A hybrid monograph/artist book of Nathalie Du Pasquier's work.

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 Nathalie Du Pasquier' works, installation views of the show at MACRO, and extracts from texts by various writers and figures fundamental for her practice. These come together to create an extension of the exhibition itself, in a form that channels the spirit of the show: the pages become exhibition spaces embracing associations and combinations allowing for a deeper understanding and exploration of Du Pasquier's work, and her imagination at large. It is a glimpse into the possibilities offered by her oeuvre, which can be approached, interpreted, and experienced from countless perspectives. It is the very vastness and variety of her work, and her inspirations, that make the exploration of her work—and as a result this publication—non-exhaustive. This publication is part of an ongoing study of her work and documents her exhibition at MACRO, "Campo di Marte," Du Pasquier's biggest show to date which brought together over one-hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and cabins, from the early 1980s to present day.

A famous designer and co-founder of the Memphis group in Milan in 1981, Nathalie Du Pasquier (born 1957 in Bordeaux, France, lives in Milan, Italy) accompanied the (post)modern adventure around designer Ettore Sottsass, with the creation of objects, fabrics, carpets, and furniture.

Edited by Luca Lo Pinto.
Published in May 2022

The story of failure asks one question only: What do people who lose do next? “Let the best one win.” War is one way. The other way is religion. Let me at the stakes. It’s so much a matter of patience. No fury, beyond all reason, no sequence broken, but diverted. Nothing seems to cooperate when you lose control. Blue becomes violet. Bend your head to the blank. The solution is so simple: don’t identify yourself with your description of yourself.

"It feels we aren’t reading prose but language that oscillates between liturgy and prayer." — Eugene Lim

Published April 2022.

In World of Interiors I use collage and appropriation to destabilise the first-person ‘I’. I also write directly about the inescapable condition of being perceived and positioned by other people. Our lives take place in time and space, meaning in history and geography, as well as in relation to one another – not just interpersonally, but intergenerationally, with all the baggage of race, class, gender and nation that this implies. I write about economic cycles of wealth and poverty at the levels of the individual, group and state. The book is about travel and immigration: migrants, tourists and refugees. It is about the work of survival and the cost of survival. It is also a hopeful book – about how strong and indomitable the will can be.

Published April 2022

Richly illustrated, this book provides for the first time a visual overview of Lawrence Abu Hamdan's works of more than a decade, and elaborates on a formal vocabulary characterized by the aesthetics of sound and language.

On the occasion of Lawrence Abu Hamdan's exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm in 2021, a group of authors have been invited to engage with individual works and their underlying concepts. Abu Hamdan recognizes the space for art as a site where attention can be drawn to real socio-political conditions in order to challenge the structures behind them. The artist can therefore push at the boundaries of what constitutes testimony. The title "Dirty Evidence" comes from Abu Hamdan's definition of evidence in which a truth value is derived from its very inadmissibility before the law. It is precisely the evidence's figurative dirt and dirtiness that works toward the production of truth.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan (born 1985 in Amman, Jordan, lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon) is an artist and “private ear” whose projects have taken the form of audiovisual installations, performances, graphic works, photography, Islamic sermons, cassette tape compositions, potato chip packets, essays, and lectures. Abu Hamdan's interest with sound and its intersection with politics originate from his background in DIY music.

Edited by Fabian Schöneich.
Graphic design: David Bennewith. 

Texts by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Natasha Ginwala, Ruba Katrib, Andrea Lissoni, Ramona Naddaff, Fabian Schöneich, Yasmine Seale, Theodor Ringborg, Eyal Weizman.

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

The play, whose full title is Up Your Ass Or From the Cradle to the Boat Or The Big Suck Or Up from the Slime, marches out a cast of screwy stereotypes: the unknowing john, the frothy career girl, the boring male narcissist, two catty drag queens, the sex-depraved housewife, and a pair of racialized pickup artists, among others. At the center is protagonist Bongi Perez—a thinly veiled Solanas—a sardonic, gender-bending hustler who escorts us through the back alleys of her street life. The fictionalized predecessor to SCUM Manifesto, the play shares the same grand, subversive, implicative language, equally spitting and winking, embracing the margins, the scum, and selling a trick along the way.

Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) is an American radical feminist intellectual, known for her SCUM Manifesto—a pamphlet with which she declares the power of women and imagines a political future through the margin—, and for having tried to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin.
With a contribution by Paul B. Preciado.
Graphic design: Roxanne Maillet.
Published in May 2022

A story that explores how power is enacted on and through the body—the physical, the social, and the political.

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. Told through one side of an epistolary exchange, the novel's letters are bookended by dense ramblings by the mother's son, who struggles to speak and write and spends most of his days in lockdown rearranging his "vessels," hysterically laughing, drooling, writhing, withdrawing—a state that will ultimately consume his mother as well. This is a story that explores how power is enacted on and through the body—the physical, the social, and the political. Custody of the Eyes (Los Vigilantes) reconfirms the essential, constitutive nature of language and expression in power and freedom.

Diamela Eltit (born 1947 in Santiago, Chile) is a Chilean writer and teacher.

Edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin.
Graphic design: Roxanne Maillet.
Published in May 2022

An anthology of queer erotic sci-fi, fantasy, and horror.

In these ten stories, everything is sex: walls, wax, the past, your future, your neighbours, hankies, candles, circuit boards, petri dishes, scrap metal – and language itself. Conjuring experiences for which there are no words, our amazing queer authors generate new tongues from the heat of their communing with a wild variety of lifeforms.

From Diriye Osman’s spiritualised Peckham to Jem Nash’s time-travelling trans multiverse, these stories transport you to new ways of being and feeling. In a word, it’s CruiserShimmeringLipophilicNeckingerCircuitGirlboss.

Whether you get horny from aliens, ghosts, robots, utopia, possession, ritual, or the completely surreal, there’s a story here for you. But why stop at one when you can taste pleasure in each and every one?

Featuring stories from: Gracie Beswick, Swithun Cooper, Rachel Dawson, Rien Gray, Vivien Holmes, Jem Nash, Diriye Osman, Alison Rumfitt, Nicks Walker & Anna Walsh.

Polar bears emerge from t-shirts. Reeboks come to life. Nothing is normal in the house of Mother Normal.

In Isabel Waidner’s second novel, we follow an unnamed narrator who looks like Eleven from Stranger Things, but is in fact a 36-year-old migrant working for minimum wage in a run-down hotel on the Isle of Wight. Along with their best friend, Shae, the narrator faces Ukip activists, shapeshifting creatures, and despotic bosses while trying to hold down their job and preparing for their Life in the UK test.

This is fiction that extends the avant-garde tradition beyond the upper-class experience that it usually chronicles – making it over as an ally of working-class queer experience. Set against a backdrop of austerity and decline, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff is an irreverent, boundary-erasing piece of work that celebrates the radical potential of resistance, ingenuity, and friendship.

Shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize.

Who determines what is remembered and commemorated, and why? How can we commemorate something that is both in the past and a daily reality? In Take 'Em Down, Simon(e) van Saarloos is inspired by the historically invisibilized lives of LGBT people and queers. They demonstrate the power of forgetting and wonder if and how it’s possible to live without a past. At the same time, Van Saarloos criticizes the way that a ‘white memory’—including their own—treats some stories as self-evident while other histories are erased.

"Amidst a global pandemic that has fundamentally changed our world, along with Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Topple Monuments Movements and ongoing struggles for LGBTQIA liberation, Simon(e) van Saarloos' Take 'Em Downasks us to reenvision monuments and acts of commemoration. They also champion forms of Queer forgetting as acts of resistance. They call upon the work of some of the greatest thinkers, scholars and writers Arendt, Orwell, Halberstam, Rankine, Moten, Hartman and more to raise critical issues around memory, mourning and social justice. In this text Saarloos joins their ranks in creating important new visions and challenges for our world. It’s a text demanding to be contemplated and shared widely."
Pamela Sneed, Author of Funeral Diva, City Lights 2020

Simon(e) van Saarloos is the author of Playing Monogamy (PS Rotterdam).  They were the curator of the 2021 exhibition on Abundance (‘We must bring about the end of the world as we know it’ – Denise Ferreira da Silva) in Het HEM and are also the host of *The Asterisk Conversations podcast. Van Saarloos recently started a PhD in the Rhetoric department at UC Berkeley.

Translation by Liz Waters.  Introduction by Pamela Sneed, New York-based poet, performer, visual artist, and educator.

A book-length visionary poem from a writer whose poems are among the major astonishments of contemporary poetry.

Alice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending, book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness. Her newest book, For the Ride, is another such work.

