[Available for pre-order, out 23 September 2024]

Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.

A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life. —Annie Ernaux

What it takes to imagine social and physical freedom is what it meant to keep reading this incredible book. —Bhanu Kapil

978-1-7395161-3-0
21.6 x 13.9 cm
112 pp, paperback
Out 23 September 2024

A history of Black imagery that recasts our understanding of visual culture and technology

In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, awardwinning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media.

Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed JET magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights. Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers how citizen-recorded footage of the LAPD beating Rodney King became the first viral video. Why the Anita Hill hearings shed light on the media’s creation of the Black icon. The ownership of Black imagery and death is considered in the story of Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard. Meanwhile the live broadcast on Facebook of the murder of Philando Castile by the police after he was stopped for a broken taillight forces us to bear witness to the persistent legacy of the Black meme.

Through imagery, memory, and technology, Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.

In Running, former NCAA Division I track athlete Lindsey A. Freeman presents the feminist and queer handbook of running that she always wanted but could never find. For Freeman, running is full of joy, desire, and indulgence in the pleasure and weirdness of having a body. It allows for a space of freedom—to move and be moved. Through tender storytelling of a lifetime wearing running shoes, Freeman considers injury and recovery, what it means to run as a visibly queer person, and how the release found in running comes from a desire to touch something that cannot be accessed when still. Running invites us to run through life, legging it out the best we can with heart and style.

In Fly-Fishing, Christopher Schaberg ponders his lifetime pursuit of the widely mythologized art of fly-fishing. From the Michigan lakeshore where he learned to fish to casting flies in a New Orleans bayou, Schaberg sketches landscapes and fish habitats and shows how fly-fishing allows him to think about coexisting with other species. It offers Schaberg a much-needed source of humility, social isolation, connection with nature, and a reminder of environmental degradation. Rather than centering fishing on trophies, conquest, and travel, he advocates for a “small-fishing” that values catching the diminutive fish near one’s home. Introspective and personal, Fly-Fishing demonstrates how Schaberg’s obsession indelibly shapes how he understands and lives in the wider world.

For twenty years, Terry Bisson published a regular “This Month in History” column in the science fiction magazine Locus. Tomorrowing collects these two decades of memorable events, four per month, each set in a totally different imaginary yet possible, inevitable yet avoidable future. From the first AI president to the first dog on Mars to the funeral of Earth’s last glacier, these stories are speculative SF at its most (and least) serious.

Collected as a series for the first time, Tomorrowing will amuse, alarm, intrigue, entertain, and like all good science fiction, make readers think. Bisson’s short stories have won every major award in science fiction, including the Hugo and the Nebula, but never, ever anything for this series.

Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

Adrenalin is Syrian-born, Stockholm-based Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun’s first collection to be published in English. This sinuous translation by Catherine Cobham comprises poems that span years and continents, that circulate between cities, ideas, lovers, places of refuge, war zones, time zones, histories. Here is a vital, relentless, intertextual voice that refuses arrest by sentimentality, that pursues the poetry coursing underneath the poetry.

Anita Di Bianco’s ongoing project, Corrections and Clarifications, is a newspaper without headlines, a cyclical reverse-chronology of daily revisions, retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print and online news, printed in numerous languages, locations, and formats since September 2001. An intermittent catalog of lapses in naming and classification, of tangled catchphrases, obstinate patterns of mis-speech and inflection, connotation and enumeration. The twentieth anniversary hardbound edition of the publication, entitled The Error is Regretted, was published in 2021 by The Green Box in Berlin.

This 2024 iteration, in a xeroxed edition of 100, collects corrections to news items back to 1981 — with its focus on the Eastern Mediterranean region, on patterns of mis-telling and misrepresentation through the persistent misuse of the passive voice, the omission of widely observable and verifiable facts and events, the euphemizing and toning down of deliberate actions, erasures through shifts in terminologies, through bold mistakes and tentative corrections.

Anita Di Bianco’s works in film, video, and print take up, modify and re-work existing and re-imagined patterns and characterization. Her work involves the imitative act, a taste for the possession and expulsion of narratives, the appropriation and accumulation of familiar texts and writing styles. Anita uses widely varying sources: from theatrical and historical texts to oft-quoted cinematic clips and thematic references. She lives in Frankfurt am Main.

