover. The book investigates notions of the script, staging, and the conditions of the exhibition itself.

The exhibition “The Promise of Total Automation” investigated our relationship to a world of machines, technological objects, and electronic devices. The prospect of a fully automated future—while acutely reshaping the notions of work, production, and value creation—also feeds emancipatory scenarios ultimately leading to the end of labor. Total automation is upon us but its liberating promise is yet to be claimed.

Since 1953, the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e. V. has awarded the ars viva Prize to young artists living in Germany. This year, it goes to Anna-Sophie Berger (*1989), Oscar Enberg (*1988), and Zac Langdon-Pole (*1988). The prize includes two exhibitions at renowned art institutions in Germany and Belgium, the ars viva catalogue, and an artist residency on Fogo Island (Canada).

This book is an adaptation of Annika Bender’s lecture “Jump! You Fuckers!” which was presented at Kunsthalle Bern in the context of a series on overproduction and ambivalence in contemporary art. Annika Bender was one of the pseudonyms of artists Dominic Osterried and Steffen Zillig, who wrote the blog Donnerstag (now discontinued) under her name.

Initiated by Swedish artist Anna Lundh, Visions of the Now is a reconsideration of the 1966 Stockholm festival Visioner av Nuet (Visions of the Present), which aimed to examine the impact of technology on humanity, society, and art; half a century later, we are immersed in the technology that was still “new” in 1966.

Rethinking Density considers new perspectives related to the category of density, which for a long time has been part of urban-planning discourses and is now regaining the attention of artists and practitioners from a number of different disciplines. In an interplay of models, this publication combines research from cultural studies, artistic research, sound studies as well as architectural and urban theory.

Drawing together discourses on contemporaneity and new materialisms, this book examines a material conception of temporality that makes it possible to develop a critique of the philosophical discourse on presence. Claiming that “there is no now,” Ebeling develops an archaeology of contemporaneity according to which the traces of the contemporary can only be secured through visual or material operations, not historical ones.

What Was I Thinking? is an initiation into thinking. With a mind that is extremely analytical and yet extremely capable of rendering all kinds of knowledge and experiences permeable to each other, Jalal Toufic creates here a “summa,” but an open-ended one.
—Etel Adnan

People have used honey, dates, and fruits to sweeten their dishes since time immemorial, but with the introduction of sugar—“white gold”—into cooking and baking, a whole array of delightful flavors and culinary possibilities was unearthed. In Bon! Bon!, Charlotte Birnbaum uncovers the wonderful world of all things sugary through surprising anecdotes and historical accounts, each accompanied by delectable recipes that are sure to satisfy any sweet tooth.

This publication accompanies the first comprehensive presentation of Asta Gröting’s project BERLIN FASSADEN. For her exhibition at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Gröting covered the walls and floors with sculptural silicone impressions of Berlin facades containing traces of bullet holes from the Second World War.

Craig Kalpakjian engages with both historical art discourses and contemporary issues. Intelligence considers the ideas of artificial intelligence exhibited by machines, as seen in the Sony AIBO robotic dog, and human intelligence, like that which is gathered through interpersonal contact by the US military in accordance with the “US Army Field Guides Manual on Interrogation” a guide that prohibits abusive techniques of torture.

The catalogue for Heman Chong’s first solo museum exhibition in mainland China, at the Rockbund Art Museum, provides an insightful and critical look into the Singaporean artist’s recent practice. To address the centrality of language, books, and the act of reading in Chong’s oeuvre, this publication features newly commissioned texts from a variety of contributors.

This book of interviews and conversations with today’s most compelling living and resurrected artists and thinkers seeks to address the relevance of Russian cosmism and biocosmism in light of its influence on the Russian artistic and political vanguard as well as on today’s art-historical apparatuses, weird materialisms, extinction narratives, and historical and temporal politics.

Unlike a number of artists who have begun to use negation, detachment, and inaccessibility as tools to reflect upon and problematize the narratives mapped onto them as members of diasporic or immigrant communities, Michael Tedja plays the other extreme. His work seems to exceed and absorb the institutions that attempt to codify him one way or another.

Sam Thorne’s School: A Recent History of Self-Organized Art Education is a chronicle of self-organized art schools and artist-run education platforms that have emerged since 2000.

In the slipstream of conceptual art, the intimate interweaving of meaning and materialization in art and design came to be discredited in the second half of the twentieth century. The master’s program Material Utopias at the Sandberg Instituut put an end to this tradition by abolishing the unproductive hierarchy separating “concept” and “making,” “content” and “process.”

In this in-depth conversation with architectural theorist K. Michael Hays, Yoshi Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow-Wow reflect on representation, occupation, and the democracy of architecture. Explaining their belief in the behavioral capacities of humans, architecture, and nature, Tsukamoto and Kaijima reveal the generous spirit of their work, and the importance of pushing such capacities to their most yielding limits.

Systemics brings together a collection of new writing and curatorial projects that unfolded at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark, over a two-year period from 2013 to 2014. Contained here are its various parts: details of the four core exhibitions and related events, two commissioned exhibitions, and four essays, together comprising the Systemics series program as a whole.

Words, Books, and the Spaces They Inhabit is the first of Mari Shaw’s series The Noble Art of Collecting. With examples of unexpected collectors and serendipitous outcomes, Shaw investigates the obscure desires that shape art collecting and the public goodwill that results from it.

The Body Electric is the first comprehensive survey of video artist and filmmaker Theo Eshetu’s extensive body of work. It provides an in-depth exploration of the artist’s engagement with a variety of genres and media, including experimental cinema, essay and documentary films, large-scale video installations, and live performances.

Otobong Nkanga’s first monograph, Luster and Lucre, charts an intensely productive period from 2013 to 2016, which includes exhibitions at the 8th Berlin Biennale; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; KADIST, Paris; and M HKA, Antwerp. Its title encapsulates the complex concerns that underpin these shows: “luster,” the illustrious shining of materials; and “lucre,” profits and gains.

Addressing the current upswing of attention in the sciences, arts, and humanities to the proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch called the Anthropocene, this book critically surveys that thesis and points to its limitations.

This publication intersperses essays from scholars, historians, and thinkers with a selection of Allan Sekula’s seminal texts and excerpts from his private notebooks. Made and written across the decades, Sekula’s sketches and texts focus on maritime space and the material, economic, and ecological implications of globalization.

Workshop of the Film Form provides an overview of the achievements of Warsztat Formy Filmowej (WFF), a group of avant-garde artists who were working in Lodz, Poland, between 1970 and 1977. It examines all aspects of WFF’s activity, from their films, photographic experiments, video art, and performative actions to their teaching, which includes pedagogical contributions to the National Film School.