The protagonist, One, is suddenly within the glyph, whose walls project scenes One can enter, and One does so. Other beings begin to materialize, and it seems like they (and One) are all survivors of a global disaster. They board a ship to flee to another dimension; they decide what they must save on this Ark are words, and they gather together as many as are deemed fit to save. They sail and meanwhile begin to change the language they are speaking, before disembarking at an abandoned future city.

CONTRIBUTORS Anna Bierler, India Boxall, Craig P Burrows, Alex Hampshire, Kayla Adara Lee, Marijn van der Leeuw, Melanie Matthieu, Gabriella T Moreno, Amira Prescott, Harrison Pickering, Astarte Posch, Ananda Serné, Zazie Stevens, Gedvile Tamosiunaite, Mia You.

cover image Ananda Serné & Poyen Wang

DAISYWORLD MAGAZINE is a seasonal art publication on perception, the sensory, the non-human, ecology & erotica with an emphasis on interconnectedness. The artist's intimate knowledge based on observation, questioning anthropocentrism through beauty & language. Reflecting on the past season while softly moving into the next, each issue launches in-between seasons; appreciating experience, transition, and metamorphosis instead of anticipating the next big thing.

Twijfelend en aanmodderend kondigt de overgang zich aan. De wereld scheurt open en intense banaliteit doet alles daveren. De metamorfose van adolescenten, als rupsen die hun cocons van zich afschudden, schippert tussen alledaags en zonderling, tussen eenmalig en cyclisch. In die tussenruimte schuilt het dankbaarste filmbeeld.

#3 coming of age

Compiled on the occasion of a Sandra Lahire retrospective at Courtisane festival 2021. This cahier was developed in collaboration with Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian). Edited by María Palacios Cruz and Charlotte Procter.

Living on air: the films and words of Sandra Lahire is the first monograph dedicated to the work of Sandra Lahire and brings together new and existing texts on Lahire as well as writing by herself, with contributions by Gill Addison, Jo Comino, Pam Cook, Laura Guy, Maud Jacquin, Julia Knight, Michael Mazière, Sarah Pucill, Irene Revell & Kerstin Schroedinger, Lis Rhodes, Selina Robertson & Ricardo Matos Cabo (with So Mayer), Vicky Smith, Sarah Turner and Ana Vaz.

Compiled by Courtisane and Sabzian on the occasion of the Out of the Shadows programme, originally conceived for Courtisane festival 2020 but rescheduled to Courtisane festival 2021.

This program and publication was developed with the support of The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), CINEMATEK and KASK / School of Arts, in collaboration with Reem Shilleh and Mohanad Yaqubi (Subversive Film).

Compiled on the occasion of new restorations of Michel Khleifi’s films by CINEMATEK and a retrospective film programme organized by CINEMATEK and Courtisane (26 September - 5 November 2019), this publication aims to provide a modest summary of the trajectory of Michel Khleifi on the basis of a series of texts and interviews that were produced between 1981 and 2019.

On the occasion of Merce Cunningham's centennial comes this edition of his classic and long-out-of-print artist's book Changes: Notes on Choreography, first published in 1968 by Dick Higgins' Something Else Press. The book presents a revealing exposition of Cunningham's compositional process by way of his working notebooks, containing in-progress notations of individual dances with extensive speculations about the choreographic and artistic problems he was facing.

Illustrated with over 170 photographs and printed in color and black and white, the book was described by its original publisher as "the most comprehensive book on choreography to emerge from the new dance ... [which] will come to stand with Eisenstein's and Stanislavsky's classics on the artistic process." By the time these notebooks were published, Cunningham had already led the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 15 years, and had collaborated with Cage and others on milestones such as Variations V (1966) and RainForest (1968), the latter with Andy Warhol, David Tudor and Jasper Johns.

Along with his essay collection Dancing in Space and Time (1978), Changes is one of the most significant publications on Cunningham's enduring contributions to dance, which developed through collaboration with John Cage to incorporate formal innovation with regard to chance, silence and stillness.

The scripts of Rainer's five films, presented here along with essays, an interview, and bibliography, demonstrate the evolution of her political consciousness as well as her creative engagement with the contemporary film and cultural scene. These texts challenge the illusionist and ideological presumptions of mainstream culture and cinema.