'In de poëzie kunnen twee verschillende werelden elkaar ontmoeten, door gedichten kunnen we zonder ID denkbeeldige grenzen overschrijden en in dezelfde denkbeeldige ruimte verblijven. Maar is die ruimte wel dezelfde? Kunnen we losbreken uit onze rollen van slachtoffer en medeplichtige? Kunnen gedichten ons leren ons te identificeren met ongevoelde pijn? Wat spreekt er uit onze ontmoeting op papier?' - Anne Vegter

'Een dichter moet egoïstisch zijn, moet een eenzame wolf zijn, maar soms ontmoeten eenzame wolven elkaar in de wouden en jagen ze samen. Twee dichters, één boek: niet noodzakelijkerwijs om iets nieuws te bouwen, maar om de muren af te breken die ons tegenhouden wanneer we naar de andere oever willen oversteken. De Steen van Rosetta, die ervoor zorgt dat we het ongelezene lezen.' - Ghayath Almadhoun

Ghayath Almadhoun (1979) werd geboren in het Palestijnse vluchtelingenkamp Yarmouk in Damascus als zoon van een Palestijnse vader en een Syrische moeder. Hij studeerde Arabische literatuur aan de Universiteit van Damascus en werkte als cultureel journalist. Sinds 2008 woont hij in Stockholm. In Nederland verscheen in 2014 zijn lovend besproken dichtbundel 'Weg van Damascus'. Anne Vegter woont en werkt in Rotterdam. Van haar hand verschenen onder andere de verhalenbundels 'Ongekuiste versies' en 'Harries hoofdingang' en de dichtbundels 'Aandelen en obligaties', 'Spamfighter' en 'Eiland berg gletsjer'. Haar werk werd meermaals bekroond. De afgelopen vier jaar was ze Dichter des Vaderlands. De gedichten van Ghayath Almadhoun zijn uit het Arabisch vertaald door Djûke Poppinga.

The third volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against, acting for better work conditions in the visual arts and against all forms of discrimination.

In 2022, the collective Wages for Wages Against applied for the Swiss Art Awards with the ambition of questioning the very model of the prize and its impact on artists. Art competitions are presented as real opportunities for artists, and arise throughout their careers, starting with school—entrance selection procedure, juried evaluations, diplomas and honors distinctions—, all the way to professional recognition—Meret Oppenheim Prize, Marcel Duchamp Prize, Turner Prize, etc. Only a handful of artists are selected for merit-based reward. However, this logic of sorting and validation upholds an entire system that reproduces inequalities and that perpetuates precarity in a milieu that is exclusive, and thus excludes. The institutional practices of communication and selection, as well as the validation of unpaid labor, favor certain artists at the expense of others. In this context, we surveyed the artists who participated, are considering participating, or are not participating in the Swiss Art Awards competition, in the interest of understanding their experiences and sharing their demands. In a broader sense, we wish to rethink the founding principles of artists' support policies and work to build a less competitive art world.

Wages For Wages Against (WFWA, wfwa.ch) is a a militant collective and a campaign for the fair remuneration of artists in Switzerland, better work conditions, and an alternative economy of the arts.

Contributions by Nathalie Stirnimann & Stefan Stojanovic and Amandine Gay.

Published on the occasion of Mudun Short Story Prize, an international competition that pays tribute to cities around the Arab world which was launched by the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah (UAE), in 2021, Mudun: Stories from Arab Cities brings together the 19 stories—10 in Arabic and nine in English—that were shortlisted for the prize, including the winning submissions.

Texts by Neetha Kurup, Soraya Morayef, Ashton Eleazer, Noora Alhashimi, Lynn Cheikh Moussa, Ramzi Maqdisi, Fatemah Raed Al Awadh, Barrak Alzaid, Bhoomika Ghaghada, Sami Raghad, Naima Abdul Wahab Abdullah, Diar Murshid, Wajdi Al Ahdal, Ben Addi, Nawaf Al Mazmi, Maryam Mirza, Laila Kubba, Ahmed Fouadeldin.

Salmon: A Red Herring questions what colours we expect in our "natural" environment. It asks us to examine how our perception of colour is changing as much as we are changing the planet. Adapted into the eponymous Turner Prize-nominated exhibition at Tate Britain, this book launched an international campaign against salmon farming.