The School of Missing Studies started in 2003 as an initiative of artists and architects who recognized “the missing” as a matter of urgency. Investigating what culture(s) laid the foundations for the loss we are experiencing from modernization and how this loss can talk back to us as a potential site of learning, the School of Missing Studies is calling for a space to turn existing knowledge against itself to affect our capacity to see things otherwise.

It is often said that we no longer have an addressee for our political demands. But that’s not true. We have each other. What we can no longer get from the state, the party, the union, the boss, we ask for from one another. And we provide. Let’s see how need and care and desire and admiration have been cross-examined, called as witness, put on parole, and made the subject of caring inquiry by e-flux journal authors since 2009.

This catalogue illustrates Stephan Dillemuth’s elaborate solo show at the Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, through installation photographs as well as texts by art historian Kerstin Stakemeier and theorist Helmut Draxler. The exhibition presented newly conceived works alongside works from the 1980s exhibited for the first time.

This publication documents the first iteration of Belgian artist David Claerbout’s project Olympia, a digital simulation of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. Conceived to last one thousand years, Claerbout’s simulation uses real-time weather data to present the slow decay of the stadium over the coming millennium. Olympia aims to exceed the human ability to imagine time, thus radically surpassing our own experience of the world.

Blake Rayne’s approach to painting stems from the duplicity of words like script, folder, application, and screen. These operative terms situate his work between forms of linguistic description and the history of reflexive material practices in art. He begins from an orientation that considers the terms painter and painting as fictions with no stable material definition. Rather, they are shaped by always-evolving social, institutional, and physical relations.

There are eight million stories of the origins of the digital in architecture, and this book brings together fourteen of them. The arguments address specific changes in ways of thinking about architecture, building, and cities, as well as the shifts in technology that resulted from these changes, marking both a capstone of Archaeology of the Digital and the start of an investigation into other beginnings of the digital in architecture.

Quinn Latimer’s arresting writings find expression in literature and theory as well as contemporary art and its history. This collection of Latimer’s recent essays and poems examines issues of genealogy and influence, the poverty and privilege of place, architecture’s relationship to language, and feminist economies of writing, reading, and art making.

Becoming Palm is the outcome of a conversation between two friends, artist Simryn Gill and anthropologist Michael Taussig, addressing the complexities of palm oil and “the enormous transformations, human, and ecological, that this crop engenders” (Taussig) in two disparate geographical locations, Southeast Asia and South America.

It’s easy to rant about the fashion industry. Nowadays, a large part of it is based on producing and consuming vast amounts of clothing. Collections are manufactured at dizzying speeds and sold for extremely low or incredibly high prices.

Three interconnected palimpsest essays recount (1) the backstory of a “meta” font recently updated by Dexter Sinister and used to typeset the Contemporary Condition book series, (2) a broad history of the rationalization of letterforms that considers the same typeface from “a higher point of disinterest,” and (3) a pending proposal for a sundial designed to operate in parallel physical and digital realms. Notes on the Time, Time, Letters & Spirits is the sixth volume of the Contemporary Condition.

Searching for the present is a bit like deep sea diving. How to dive without drowning in the turbulent waters of now? When to surface and how to ride a strong current? These are some of the questions that Raqs Media Collective address in their account of contemporaneity, guided by a motley collection of figures lost and found in the turbulence of their practice.

In the media theater of contemporary culture, a drama unfolds: While the human sense of “the present” is challenged by the immediacy of analog signal transmission and the delays of digital data processing, a different (non-)sense of time unfolds within technologies themselves.

Katja Novitskova’s catalogue If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, published for the Estonian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, addresses emerging potentialities between visual culture, big-data-driven processes, and ecology.

Recollection is the presence of the past in the here and now; it shapes our understanding of our places and lives, their histories and changes. As experience becomes fact, the past turns into objective matter. Leonard Qylafi’s artistic practice takes such material records as books, films, or photos as points of departure for examining this process of change.

Conceived as a field of production and mutual learning, Green light works with refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and NGOs to fabricate an unlimited edition of fully functional lamps: geometric, stackable modules made from recyclable materials and fitted with a welcoming green light.

Tom Humphreys—Plates is an artist’s book documenting works produced between 2009 and 2016 using industrially manufactured plates as a support medium. This extensive volume loosely catalogues four hundred and twenty works from this series at a one-to-one scale, in precisely rendered photographs.

This publication comprises two volumes: a booklet accompanying Pierre Bismuth’s 2015 solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, and a catalogue raisonné indexing his typically serial and often humorous work of the last three decades, from five-minute paintings of recipe cards from women’s magazines (1986–87) to fried-chicken-flavored polyethylene sculptures (2015).

Jesse Jones’s 2013 film The Other North represents the culmination of her research in South Korea and the Demilitarized Zone. It features Korean actors reenacting The Steel Shutter, a little-known documentary of a “conflict resolution therapy session” held by American psychologist Carl Rogers in the early 1970s with a group of individuals from various political and socioeconomic backgrounds in Northern Ireland.

Matter Fictions addresses fiction as a mode of producing reality as well as the significance of matter—animal, vegetable, mineral, hybrid—beyond binaries.

Imagined as a residency that would result in no material production, the Site Residency was conceptually grounded in theories and practices of withdrawal and in the critical questioning of creation, materiality, and objectified artistic output, paying tribute to the artistic strategies from the 1960s and ’70s. This publication presents various visual and textual materials of the residency’s three participating artists.

Martin Beck’s exhibition “Program” at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts comprised a sequence of interventions, installations, events, and displays that drew on the exhibition histories and academic pursuits of the famed 1963 Le Corbusier building at Harvard University. This book, An Organized System of Instructions, is both a document of “Program” and an extension of the exhibition.

This publication comprises a series of interviews with contemporary artists, musicians, and writers who are in dialogue with Beirut and Cairo. While not purporting to be an overview of the art scenes in these cities, this book begins to draw a picture of how artists think about what it means to be active in the contexts of these cities. It offers insight into the circumstances that structured these artists’ stories.

Uchronia is a project initiated by the artists Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet (les gens d’Uterpan) in 2014, which emanates from the analysis of individual or collective attitudes and behaviors produced in the public space of a given city. The two artists call upon citizens to become uchronists, to infiltrate public life with physical modules coming from daily behaviors, synchronized and adjusted according to context.

The Long Road to Xico, 1991–2015 is the first monograph of Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves. It gathers more than twenty projects realized between 1991 and 2015. This publication also collects a selection of Alves’s writings and contextualizes her work in the political and cultural debates from the 1980s, when she became an activist and an early participant in discourses around “postcolonialism” and “ecology.”

