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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 2011, the astounding personal effects of Entwistle’s grandfather, architect Clive Entwistle (1916–76), emerged from a Manhattan storeroom. This book welds together original text fragments and extensive visual material from the collection and Clive Entwistle’s years in Paris, London, Tangiers, and New York.

At the hour of tea is a collection of stills from Paul Sietsema’s most recent 16 mm film of the same title. A filmic space develops within pages of the book, moving through and layering the film’s imagery—tableaux of objects—via a system of cut portals and transparent screenlike pages.

In Hystericizing Germany, Manfred Hermes provides an excursive analysis of the potential of narration within the paradoxes of cinematic representation, with Fassbinder’s miniseries forming both beginning and end point.

This publication examines the impact of Oskar Hansen within contemporary visual culture and the redefined role of the viewer since the 1960s. The book includes in-depth interviews with some of the most important protagonists of experimental art in Poland, who investigate the historical impact of the open form.

Cluster is a network of eight contemporary visual arts organizations each located in on the peripheries of European cities. Each organization is focused on commissioning, producing, and presenting contemporary art, and the nature of the work is often experimental, process-driven, involves research, is based on working with international and local artists, and often engages with diverse publics on a local level.

Hu Fang’s Dear Navigator is a collection of ten short stories that takes us on a journey across time and space. Performance artists, astronauts, an airplane, Zen masters, and hunger artists are some of the companions of this exploration into hidden realities. Hu draws on the experience of everyday life, the past, and the future to create otherworldly stories where reality turns into fiction and science fiction becomes reality.

Living Labor considers the increasing subordination of life to work. In response to the eroding boundaries between work and life, and against the historic backdrop of the Scandinavian labor movement, the writers gathered in Living Labor propose viable forms of refusal and imagine prospects for a post-work future.

No Is Not an Answer is the largest presentation of Marie-Louise Ekman’s art ever featured in the form of a book. As one of the most influential artists in Sweden in the postwar period, Ekman was both part of Swedish pop and the rebellious underground in the ’60s and ’70s.

Ulf Linde is without doubt one of the world’s most important interpreters of Marcel Duchamp’s art. For more than half a century, he has pursued intense studies of Duchamp’s entire oeuvre and has made perfect replicas of all his major works. His as-yet unpublished manuscript scrutinizing the mathematical principles behind Duchamp’s art reveals what Linde claims to be the key to Duchamp’s poetic universe.

The 60th Jahresring takes the form of a compilation of artist interviews and offers a snapshot of a highly active art scene that stretches from Berlin, as a new international center for art. Nicolaus Schafhausen put a series of questions to thirty-one art practitioners, less geared toward the artists’ respective praxis and more toward the conditions under which it arises.

Many postwar American artists were influenced by French philosophy, literary studies, and social sciences. French Theory in American Art examines some of the main historical conditions of this reception.

This catalogue accompanies the eponymous exhibition at TBA21–Augarten in Vienna and brings together threads and voices of leading contemporary artists, scientists, and theoreticians exploring Cerith Wyn Evans’s polyphonic oeuvre.

The starting point of this exhibition and subsequent publication is the novel The Man Who Was Thursday by British poet G. K. Chesterton from 1908, a mysterious crime story about a seven-headed anarchist council functioning in a world of permanent emergency. Yet in the end, the real danger emanates from artists and intellectuals.

In 2010, a production process was instigated by filmmaker Beatrice Gibson and typographer Will Holder, with the intention of using British composer Cornelius Cardew’s musical score The Tiger’s Mind as a means of producing speech. This book is a document of that film’s making.

Encounters with art engage various conditions of interiority—whether through psychic spaces or specific physical environments, such as museums and private residences. Through diverse discursive modes—commissioned essays, conversations and talks, historical writings, and artistic projects—this anthology, the first CCS Readers volume, examines the poetics and politics of interior experience within the frame of contemporary art.

Composed of official committee members and illicit “agents,” the INS harks back to early twentieth-century avant-gardes, producing declarations, reports, public hearings, broadcasts, and research documents, as well as orchestrating more covert media infiltrations, all governed by the objective, set out in the “Founding Manifesto,” of mapping, entering, and occupying the space of death through literature, philosophy, culture, and technology.