In 2018, the artist/activist duo Cooking Sections heard of a sparrow that had turned bright pink on the Isle of Skye. So began an odyssey-like investigation into where it went, who was responsible, and what it signalled about its surrounding ecology. The pair spoke to fishermen in Mexico, where shrimp are turning grey, interviewed beekeepers in Brooklyn, who reported red-coloured honey, and investigated the Nornickel factory in Norilsk, Russia, where blue fog and black snow are industrial byproducts. Their findings are presented as a detective story for the era of environmentalism: a wildly inventive book and an exhibition at Tate Britain.

The book, Salmon: A Red Herring, shows how design can address the fragility of our food systems and how colour configures our economies. It is a visceral and visual examination of aesthetic manipulation, industrial farming, and environmental degradation, a seminal intervention in colour theory. In turn, Cooking Sections—the recently announced winners of the Harvard Wheelwright Prize—use it to launch a new global campaign against fish farming.

As COVID makes visible the fragility of our food systems and the need for an overhaul of environmental regulations, this work is now more relevant than ever. The publishers describe it as "Michael Pollan meets Gilbert and George" and Cooking Sections say it is "intended as a Ways of Seeing for the era of environmental reassessment".

Cooking Sections examines the systems that organise the world through food. Using site-responsive installation, performance and video, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. Established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual (born in 1984) and Alon Schwabe (born in 1984), their practice uses food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation.

Forewords by Bruno Latour, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hannah Landecker, David Zilber.

The most accessible introduction to the life and work of James Lovelock, and a guide to address today's "polycrisis."

There is no creation of the future if we do not sustain, at root, an intuition for invention. No one understood this better than James Lovelock, the most significant scientific thinker since Charles Darwin.

Over the course of his career, Lovelock set the terms by which we've come to understand life—biologically, societally, poetically—in the twenty-first century. He helped NASA complete missions to Mars and the moon; he invented devices that revealed the presence of harmful chemicals in the Earth's atmosphere, inspiring Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring; and he formulated the Gaia hypothesis, the deceptively simple idea that our planet could be viewed as a single self-regulating organism—everything entangled, everything acting upon everything else.

In September 2015, Hans Ulrich Obrist traveled to Dorset to visit Lovelock at his seaside cottage, where they spent nine hours discussing garden cities, frozen hamsters, rising temperatures, tiny widgets, the Space Age, the birth of modern science, the agonies of institutions, and the future of humanity. Ever Gaia presents this conversation as a celebration of Lovelock, who died in 2022 at 103, alongside contributions from two future pioneers of Gaia: Daisy Hildyard and Precious Okoyomon. As another of Lovelock's heirs, Tim Lenton, writes in his afterword, this encounter was pivotal in Lovelock's late intellectual life and, at the start of 2023, provides a guide—by way of Lovelock's Gaian approach—to address today's "polycrisis."

Ever Gaia opens the second season of isolarii as a tribute not just to Lovelock but to the late Bruno Latour, who introduced the series when we launched it two years ago. The second volume of a trilogy that started with the release of The Archipelago Conversations in 2021, Ever Gaia is the most accessible introduction to the life and work of Lovelock, whose way of seeing—"perhaps his greatest legacy," Obrist writes—will continue to shape our world and our place within it for decades to come.

An exploration of eroticism in extremism.

Published in Icelandic in 1994, Under the Wings of the Valkyrie is the work that established Sjón's literary career. Short and intense, the story unfolds through a letter from Icelandic architect Fridjón B. Fridriksson to his wife, revealing his lifelong obsession with German militant Gudrun Ensslin, of the Baader-Meinhof gang. He first glimpsed her on TV as a child and now Ensslin lingers in his dreams and has become the defining fixture of his psyche. To break free from Ensslin, and salvage his marriage, Fridjón resorts to drastic measures. Disturbing yet captivating, Under the Wings of the Valkyrie blurs the lines between passion and madness, fantasy and reality.

Sjón (Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson, born 1962 in Reykjavik) is a celebrated novelist, poet, and lyricist, who has become a central figure in Icelandic culture. Junot Diaz hailed him as "the trickster who makes the world" and the late, great A.S. Byatt regarded him as "a Magus of the North." He is known also for his collaborations with singer Björk, receiving an Oscar nomination for lyrics to Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, and his screenplays for critically acclaimed films The Northman and Lamb. His works have been translated into 30 languages.

Translated from the Icelandic by Brian Fitzgibbon.

Charismatic Spirals is for an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological and political consequences.