Over the past four years, the art magazine Contemporary And (C&) has called attention to exhibitions, artists, and curators from diverse African perspectives while boosting new areas of debate. I am built inside you, C&’s first book, is a compilation of eighteen pieces published since the magazine was launched in 2013.

This book examines some of the usually disavowed but arguably decisive intersections of mass-population displacement and architecture—an art and technology of population placement—through the twentieth century and into the present.

Providing an important platform for new and ambitious work from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, the ninth installment of the Abraaj Group Art Prize features “seepage/ritual,” an exhibition with the work of winner Rana Begum and the three short-listed artists: Sarah Abu Abdallah, Doa Aly, and Raha Raissnia. This publication is conceived as a parallel exhibition in book form.

The Rough Law of Gardens documents Olaf Holzapfel and Nahum Tevet’s eponymous joint exhibition and explores the intergenerational differences between two unique artists. Both artists’ work rejects the global logic of growth and traverses the bounds of sculpture and painting: each of their practices involves ideas to do with materiality, learning, and memory.

Live and Die as Eva Braun and Other Intimate Stories is a bilingual edition of short writings by Roee Rosen. At the heart of this collection are three provocative texts extracted from important artworks by Rosen, offered here as genre-defying literature at the intersection between reality and fiction, speculative narrative and historical-political critique, humor and eroticism.

Through multiple exchanges between members of thirty-two Huni Kuin communities in Brazil, this publication brings together threads from anthropology, art, and science that are interwoven, like the movement of a serpent, with essay contributions, oral histories, drawings, and traditional song. Together, they outline the way unique kinships produced within an indigenous cosmo-vision can shape our present moment.

Merlin Carpenter’s exhibition “MIDCAREER PAINTINGS” filled Kunsthalle Bern’s rooms with transit blankets stretched over identically scaled frames, each named after one of the artist’s seven galleries and marked “not for sale.” This publication documents these “paintings,” how the works thematize the limbo of the “midcareer” artist, as well as the circulation of the artwork as a commodity that signifies material wealth or value.

The catalogue First Things First comprises a selection of images from a number of Shirana Shahbazi’s photographic series created over the past ten years. The presentation of some fifty works is not necessarily categorically or linearly organized; rather, it appears completely free of hierarchy, with photographic styles, subjects, and techniques displayed on equal footing.

From the 1970s to the present, Cecilia Vicuña’s work has engaged with rituals from Aboriginal Australia, South Africa, Paleolithic Europe, and pre-Columbian America involving red-colored thread. Appearing on the occasion of Vicuña’s installation in Athens for documenta 14, Read Thread tells the story of the sanguine thread in Vicuña’s work.

Titled “Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium,” the eighth Contour Biennale in Mechelen, Belgium, addresses the nation-state system and the realm of justice today. The editorial approach of its accompanying reader, Hearings, borrows from the juridicial and musical spheres. Launched as the online journal of the biennial, the reader pairs texts or image-based contributions, allowing for a sense of tension and affinity to develop in the feedback loop of the two voices.

This publication documents the 2016 exhibition “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand,” which took place at Kunsthalle Wien, Karlsplatz. Curated by Luca Lo Pinto, the show took its inspiration from Oulipo, a literary strategy whose objective was to propose new “structures” for writing that were mathematical in nature.

In the style of a catalogue raisonné, Reto Pulfer’s comprehensive monograph, Zustandskatalog, follows the artist’s work over the past fifteen years. Excerpts from the artist’s novels as well as insightful texts by Anselm Franke and Benoît Maire are juxtaposed with 475 documentary photographs of Pulfer’s technical drawings, exhibitions, large-scale installations, and performances.

It is difficult to imagine making claims for human rights without using images. For better or worse, images of protest, evidence, and assertion are the lingua franca of struggles for justice today. The Flood of Rights examines the pathways through which these images and ideas circulate—routes that do not merely enable, but actually shape human-rights claims and their conceptual background.

In 1992, Helke Bayrle began videotaping the installation of each exhibition at the Portikus exhibition space. These videos form a remarkable and intimate archive of the storied Frankfurt contemporary art institution and the artists who have worked within it. This publication pays tribute to Bayrle’s extraordinary work, through a comprehensive timeline, video stills, and statements by past and current directors and curators.

CityCat Project is the record of an extraordinary collaboration between American artist Dave Hullfish Bailey and senior Aboriginal writer and activist Sam Watson. The collaboration is structured around Maiwar Performance, in which the CityCat ferries that ply the Brisbane River execute unannounced maneuvers near a site of significance to the Aboriginal people who lived on the lands around Brisbane before British colonization.

What role does historiography play in the formation of the present? How does contemporary experience inform the commemoration of historical events or lack thereof? Minouk Lim explores history in the present tense—its media representation, collective memory, ritual, and trauma—through her exhibition, publication, and broadcasting station United Paradox.

In this collection of essays, art historian and critic Sven Lütticken focuses on aesthetic practice in a rapidly expanding cultural sphere. He analyzes its transformation by the capitalist cultural revolution, whose reshaping of art’s autonomy has wrought a field of afters and posts.

Appropriation, storytelling, reenactment, and reportage are some of the strategies that Mario García Torres deploys to highlight the limitations of factual evidence and the agency of historical records and objects. An Arrival Tale detaches the Mexican artist’s works from their original contexts and offers them as a collection of narratives and artistic experiments open for reinscription in order to address the conditions and urgencies of our contemporary societies.

The original ideals of the Enlightenment research university and the rise of aesthetics in modernity have been decisive in shaping neoliberal capitalism. How, then, might we endeavor to change the academic status quo? Philosopher and political theorist Armen Avanessian argues that the ethical dimension of knowledge can produce a new reality.

Edgar Leciejewski spent six months as an artist-in-residence with Fogo Island Arts in 2014. Tones brings together new work stemming from the Leipzig-based artist’s time on the island, including large-scale collages, photographs of natural elements, and precarious sculptures composed of objects found on the shore. Taken together the works raise questions on how we contemplate ideas of nature.

For the 1st Asia Biennial/5th Guangzhou Triennial, artist Sara van der Heide converted a public library in Guangzhou, China, into a restaging of the Goethe-Institut’s German Library and Information Centre of Pyongyang, which operated from 2004 to 2009. Van der Heide’s German Library was to offer a set of public cultural programs: a group exhibition, video program, performances, and seminar.

This collection of more than thirty texts, which were originally published between 1790 and the present day, explores man’s rich relationship with material things. Devised largely in response to the gradual breakdown of the divide between art and design that began over a century ago, this book sheds light on the ways that the concept of the thing as idea has been considered over time.