Invalid Format is an archive of the widespread publishing activities of Triple Canopy, the editorial collective and online magazine based in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin. The book explores how works produced for the screen might be transposed to the codex in a way that recalls that former context while also fully inhabiting the page.

Artist Erik Niedling would like to be buried in Pyramid Mountain, the largest tomb of all time, an artwork conceived by writer Ingo Niermann. To make this goal a reality, Niedling lives one year as though it were his last. The Future of Art: A Diary recounts the joys and horrors of that year.

One of the greatest challenges for art and culture, sounded by intellectuals and also by funding bodies, is to represent diversity. But what precisely does this term mean and why does it so often placate rather than produce what it names?

This catalogue pays tribute to one of Germany’s most radical, experimental, and progressive voices. With contributions from over thirty internationally renowned curators, artists, critics, theorists, directors, and practitioners.

Poor Man’s Expression examines the relationship between film, video, technology, and art, with a particular focus on the reciprocal influences between conceptual art and experimental film.

Welcome to Finland, a young land of rapid aging, where newly founded institutions are already outmoded and geographic impediments are a constant crippling agent. As part of Ingo Niermann’s Solution Series, Solution Finland: The Welfare Game by architect Martti Kalliala with writer and curator Jenna Sutela and architect Tuomas Toivonen, addresses the Nordic country’s numerous predicaments.

Circular Facts is a collaborative endeavor between three European contemporary art organizations: Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht; Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp; and The Showroom, London, which acted as an informal think tank and a mutual support structure for the production and dissemination of artistic projects.

Garden of Mirrored Flowers
is

a labyrinth of reality
in which one can get lost
or find his/her own way;
a theme park constantly
consuming history;
a contemporary Chinese garden
replete with multiple routes.

An extended selection of edited video stills, Soft Intrusion offers a coherent oeuvre of Julika Rudelius’s video works.

Net Pioneers 1.0 discusses media art history with a new, interdisciplinary look at the historical, social, and economic dynamics of our contemporary, networked society.

Solution 168-185: America is the fourth book in the Solution Series. Opting for the United States of America—which the author says is “still the most proficiently colonial place” [he knows]—Tirdad Zolghadr provides a compilation of highly entertaining “solutions” for a nation suspicious of progressive politics yet rich in its history of harboring and cultivating the avant-garde.

“Crimes against humanity,” especially genocide, have been excluded from amnesty since the Nuremburg Trials. On a cultural level, oblivion by decree becomes an obligation to remember. This reversal is well-intended, but it opens up critical questions: Can memory be permanently established? Is it possible to maintain it in a monument?

The alienation between modern high culture and its public is a fundamental conflict of art. This book develops a theory of contemporary art in response to our moment, when artists and critics must respond to art’s unprecedented popularity.

This book reexamines the legacies of modern theoretical and artistic iconoclasm in the context of the current religious-political image wars.

If modernism was a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification with the aim of rediscovering their essence, then our own century’s modernity will be invented, precisely, in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solution of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations decreed by economic globalization.

Daniel Birnbaum’s The Hospitality of Presence is a study of the concept of otherness in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In the late 1990s it gained international attention in academic circles. It was reviewed favorably in specialized philosophy journals such as Review of Metaphysics and quoted extensively, most notably by Paul Ricoeur in one of the legendary French thinker’s last books.

“German entrepreneurs are planning to outstrip the ancient Egyptians by building the world’s largest pyramid on a derelict site in eastern Germany – which they claim will eventually contain the remains of millions of people in concrete burial blocks.”
—The Independent

1,2,3… Avant-Gardes is dedicated to the ongoing history of the experiment in film and art. This book describes and analyses the works of filmmakers and artists, defining two decades of experiments in Polish avant-garde film, and juxtaposes their work with contributions by international artists, who started to work during the last fifteen years.

Initiated by artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and edited by his Bangkok publishing house PLAN.b, oVER magazine offers an innovative publishing format for artists, photographers, architects, musicians, poets, and other groups and individuals that can join in and collaborate any time, from anywhere.

Thomas Eggerer’s enigmatic depictions of groups and collectives attempt less to portray the singularity of the individual than to explore the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, conformity and hierarchy, as well as the potential of individual or collective utopia.