An archetypal outsider, Will Alexander released his first poetry collection aged forty-four while working at the Los Angeles Lakers' ticket office. Three decades on, he has ascended to the legendary status of the city's great living surrealist, existing, as Eliot Weinberger wrote, in a state of "imaginal hyperdrive," with forty such collections to his name.

Operating at the edge of language, Alexander deploys words in a way that feels prophetic—human psyches synthesize with technological artifacts; atoms and archetypes collide; bodies are vacated, voices are newly incarnated. His America—like Glissant's—is multinational and—like Coover and Spiegelman's—multivalent and symbolically unstable. That is to say, he belongs to an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological, and political consequence.

In doing so, Alexander draws from a vast array of influences, from luminaries like Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to holistic visions such as Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, the Mayan numerical system, and Cheikh Anta Diop's perspectives on ancient Egypt. In a preview of Charismatic Spirals in the New York Times, Anne Boyer captured the essence of his work: "visionary poetry [that] achieves its effect through sound, not image...Cadence [that] can shatter us, set the world ablaze."
Read it syllabically, surf it quickly—there is no single way to approach this work.

Will Alexander (born 1948 in Los Angeles) is an African-American artist, philosopher, poet, novelist, essayist and pianist.

Art, empathy and political solidarity.

Can empathy deliver political change? Does art that elicits emotional identification with others take us where we need to go? In Imperfect Solidarities, writer and art historian Aruna D'Souza offers observations pulled from current events as well as contemporary art that suggest that a feeling of understanding or closeness based on emotion is an imperfect ground for solidarity. Empathy—and its correlate, love—is a distraction from the hard work that needs to be done to achieve justice. Rather, D'Souza contends, we need to imagine a form of political solidarity that is not based on empathy, but on the much more difficult obligation of care. When we can respect the unknowability of the other and still care for and with them, without translating ourselves into their terms, perhaps we will fare better at building political bridges.

Aruna D'Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times and 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board. Her writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Bookforum, Frieze, Momus, and Art in America, among other places. Her book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited), was named one of the best art books of 2018 by The New York Times. She is the recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for art journalism and a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant.

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

This book contributes to discussions about what counts as heritage now, who gets to do the counting, and broader related issues around the subject of cultural sovereignty. It unpacks historical narratives and political memories linked with objects, sites, and ceremonies that have been lost, looted, restituted, repatriated, revived, or reinvented. Through its diverse line-up of discourse, poetry, and original artistic contributions, it weaves together subjects and geographies that are not usually part of the same conversation —from plundered cultural belongings held in colonial collections, to processes of renaming or removing symbols of past eras— and considers how they relate in the context of recent social upheavals and political processes across continents.

In our era of dangerous revisionism, when history has become a battlefield for both the left and the right, we are asking: How can art reconfigure our collective foundational myths? And of what should we let go on the journey towards figuring it out?

A series of “Bad Paintings” by the Geneva-based artist.

White noise escapes from the 3rd floor of an opulent building located in the Eaux-Vives district. In an apartment, converted into a laboratory, hum a whole bunch of complicated machines linked together by a tangle of multicolored electrical wires. In the middle of all this mess, wrapped in transparent plastic sheets, a new experience will take place in a few moments.

Indeed, for the first time in history, a team of researchers will be able to precisely decode the creative process of an artist. Plunged into an artificial coma, the Genevan painter Josse Bailly wears a sort of motorcycle helmet, from which colorful cables spring. At the end of the test, Bailly's abundant pictorial practice will no longer have any secrets for the scientists present. The mechanism of his artistic frenzy, this true fury to paint, will be translated in an intelligible and logical manner.

Suddenly, a crackling sound is heard. Eyes rolling back, Bailly suddenly sits up square on the massage table transformed into an electric chair. Foaming at the mouth, he chants a series of names of old rock groups from the 70s. Sparks come out of the artist's blackened nostrils. His head looks like it's going to explode any minute. The screens light up in the smoke. Words scroll continuously on the monitors: "The beanbag chair", "Harvard beets", "I love wiener dog".

The pellets go off, putting an end to the strange scene which is more reminiscent of a planned execution than a scientific study. An expression of perplexity freezes on the stunned faces of the team of researchers. In a heavy silence where there is a smell of scorching, a young assistant risks slipping in a confused voice: "I think he likes to illustrate wiener dogs because he finds them cute and it's cool to draw them."

The Significance and Relevance of Early Modern Indian Painters to the Contemporary Indian Art, written in 1971, reevaluates the legacies of painting inherited by the artist Nilima Sheikh.