In the ancient art of alchemy, some elements can change to other states of matter while others cannot. At least not without magic. And a touch of trickery. For some time now, Goldin+Senneby have been interested in a utopian alchemist named August Nordenskiöld (1754–1792) who sought to create enough gold from inferior metals to permanently abolish its value, and the tyranny of money with it. 

Over the past quarter century, artists have made powerful interventions in debates around globalization, addressing various dimensions of cross-border exchange, from mass migration to the dynamics of translation, and devising new ways of conceptualizing them. Marcus Verhagen’s Flows and Counterflows tells the story of those interventions, dwelling on projects that draw out both the dangers and the tangible or imaginable benefits of global exchange.

This book offers a first report on the activities of the Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise (CATPC), an association based in Lusanga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. CATPC brings together a unique gathering of individuals—along with its members and partner institutions that are engaged in dialogue with it—and attempts to rethink postcolonial power relations within the global art world.

This publication expands a 2014 exhibition that took place in British Columbia. The title refers to coal mining, an industry that has formed and fragmented communities through economic development, racial segregation, and labor inequity, while fueling the modern world. In this book, forgotten or under-acknowledged histories are investigated and discussed along with cultural forms that surround the practices of international coal mining.

This collection of art and theory analyzes today’s post-digital conditions for critical media practices—across and beyond the analog and the digital, the human and the nonhuman. The contributions also look across and beyond the field of media art, staking out new paths for understanding and working in the transversal territories between theory, technology, and art.

How did art escape the deadlock of the Situationists’ anti-art refusal? Did the relational artists, with their repetitions of Situationist slogans and techniques, outline a sustainable, micro-political alternative to Guy Debord’s dream of surpassing art and realizing philosophy? Looking back at some of the Situationists’ confrontations with the museum, this book traces a path beyond the tragedy of negativity and the litany of recuperation.

This reader is the result of Joanna Warsza’s course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. It examines four recent cases of boycotts, presenting their political, ideological, and economic contexts, timelines, statements, as well as interviews with parties involved. It reflects on how certain biennials became the place where the power of art is renegotiated and why one simply “can’t work like this.”

This issue comprises various outlooks on “perspective.” This might be taken to mean something as specific as a particular opinion or as general as an axonometric projection; in short, different ways and means of looking at the world.

The applied research project and publication The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict deals with archival practice and its spatial repercussions. Inquiring whether any accumulation and organization of knowledge is productive—to the effect that it generates a narrative and/or history—the project focuses specifically on archives becoming productive due to their spatial framework.

A “politics of listening” is an intervention into and a reorganization of forms that listening takes rather than a call for free speech or for a platform for voices to be heard. Listening is a political act, a pedagogical process, and an activity that can lead to the development of an organized protocol for engagement. In his art and research, Beirut-based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan explores the perception of language, sound, and listening.

Requests and Antisongs is an artist’s book to accompany a sequence of exhibitions by James Richards held at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover. The book contains a series of visual essays by the artist, documentation of recent exhibitions, as well as essays by Dan Fox, Ed Atkins, Steve Reinke, Chris McCormack, and Fatima Hellberg.

“It is impossible, but as you do not know it is impossible, it might be possible.”
—Lolita Jablonskiene, Director of the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, commenting on previous attempts to organize a joint pavilion including all three Baltic States for the Venice Biennale

Following the 2015 exhibition “Florian Hecker/John McCracken” at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien Graz, this publication probes the experimental capacity of the white-cube space of the gallery. For the exhibition, two complementary yet autonomous artists were brought into dialogue with each other: German artist and computer composer Florian Hecker, and the late American sculptor John McCracken.

New Institutionalism’s dispersed and varied approaches to curating sought to reconfigure the art institution from within, reshaping it into an active, democratic, open, and egalitarian public sphere. What Ever Happened to New Institutionalism? reflects upon the aspirations of these curatorial strategies and assesses their critical efficacy today within the landscape of contemporary art and globalized culture.

A central theme of this book concerns slowness instead of acceleration. This is approached through art and design practices that unfold this multiplicity of time, closely entwined with contemporary concerns in aesthetic theory, to understand and engage with the planetary time scales of slow environmental violence.

In the fourth volume of the series Visual Cultures as…, Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mörtenböck analyze the networked spaces of global informal markets, the cultural frontiers of speculative investments, and recent urban protests, and discuss crucial shifts in the process of collective articulation within today’s “crowd economy.”

This catalogue presents many possibilities for the artistic exploration of the cosmos: the connection between artistic and scientific imagination, the cosmos as analysis of sci-fi culture, perspectives of corporeal immortality, and the critique of contemporary technology.

For her first institutional solo Darja Bajagić turns to the murky terrain where real and staged violence bleed into each other with an ease both unsettling and alluring. Following the lure of the fringes, the artist culls her imagery from fan-gore magazines, true-crime TV shows, fetish websites, obscure online forums, and hidden chat rooms tucked away in the darker reaches of the Web.

For almost fifty years, Lydia Okumura has explored the realm of geometric abstraction. She challenges our perception of space through sculptures, installations, and works on paper that blur distinctions between dimensions.

Inhalt concentrates on Eberhard Havekost’s painting from the past ten years, focusing on work first exhibited at KINDL, Berlin, in 2016/17. The work’s heterogeneity is evident in the selection of subjects, as well as the styles employed. This extreme range characterizes Havekost’s artistic work as a whole. The artist situates his paintings in complex interrelationships, where connections and relevancies are constantly reconfigured.

Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough is an artist’s book focusing on Victor Man’s series of paintings first exhibited as part of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and later developed for a solo exhibition at Galeria Plan B, Berlin. The book includes essays by poet and translator Bogdan Ghiu, curator Mihnea Mircan, and literary critic Laura Pavel.

This book is the result of ongoing research into historical and current artistic practices that explore new paradigms of experience. It is the first volume in a series of books that focuses on what is happening both inside and outside of the art institute.

The second volume in the EP series identifies the current fascination with fiction across art, design, and architecture. Practitioners and theorists explore this strategy by pushing the debate into both speculative and real-fictitious terrains.

Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday is the outcome of a research project pursued by a group of artists, architects, and social theorists. In the face of an exhilarating politics of accumulation and dispossession, the group explores commoning as the subject as well as the means of its study.

A curatorial situation is always one of hospitality. This publication analyzes the curatorial within the current sociopolitical context, through key topics concerning immigration, conditions along borders, and accommodations for refugees.

Andrej Polukord, corecipient of the Kunsthalle Wien 2016 prize, draws on painting, installation, performance, and video art to create unpredictable environments and absurd situations that produce double meanings and ambiguity.

Addressing possible configurations of art and nature, Margit Busch, recipient of the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2016, created a laboratory-cum-experiment that included mealworms and beetles that consume, and thus recycle, polystyrene plastic. By generating insights into the discipline of “transciency,” Busch’s project sheds light on the meeting points of scientific, philosophical, artistic, and practical discourses.

Nathalie Du Pasquier was one of the founding members of Memphis, the groundbreaking Milanese design and architecture collective. Since 1987, however, her main focus and passion has been painting. The title of this publication describes the main focus of her work: the still life. It consists of an artist’s book by Du Pasquier with drawings, photographs, and reproductions of her paintings.

Future Imperfect critically examines the role played by cultural institutions in producing present-day and future contexts for the production, dissemination, and reception of contemporary art in the Middle East and North Africa.

Hubs and Fictions, originally a touring forum, invited international curators, writers, and producers to probe how fiction plays out in a globally distributed art-world ecology, and how infrastructures are invented against its background. The book functions as a deliberately discontinuous reader; it juxtaposes documents, negotiations, and reflections from and on these conversations.

This publication focuses on the practice of curating in Southeast Asia, a region experiencing a time of increased global visibility as well as nation and institution building. The diversity of voices in this publication mirrors the complexity of the region itself: its various curatorial spaces, infrastructures, and political systems.

Grey light is a major new work by London-based artist Hannah Rickards commissioned by Fogo Island Arts. The publication features texts by Melissa Gronlund and Will Holder and striking new photographic imagery drawn from the installation’s physical materials and production process. Like Rickards’s work, the publication aims to bridge the distance between visual experience and its expression in language, whether spoken, written, or gestural.

This collection of essays by Martin Herbert considers various artists who have withdrawn from the art world or adopted an antagonistic position toward its mechanisms. Providing a counterargument to this concept of self-marketing, Herbert examines the nature of retreat, whether in protest, as a deliberate conceptual act, or out of necessity.

This volume accompanies the eponymous exhibition at the Sharjah Art Museum—two parallel solo shows by Angela Bulloch and Maria Zerres brought together under one title, framed by the notion of entropy. A key term that characterizes the movement toward chaos, entropy appears in a variety of fields such as physics, probability theory, sociology and information technology.

This publication accompanies Australian multidisciplinary artist Nicholas Mangan’s survey exhibition “Limits to Growth.” The works in the show tackle narratives from his own geographical region—Asia Pacific, in which his home country of Australia plays a colonial role—and weaves them into a bigger picture to take into account the global economy, resource extraction, and the ultimate power of the sun.

Gordon Bennett: Be Polite follows the exhibition of largely unseen works on paper by one of Australia’s most visionary and critical artists, Gordon Bennett (1955–2014). The exhibition and publication are the first to present the work of Bennett since his death. Though rarely seen in exhibition contexts, Bennett’s drawing and writing formed the foundation of his practice.

The No-Frills book series was developed in the early 1980s as a translation of the non-branding strategy of supermarket staples to mass-market genre fiction. The result of research into this experimental series, Signature Strengths also includes complete reproductions of its books—Western, Mystery, Science Fiction, and Romance.

With delicate lyricism, Karina Mendreczky creates fictional landscapes using light and shadow. As one of two recipients of the 2015 Kunsthalle Wien Prize, she created the installation Thin Dream at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz. Silhouettes of acrylic trees, whose details were hand-carved with an etching needle, were projected onto the back wall of the gallery to create the impression of actual large-format drawings.

Anastasiya Yarovenko, one of the two recipients of the 2015 Kunsthalle Wien Prize, makes work concerned with the body’s relationship to societal structures, behaviors, and space. In her installation Mimicry at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, the Ukrainian-born artist assembled a selection of objects that don’t represent any definitive state but that possess the potential to interact with the viewer or surroundings.

The ars viva Prize has been awarded annually since 1953 to young artists living in Germany whose work stands out for its innovative potential and high artistic quality. The recipients of this year’s prize are Jan Paul Evers, Leon Kahane, and Jumana Manna.

This collection of essays does not aim to illustrate a prefabricated theory of art, but rather follows the impulses given by artworks themselves. Philosopher and art critic Boris Groys writes about significant artists and artworks of the last century that have pushed his thinking and writing in a new direction.

British artist Monica Ross (1950–2013) left behind forty years of socially engaged, feminist, and performative artwork, which has had a deep effect on contemporary art and society. This fully illustrated publication documents Ross’s works from 1970 to 2013.

Revising his well-known histories of contemporary art, Terry Smith argues that we must respond to the compelling need for coeval composition at a time defined by the contemporaneity of divisive difference. This book traces how—despite many obstacles—visual artists across the globe are rising to this challenge.

Marxist geographer David Harvey opened his lecture with a fact: between 2011 and 2013 China consumed 50 percent more cement than the United States had in the entire twentieth century. In Abstract from the Concrete, he asks why. Spiraling outward—geographically and materially—Harvey travels from the building industry in China to the foreclosed housing market in the United States to the automobile industry in São Paolo and back again.

What do we mean when we say that something is contemporary? And what should the designator “contemporary art” refer to? An immediate response would be that contemporary art is an art of the present, that it somehow addresses and expresses the present. But what is this present? This first book in the Contemporary Condition series introduces some of the key issues concerning contemporaneity as a defining condition of our historical present.

A 13-volume set of Marcel Proust’s collected works was published in Yugoslavia in 1967. During the Bosnian civil war, these Proust sets fetched up to the equivalent of a full year’s salary in the Belgrade black markets. The set exhibited in Irena Haiduk’s “Seductive Exacting Realism” was seized by local police from Belgrade Kalenć Market in 1995. It was acquired at a public auction in 2014. It is missing volume number 12.

In this post-truth era, how does one navigate the endless information available and choose a viable narrative of reality? In How to Know What’s Really Happening Glasgow-based writer and curator Francis McKee looks at various techniques for determining verity, from those of spy agencies and whistle-blowers to mystics and scientists.

Kalimpong is an artist project in book form by the London-based artist Shezad Dawood. Set in Kalimpong at various moments from 1912 to the present day, Dawood’s project is part fact, part fiction. There are explorers and spies, poets and travelers, lovers and strangers, princesses and humanoids, all strangely connected across the globe through this curious Indian town.

An incomplete guide for life. Each person written about is represented by a letter, and when an object turns into a subject it is marked in bold. This book was written from the middle. The contents of these pages have been modified numerous times. Notes were taken, ideas were rewritten—the ones that survived bare the most essential guidelines and wisdom for life.