Drifting between two inadequate models, one an import of British Colonialism, and another desperate for an identification as "Indian", the artist engages with the works of Raja Ravi Varma, Abanindranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil, Nandalal Bose, and Jamini Roy, as well as the critical and art historical writing surrounding these practices, to offer a revaluation of these legacies and a possible way forward—one that she would go on to articulate in her own decades-long engagement with painting.

Published here for the first time, The Significance and Relevance of Early Modern Indian Painters to the Contemporary Indian Art was written as part of Nilima Sheikh's Master's in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. The complete facsimile of this dissertation is accompanied by a recent interview with the artist by Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian.

Itinéraires Fantômes is an oracle deck created by Alexandra Grant with Hélène Cixous in celebration of H. Cixous' work.

The Itinéraires Fantômes deck consists of 72 cards in six categories: animots, creatures, and entities that include Those from Below, Those from Above, Those Who Fly/Steal, who travel via Portals, manipulate Messages and Symbols, and have Superpowers. The cards are accompanied by a booklet in English and French.

The images on these cards come from family, friends, and artists who have been inspired by Hélène Cixous' writing. Artists include: Adel Abdessemed, Pierre Alechinsky, Sara Barker, Gabrielle Berger, Louise Bourgeois, Leonardo Bravo, Maria Bussmann, Sarah Cain, Lewis Carroll, Bertrand Charneau, Maria Chevska, Michael Kennedy Costa, Laura Darbutaitė, Tacita Dean, Edgar Fabián Frías, Jeffrey Gibson, Francisco Goya, Alexandra Grant, Mathew Hale, Simon Hantaï, Johanna Hedva, Roni Horn, Victor Hugo, Hanna Hur, Franz Kafka, YeRin Kim, Lynn Marie Kirby, Jean-Jacques Lemêtre, Colin Lemoine, Laure Prouvost, Elsa Prudent, Addy Rabinovitch, Keanu Reeves, Cindy Rehm, Saranya Siegel-Berger, Shinique Smith, Nancy Spero, Luc Tuymans, Unyimeabasi Udoh, Roger Viollet, Anna Winger.

A taut, tender collection of poems woven with sadness and loss dealing with aging, attachments, and the precarity of life.

“Dawn Lundy Martin’s poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can’t do,” writes Maggie Nelson. In Instructions for The Lovers, her most stripped down, direct work to date, Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist conditions within the dying American university system. With rigorously embodied vulnerability and virtuosity, Martin constructs moments of pleasure, humor, and sexiness woven with grief—a tender body to live in.

Trash interweaves the voices of three women with lived connections to the municipal garbage dump of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. 

Aguilar Zéleny's Trash shows the complexities of survival and joy, love and violence for three women: a teenager abandoned by her guardian at the dump, a scientist doing research on the residents of the dump, and a transwoman living nearby who is the matriarch of a group of sex workers. 

Each one of the characters navigates family, abandonment, power, jealousy, greed, and multiple taboos around sexuality and gender violence. Their stories are linked by geography and by ideas of waste and abandonment. 

As Aguilar Zéleny explores these territories in her book, she asks crucial questions: who is seen as disposable and why? How do women find their own means of survival and joy in the midst of a perilous sociopolitical context? What does it mean to live a life in a time of austerity and extreme violence? Trash is a critical intervention in Mexican literature.

Translated by J.D. Pluecker
Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Fiction

An ageing eunuch, named Wang Wei after the great poet, looks back on his life at the court of the Song dynasty in 12th-century China

Wang Wei has always chosen his words carefully. His unobtrusive presence has seen him through the reign of five emperors, but now, as his own time is running out, he immerses himself in an unbridled account of a life confined at court. From the early separation from his parents, sisters, and brother – who did not survive the operation into a eunuch – to the power struggles he has witnessed and endured, Wang Wei examines human relationships with precision and a catching sense of wonder. While rumours are weapons, it is love and its various forms of expression that most fascinate Wang Wei.

Reaching into a secret and secluded world, Carlson's vivid prose is as delicate as it is enigmatic. A meditation on power and exclusion, love and loneliness, gender and identity, ageing and transformation, Eunuch is a compact masterpiece.

Catalog is a serial publication about cataloging written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala. This is Catalog issue 19: Shimmer, Slice, Accretion; it’s part of a sub-series on near invisibility. Formally, each publication is an offset-printed A2 sheet folded into a signature. The series will be compiled into a book. This is done in the trust that the presentations, talks and conversations that stem from one issue's publication will influence the next issue. And the next. And the next.