Traction argues that contemporary art is defined by a moral economy of indeterminacy that allows curators and artists to imagine themselves on the other side of power. This self-positioning, in turn, leaves us politically bankrupt, intellectually stagnant, and aesthetically predictable. In his memoir-polemic, curator and writer Tirdad Zolghadr candidly reflects on his own experiences and the work of others.

With The Proposal Magid attempts to bring together architect Luis Barragán’s professional and personal archives by probing the architect’s official and private selves, and the interests of various individuals and governmental and corporate entities who have become the archives’ guardians. Magid, with permission of the Barragán family, commissioned a small amount of Barragán’s cremated remains to be transformed into a diamond.

This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz. Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration.

What exactly is a behavioral object? How can it be analyzed, understood, theorized, experienced, and how can we conceive of works that possess the faculty of action and reaction to their environment and public? Examining three works by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, this book tackles these questions and defines a new field of research and practice.

Books and Ideas after Seth Siegelaub spans an arc of tension between the works of Seth Siegelaub and contemporary cultural production. It features an interview with Seth Siegelaub, two essays by Regine Ehleiter and Michalis Pichler, and an extensively illustrated catalogue with bibliographic details.

Although the format of the rehearsal is used across a number of disciplines—film and theater as well as fine arts—it has been scarcely considered in historical and contemporary art discourses. With this in mind, Putting Rehearsals to the Test investigates the role and function of the rehearsal as a methodology, modus operandi, medium, site of representation, and reflection on processes of artistic production.

It’s 2011, late summer. All over Europe, young people are occupying central public squares to demonstrate for more social justice. In Berlin, their agenda is different. The completists gathered at Alexanderplatz aspire for justice primarily on an intimate level.

“New Ways of Doing Nothing,” a group exhibition that took place at Kunsthalle Wien in 2014, devoted itself to artistic production that opposes activity and instead gives an affirmative slant to forms of doing nothing or refraining. The book presents the displayed works and artists, but also continues the process that led to the exhibition.

Dysfunctional Comedy documents a series of public events, performances, and workshops conceptualized by German-American artist Olav Westphalen and organized with different partners, mainly in Sweden, between 2012 and 2015. An intersection of practices, ideas, and images, this artist’s book/catalogue engages with representatives of different traditions and genres in comedic and cartoonist practices to reflect on the rich history of stand-up comedy and political satire.

Through her videos, exhibitions, and photographic works, Kate Cooper explores the role of gender and what agency images might possess in and of themselves. Producing images becomes akin to building infrastructure; her computer-generated bodies are imbued with power and put to work. Cooper returns to the CGI models in her exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, to create a new series of works within the fictional space of the lookbook.

From 2012 to 2016, Foreign Affairs, the international performing arts festival of Berliner Festspiele, and the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) have been investigating the relations between the performing and visual arts. This book is both a question and a manual, collecting ideas, knowledge and experiences that stem from the theory and practices developed over the past few years.

By engaging artists’ widespread aesthetic and political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the globe—looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural developments in the Global South and North—Decolonizing Nature offers a significant and original contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics.

The project explores the idea of diversity in all of its possible meanings and manifestations, tying together collaborative and associatively connected works by Majewski and Agnieszka Polska, Freisler, Piotr Życieński, and Jimmie Durham in a museum exhibition dealing with the apple.

Released to inaugurate The Serving Library’s new red, gold, and green space in Liverpool, this issue is both printed in and concerned with color. It includes, among other contributions, a truncated phone call from Dexter Sinister to László Moholy-Nagy, the late, great Muhammad Ali discussing skin color in a 1971 TV interview, a personal history of paint and painting by Amy Sillman.

Fredrik Værslev’s work navigates between different painterly traditions, and demonstrates the possibilities and relevance of the medium today. Published in conjunction with Værselv’s exhibition “All Around Amateur,” this publication comes in two different versions, with each book comprising 320 one-to-one digital images scanned from eight of Værslev’s new “sunset” paintings.

Intersubjectivity, a two-volume collection of essays, is concerned with a new account of our ideas of what subjects are, and what it means for them to meet. The project explores these concepts in the context of the interaction of non-sentient beings, attempting to move beyond anthropomorphic theories of objectivity and materiality, as well as subjects whose boundaries resist definition.

The Silent University, initiated by artist Ahmet Öğüt in 2012, is an autonomous platform for academics who cannot share their knowledge due to their status of residence, because their degrees are not recognized or regaining access to academia is blocked for other reasons. It is a solidary school by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who contribute to the program as lecturers, consultants and researchers.

“Miessen’s new book depicts in a challenging and projective manner the problem of politics in times of conceptual indeterminacy, where ‘participation’ of the civil society seems to become the salvation for the political mess we are in, especially in Europe.”

—Ulrike Guérot, political scientist, founder and director, European Democracy Lab, Berlin

10 minutes after features installation views from Josephine Meckseper’s recent exhibition at Timothy Taylor, a gallery of “psychoimages.” Independent curator and writer Piper Marshall considers ideas of détournement, the readymade, and base materialism in Meckseper’s oeuvre, while writer and editor Domenick Ammirati explores the significance of painting and text within Meckseper’s installations.

Charlemagne Palestine works from a highly personal universe of ritual, intoxication, and shamanism. Over the last four decades the artist has created an extensive body of experimental musical compositions, bodily performances, and, in later years, visual artworks inhabited by stuffed animals. To Palestine, teddy bears figure as powerful shamanic totems, which he fondly calls “divinities.”

Ageing Process, Lara Favaretto’s first monograph, documents the artist’s works from the 1990s to her most recent installations presented in the 2015 exhibition “Good Luck!” at MAXXI in Rome. Structured like a manual, this volume accompanies entries on her works with essays by critics and experts from various disciplines who tackle themes complementary but not directly connected to the artist’s practice.

“I Have Left You the Mountain” presents ten new texts written by contemporary writers and thinkers on the architecture of displacement. These texts have been set to music and sung by some of the last remaining groups of Albanian iso-polyphonic singers, an art form now protected as “intangible cultural heritage” by UNESCO.

This publication documents the exhibition “United States of Latin America,” held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), in collaboration with the Kadist Art Foundation. Bringing together their shared and ongoing engagement with artistic practices from Latin America, Jens Hoffmann and Pablo León de la Barra have assembled one of the most significant contemporary survey’s of recent art from the region.

Recently, the idea of “presence” has returned to the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In February 2013, in Zurich’s historical Cabaret Voltaire, which was central to the Dada movement almost a hundred years ago, an experimental international symposium took place that put presence under the microscope.

Brutalist Readings is a significant intervention into recent debates on the place of literature and writing in the context of contemporary art. Featuring essays on the highs and lows of the conceptual turn in poetics, avant-garde literary genealogies, and monographic pieces on Paul B. Preciado, Chris Kraus, and Pierre Guyotat, among others, Brutalist Readings explores the radical histories of writing, as well as its potential now.

Cave is a series of publications featuring commissioned and republished explorations, anecdotes, research, documents, case studies, essays, and scenarios on how to think and practice contemporary collecting. The first issue of Cave looks into the territory of the public collection considering it both a semantic ground for institutional collecting as well as political and cultural infrastructure.

This substantial publication presents the shortlisted artists for the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award for Emerging Asian Artists 2015, and the accompanying exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum. The art prize aims to put into practice and to question intra-Asia art connections, gaps, and combinations that build very active art scenes from specific contexts to ongoing extensions.

The globalized world seems at once transparent and opaque. The exhibition project “Transparencies” examined the cultural facets and atmospheres of these (non-)transparencies. The two-part, joint exhibition project in Bielefeld and Nuremberg was dedicated to developments in “transparent society,” asking how these are reflected in the current work by contemporary artists.

As the first significant overview of the work by artist Olivia Plender, this monograph navigates through the evolving attitudes to historical and contemporary forms of communication and education that her research-based practice has explored for the last ten years.

Duskdust is an artist book by Susanne Kriemann. It takes as its starting point the former industrial site of limestone mining at Furilden peninsula on the northeastern coast of Gotland, Sweden’s biggest island. It is informed by the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with photography, labor, and archaeology and includes photographs taken during her residencies and site visits, archival material as well as text contributions by invited authors.

In her innovative take on early video art, Ina Blom considers the widespread notion that video technology was endowed with lifelike memory and agency. Blom documents, among other things, video’s emergence through the framework of painting, its identification with biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its construction of new realms of labor and collaboration.

This double publication offers further investigation into the work of the recipients and shortlisted artists of ninth installment of The Abraaj Group Art Prize. Syntax and Society, the first volume, reflects on the exhibition premise that considered the structure and meaning of language and the role it plays in society, while the second volume, Oh Shining Star Testify, focuses on the work of artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.

Eva Grubinger’s exhibition explores the idea of psychological landscapes—a physical or mental journey—that evokes ideas of escapism and the search for the self. Released in conjunction with the show, this catalogue features visual documentation of the exhibition by Sylvain Deleu, and an accompanying text by Fatos Üstek.

This collection of unpublished or rare texts by Frederick Kiesler written between 1927 and 1957 focuses on Kiesler’s ideas on display, and juxtaposes works of contemporary artists with a number of original drawings by Kiesler.

Amateur is the first comprehensive publication about Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s moving image works, and their accompanying installations. Developed over the past ten years of her practice, these works explore communication and interaction between individuals, often against the backdrop of a unique public location, in order to cast attention on repressed, incomplete, and unresolved histories.

What does it mean to publish today? How the traditional publishing framework has been cast adrift, and which opportunities are surfacing in its stead, is discussed here by artists, publishers, and scholars through the examination of recent publishing concepts emerging from the experimental literature and art scene, where publishing is often part of an encompassing artistic practice.

This volume is a collection of dynamic and engaged writings by art historian John C. Welchman on a range of contemporary European artists. Anchored in concerns that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, Welchman poses thoughtful and provocative questions about how these artists receive and negotiate the social and aesthetic histories through which they live and work.

Photographs, books, and knickknacks: artists collect a variety of objects. Individual Stories considers the collection as a portrait of its collector and also as an artistic method—as a process rather than an end result. This catalogue is a compilation of individual collections that could not be more different.

This catalogue presents an art-historical angle on Chen Zhen’s unique way of questioning his experience of globalization through art. It includes documentation of the eponymous exhibition at Rockbund Art Museum (May 30–October 7, 2015), along with detailed sketches of both existing and unrealized projects.

In response to recent developments in pictorial practice and critical discourse, Painting beyond Itself seeks new ways to approach and historicize the question of the medium. Reaching back to the earliest theoretical and institutional definitions of painting, this book focuses on the changing role of materiality in establishing painting as the privileged practice, discourse, and institution of modernity.

An artist book juxtaposing text and image, history and its revision, The Blind Merchant is composed of three elements: the complete text of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; a “parasitical” text written by Roee Rosen that runs alongside the play, adopting the perspective of the principal antagonist Shylock; and 145 drawings that present an alternative approach to the drama’s staging and casting of characters.

An experiment with alternative forms of design, Public Design Support is also an intervention in urban life. This publication—which includes key project materials, scholarly essays, and significant historical texts—chronicles the aspirations, methods, and projects of the first four years of Public Design Support.

Rare Earth is an attempt to define the spirit of an age. Exploring how today’s myths, identities, and cosmologies relate to current advances in technology—through reference to the material basis to our most developed weapons and tools; a class of seventeen rare earth elements from the periodic table—Rare Earth challenges the rhetoric of immateriality associated with our hypermodern condition.

The subject of this book is a deceased prop, an object of a particular color, the green of cinematic trickery and special effects. It edged itself into Shahryar Nashat’s work in 2011, first appearing in Factor Green, an installation the artist produced for the Venice Biennale.

In the seventh volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series, architectural historian Felicity D. Scott revisits the Viennese émigré architect’s readings of the vernacular both in the United States and Japan, which resonate with his attempts to imagine architecture and cities that refused to communicate in a normative sense. Rudofsky’s unconventional musings take on a heightened resonance in a contemporary world saturated with visual information.

This publication is devoted to the phenomenon of the artist novel, and whether it can be considered to be a medium in its own right within the visual arts. Thanks to the contributions of a selected group of artists, writers, curators, and scholars this publication strives to demonstrate that literature, when treated by visual artists, can take place well beyond the space of the book.

Part document, part photographic album, this book by artist duo Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys captures the sculptural revisionings of the descendants of an executioner family from Greifswald in Pomerania, a historical region on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea. The “dirty puppets” are weary, the clothing worn in by history, their story line deadpan and fable-like.

Since the late 1980s, Tom Burr has been reusing appropriation strategies in his art. Not confined to his photographic and sculptural works, they also lend momentum to many of his writings. The artist creates assemblages of personal writings and sources, differing in nature and style, which he has used as both conceptual and aesthetic materials. Thirty-seven texts—works, poems, autobiographical texts, and portraits—have been compiled for the first time in this publication. Written over a period of twenty-four years, they are presented chronologically, enabling us to fully appreciate the conceptual and visual coherence and richness of Burr’s writings.