Chris Mann is an Australian-American composer, poet and performer specializing in compositional linguistics. Mann studied Chinese and linguistics at the University of Melbourne, and his interest in language, systems, and philosophy is evident in his work. Mann founded the New Music Centre in 1972 and taught at the State College of Victoria in the mid-1970s. Mann moved to New York in the 1980s and was an associate of American composers John Cage and Kenneth Gaburo. Mann has recorded with the ensemble Machine For Making Sense with Amanda Stewart and others, Chris Mann and the Impediments, and Chris Mann and The Use. Mann currently teaches in the Media Studies Graduate program at The New School.

The first issue of the biannual magazine offering an heterogeneous and multifaceted exploration of approaches to modern and contemporary photography through 12 large-format wall posters, folded and detachable, with Julia Andréone, Roman Cieslewicz, Marie Quéau, Stig De Block, Area Of Work, Aurélien Froment, Fabio Mauri, Thomas Demand, Marie Deteneuille, Simon Menner, Kuba Ryniewicz, and Deborah Turbeville.

As a cofounder of Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, Emmy Hennings, with her partner, the Dadaist Hugo Ball, is recognized as having established and environment for collective experimentation. This book gathers an extensive collection of Hennings's writings, ephemera, and art, to give shape to a practice and an individual so ofter flattened for the sake of art historical narrative.

In the exhibitions held at Cabaret Voltaire and at the Swiss Institute in 2020, Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi made evocative displays that created space for a deeper engagement with Hennings's life and art. For this publication, she has made new collages, combining found materials and working tools suck as adhesive strips, supplemented by graphic gestures and subjective indexes such as cigarette butts. By bringing the Hennings archive into dialogue with her own work, Ghaznawi considers the manner in which an individual's multiple identities guide the accumulation of personal experience, be they her own or those of a woman she never met. Commissioned on the occasion of her exhibitions, and published together here for the first time, are texts by Ghaznawi's friends and collaborators Michael Zimmerman, Samuel Lala, Nils Amadeus Lange, Sophia Rohwetter, Der Serpas, Olamiju Fajemisin, Samiran Istifan, Timur Akhmetov and Furqat Palvan-Zade.

Published following the exhibitions Emmy Hennings / Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, and the Swiss Institute, New York, in 2020-2021.

Emmy Hennings (1885–1948) was a writer, actress, cabaret artist and co-founder of the artists' bar with Hugo Ball, and probably the most present figure at Cabaret Voltaire. The fact that she received little attention as a writer and artist may be due to various reasons. Perhaps it was the distinct language, or the general uneasiness at dealing with her Catholicism; whatever it was, her trace is missing in the male-dominated Dada historicisation. Only recently has Hennings received recognition, and indeed beyond the role of cabaret star. Whoever reads her novels, poems, and reviews will encounter a woman for whom writing was a survival strategy. She astutely analyses her existence and stages herself as a multiple.

Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi (born 1995 in Ghazni, Afghanistan) lives and works in Zurich and Obwalden. Her assemblages transgress forms and space, revealing a questioning of institutional structures and accepted ideas of craft and taste. In her sculptural transformations her processes insist on maintaining the visibility of the lowly beginnings of her materials, forming strong, shameless and rigorous poetries.

Edited by Simon Castets and Salome Hohl.
Texts by Salome Hohl, Laura McLean-Ferris, Michael Zimmerman, Samuel Lala, Nils Amadeus Lange, Sophia Rohwetter, Der Serpas, Olamiju Fajemisin, Samiran Istifan, Timur Akhmetov, Furqat Palvan-Zade.

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.

The seventh entry in an ongoing series of anthologies, this book features rare poems alongside new essays and interviews that engage the artists and themes explored elsewhere in Blank Forms' public programming.

Where most of prior entries, including Aspirations of Madness (2020), Intelligent Life (2019), and Music From The World Tomorrow (2018), have foregrounded little-seen or newly translated archival materials, this iteration privileges new texts produced specifically for the publication. These include an in-depth retrospective interview with the idiosyncratic Texan singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen conducted by ICA Philadelphia chief curator Anthony Elms; a conversation between multidisciplinary writers—and longtime friends—Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn on the occasion of Davis's latest poetry collection, Nothing but the Music, recently published by Blank Forms Editions; a recent discussion between composer Sarah Hennies and cellist Judith Hamann about their recent collaboration, which is included on Hamann's Music for Cello and Humming; and a conversation with composer-performers Tashi Wada and Charles Curtis, on the heels of a recent compilation of Curtis's work, Performances & Recordings 1998– 2018, produced by Wada. Each of these interviews shed light on the particularities of the artists' careers and methods in terms both formal and casual, practical and theoretical. 

In addition to these dialogues, this book features new critical reflections on three artists whose work Blank Forms has presented: the legendary jazz percussionist and healer Milford Graves, by Ciarán Finlayson; English multimedia artist Graham Lambkin and his beguiling 2011 album Amateur Doubles, by Alan Licht; and the UK-based experimental music trio Still House Plants, by Joe Bucciero. These articles mine historical, social, and theoretical contexts, filling gaps in the existing literature on the given artist-subjects. New and archival poems and writing about poetry complement these interviews and essays, including rare texts by Davis, Hagedorn, and René Daumal—the latter translated by Louise Landes Levi—and a suite of Auto-Mythological writings commissioned from Chicago-based composer and musician Angel Bat Dawid.

DEARS is a print magazine for transversal writing practices at the crossroads of art, poetry and experimental writing. It brings together authors and writers from different backgrounds and constitutes a dedicated platform for texts escaping the usual genres and disciplinary boundaries.

DEARS promotes the exploration of new forms of language as a way to foster new forms of living together, and emphasizes the growing relevance of trans- versal writing practices in this respect.

DEARS no. 5 / Summer 2023 / ever.over

With texts by Diaty Diallo, Douglas Keaney, Dzifa Benson, Sevinç Çalhanoğlu, Jana Vanecek, and an epigraph by Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Meriem Bennani's Life on the CAPS is the final chapter in her film trilogy of the same name. Set in a supernatural, dystopian future surrounding a fictional island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it is rooted in Bennani’s research and reflections on the histories of island societies, biotechnology, and vernacular music. Layering live-action footage and computer-generated animation, Bennani intuitively adapts editing techniques that evoke documentary film, science fiction, phone footage, music videos, and reality TV. Her one-person exhibition at the Renaissance Society marked the debut of this personal, electric yet melancholic consideration of what it is to live in a state of limbo, and this accompanying book captures the film through a combination of still images and selections from a transcript of the film.

This volume includes essays by Emily LaBarge and Elvia Wilk and transcripts of conversations between Meriem Bennani and: Omar Berrada; Fatima Al Quadiri, Negar Azimi, and Tiffany Malakooti; Amal Benzekri; and Aziz Bouyabrine.

In 2019 SOTA finished the first Fair Arts Almanac. The content of the book was generated during a week long summer camp in 2018 with about 70 contributors. The result was a bundling of tips & tricks, statements & demands, visions & ideas, dates & data, testimonies & voices, addresses & announcements on fairness within the complex relationships between the artistic, political and economic sphere. The compilation of various contributions in this first edition was deliberately associative and open for debate, full of contradictions, loose ends and inconsistencies.

Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens (born 1939) has been an influential figure in the visual culture of the Netherlands for many decades. Alongside his commissioned projects, Martens has maintained a commitment to this personal and iterative way of printing, which shows how creative practice often spans perceived disciplinary boundaries.

For each day of this elegant 2023 calendar, Martens has created a unique abstracted form to serve as a number—originally constructed using his signature method of printing letterpress monoprints from found metal forms, which are then digitized to comprise 365 compositions in total. The piece’s reference to the daily practice of art expresses Martens’ own approach as a designer and educator: “every day is a new day.”

Alternative forms of curatorial and institutional work suitable to our novel conditions, when the relationship between physical and online work must be revised.

In our current era of global pandemic and violent political upheaval, the question must be asked: What is our future and whose voices will announce it? These can only be situated voices, each with its own body and space, formed through dialogue within their own communities and in reaction and resistance to dominant discourses. Museum director, curator, and writer Zdenka Badovinac argues that these situated voices of people, artworks, and exhibitions, rooted in the local, can bring incisive, productive change. The call of these voices, in rethinking art, curation, and institutions, is the subject of this powerful essay.

Zdenka Badovinac is a curator, writer and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. She served as Director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana (1993-2020). In her work, Badovinac highlights the difficult processes of redefining history alongside different avant-garde traditions within contemporary art.