Terminal is an artist book conceived by Nora Schultz and Keren Cytter. Its title and logic follow Schultz’s latest performance, Terminal + at Tate Modern, London (2014), and the exhibition “I’m Honda” at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York (2015). Nora Schultz used Google’s image search on her own documentation to create an unexpected, ever-expanding narrative of digital associations. She then invited nine artists to contribute to this narrative.

Kamran Sadeghi, New York-based musician and member of the Soundwalk Collective, contributed the musical score for Mario Pfeifer’s video installation Approximation in the digital age for a humanity condemned to disappear (2014). For his digital compositions Sadeghi, in dialogue with Pfeifer, took the field recordings made by missionary and anthropologist Martin Gusinde in 1923 of Yaghan chants in Bahia Mejillones as point of departure and reference.

The question of life has always been one of modernity’s main preoccupations, but it was the advent of the camera—with its ability to record moving creatures—that initiated a new phase in the human investigation of animal behavior. In the world of contemporary art, animals now occupy center stage. This volume brings together theory and art, showing how both turned to animals to find new ways of problematizing “life.”

The catalogue Olafur Eliasson: Baroque Baroque examines some of the trajectories of thought raised by the encounter between Eliasson’s artworks and their temporary baroque housing: in particular, how transformations of space, perception, and cognition reflect the realms of politics, technology, and the Anthropocene.

Ull Hohn: Foregrounds, Distances aims not only to offer the first comprehensive overview of his work, but also to contribute to a history of painting-based practices, which occupy a marginal place in the established narratives of the art of the 1980s and 1990s

On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency prompts a unique crossdisciplinary inquiry into the productive potential of the affect of shame. This book contests the ontological understanding of shame and the psychoanalytical interpretation of it based on personal traumatic experiences linked to lack, loss, memory repression, and absence.

Benjamin H. Bratton’s kaleidoscopic theory-fiction links the utopian fantasies of political violence with the equally utopian programs of security and control. Both rely on all manner of doubles, models, gimmicks, ruses, prototypes, and shock-and-awe campaigns to realize their propagandas of the deed, threat, and image. Blurring reality and delusion, they collaborate on a literally psychotic politics of architecture.

Through archival research, this monographic publication focuses on Ukeles’s work ballets—a series of seven grand-scale collaborative performances involving workers, trucks, barges, and hundreds of tons of recyclables and steel—which took place between 1983 and 2012 in New York, Pittsburgh, Givors, Rotterdam, and Tokamachi.

Fine Arts continues Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys’s playful and dystopic approach to depicting the human condition. The artist duo became watercolorists for the project, harping back to an early amateur pictorial tradition while basing their picture making on a range of quotidian and historical images culled from the Internet.

What’s on a Universal Serial Bus? A collection of electronic works by Dexter Sinister produced from 2008 to 2015. Dexter Sinister is the compound name of Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt, who operate at the intersection of graphic design, publishing, and contemporary art. This memory stick is released parallel to the exhibition at Kunstverein München, “On a Universal Serial Bus.*”

Black transparency is an involuntary disclosure of secrets against a backdrop of systematic online surveillance, as large parts of contemporary life move into the digital realm. In their latest book, Metahaven embark on a journey of subversion while examining transparency’s intersections with design, architecture, and pop culture, as well as its ability to unravel the circuitry of modern state power.

Expanded from a touring exhibition originated at Para Site in 2013, this book critically analyzes historical and contemporary imaginations and politics of fear in the face of disease and the specter of contamination in society and culture.

Approximation in the digital age for a humanity condemned to disappear is Mario Pfeifer’s latest project, which he developed in Puerto Williams, the southernmost settlement in the world located on the southern archipelagos of Patagonia on Chile’s territory bordering Argentina.

Pink Labor on Golden Streets: Queer Art Practices builds on an exhibition and conference at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna that explored the contradictory standpoints of queer art practices, conceptions of the body, and ideas of “queer abstraction,” a term coined by Judith Jack Halberstam that raises questions to do with (visual) representations in the context of gender, sexuality, and desire.

Moving through a wide range of formats, the book encompasses manifestos, music scores, forecasts, conversions, translations, architectural programs, and other difficult-to-categorize works. With sharp teeth and a killer instinct, Haiduk leads the way to a sunny spot where every soul suffers infinite injustice.

Tony Conrad, who can be described as an artist, composer, musician, filmmaker, and performer, might be considered the first true “crossover artist.” Two Degrees of Separation accompanies the eponymous exhibition by Tony Conrad at Kunsthalle Wien.

When Marcos Lutyens arrived in Kassel in the summer of 2012, he didn’t know he would end up staying for the entire 100 days of documenta 13 to perform 340 hypnotic sessions with the audience. He also didn’t know that he would write a book about it: Memoirs of a Hypnotist: 100 Days, an intimate and hardly qualifiable document.

This book traces the work and research of filmmakers and visual artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige and their exploration through their work of online spam e-mails, specifically, advance-fee frauds and scam messages. The artists present material they have collected since 1999, focusing on the way that personal narratives are formed and articulated in a post-digital age.

In the fall of 2013, Dan Graham and Mieko Meguro traveled with Donatien Grau to a town in the French Alps to meet Michel Butor, one of the foremost innovators of postwar literature. This is their conversation.

This tenth volume is a “sampler” issue comprising one choice Bulletin from each of the previous nine. From now on, Bulletins of The Serving Library will proceed in full color and at half its former size (but will be twice as good).

Having furnished solutions for Germany and Dubai, Ingo Niermann takes a new look at what nationhood can mean and accomplish today, finding inspiration, of all places, in North Korea. Now that the promise of global prosperity and abundance can technically be fulfilled, the time has come for a minimalist rethink of society.

Five essays that take an intimate look at what language’s role is in moments of dramatic change, and how to find meaning for artistic practices in these transformative conditions. Taking its cue from the aftermath of the events of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, Final Vocabulary doesn’t provide answers as much as it captures the spirit of the moment of searching in which the writers find themselves.

The Paris-based architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal opened their 2015 lecture at Harvard University with a manifesto: study and create an inventory of the existing situation; densify without compressing individual space; promote user mobility, access, choice; and most importantly, never demolish. Freedom of Use reflects on these core values to present a fluid narrative of Lacaton and Vassal’s oeuvre.

The phenomenal performative relationship between the state and its cultural institutions was perhaps best exemplified when the declaration of the State of Israel was staged at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1948. This relationship has been at the heart of Public Movement’s research.