Film Scripts included:

Lives of Performers
Film About a Woman Who...
Kristina Talking Pictures
Journeys from Berlin/1971
The Man Who Envied Women

Top Stories was a prose periodical published from 1978 to 1991 by the artist Anne Turyn in Buffalo, New York, and New York City. Over the course of twenty-nine issues, it served as a pivotal platform for experimental fiction and art through single-artist issues and two anthologies. The entire run of Top Stories is collected and reproduced here across two volumes.

Top Stories primarily featured female artists, though in Turyn’s words a few men “crept in as collaborators.” Although primarily “a prose periodical” (as its byline often stated), the issues varied in form and aesthetics, pushing the boundaries of what prose could be and, from time to time, escaping the genre altogether. In fact, the only parameters required for participants were that the periodical’s logo and issue list be included on the front and back covers, respectively.

A great deal of the works are short stories by the likes of Pati Hill, Tama Janowitz, and Kathy Acker, whose Pushcart Prize–winning “New York City in 1979” appeared for the first time in book form as part of the series. Constance DeJong contributes “I.T.I.L.O.E.,” a widely unavailable work that features the artist’s trademark prose and is sure to please fans of her novel, Modern Love. The largest issue of the periodical is undoubtedly Cookie Mueller’s “How to Get Rid of Pimples,” which consists of a series of character studies of friends interspersed with photographs by David Armstrong, Nan Goldin, and Peter Hujar altered with freshly drawn blemishes.

Top Stories also celebrates less conventional literary forms. Issues by Lisa Bloomfield, Linda Neaman, and Anne Turyn take the form of artists’ books, juxtaposing image and text to construct tightly wound, interdependent narratives. Jenny Holzer and Peter Nadin present a collaborative work in copper ink comprised of truisms by Holzer on corporeal and emotional states and drawings by Nadin of abstract bodies. Janet Stein contributes a comic, while Ursule Molinaro provides a thorough index of daily life (and the contempt it produces) consisting of entries that were written just prior to lighting a cigarette.

Top Stories remains vitally defiant, an essential witness to what was the downtown literary and art-world underground.

Primary contributors include Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Sheila Ascher, Douglas Blau, Lisa Bloomfield, Linda L. Cathcart, Cheryl Clarke, Susan Daitch, Constance DeJong, Jane Dickson, Judith Doyle, Lee Eiferman, Robert Fiengo, Joe Gibbons, Pati Hill, Jenny Holzer, Gary Indiana, Tama Janowitz, Suzanne Johnson, Caryl Jones-Sylvester, Mary Kelly, Judy Linn, Micki McGee, Ursule Molinaro, Cookie Mueller, Peter Nadin, Linda Neaman, Glenn O’Brien, Romaine Perin, Richard Prince, Lou Robinson, Janet Stein, Dennis Straus, Sekou Sundiata, Leslie Thornton, Kirsten Thorup, Lynne Tillman, Anne Turyn, Gail Vachon, Brian Wallis, Jane Warrick, and Donna Wyszomierski.

David Armstrong, Nan Goldin, JT Hryvniak, Peter Hujar, Nancy Linn, Trish McAdams, Linda Neaman, Marcia Resnick, Michael Sticht, and Aja Thorup all make appearances as well, contributing artwork for the covers or as illustrations.

Anne Turyn (b. 1954) is a photographer based in New York. Turyn’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kunsthalle Bern, Denver Art Museum, Walker Art Center, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Published by Primary Information, 954 pgs, 21.6 × 14 cm, 2 Paperback books in Slipcase, 2022

Sex, or the Unbearable is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, only that it unleashes unbearable contradictions that we nonetheless struggle to bear. In Berlant and Edelman's exchange, those terms invoke disturbances produced in encounters with others, ourselves, and the world, disturbances that tap into threats induced by fears of loss or rupture as well as by our hopes for repair.

Through virtuoso interpretations of works of cinema, photography, critical theory, and literature, including Lydia Davis's story "Break It Down" (reprinted in full here), Berlant and Edelman explore what it means to live with negativity, with those divisions that may be irreparable. Together, they consider how such negativity affects politics, theory, and intimately felt encounters. But where their critical approaches differ, neither hesitates to voice disagreement. Their very discussion—punctuated with moments of frustration, misconstruction, anxiety, aggression, recognition, exhilaration, and inspiration—enacts both the difficulty and the potential of encounter, the subject of this unusual exchange between two eminent critics and close friends.

This Container is an open host for texts and documents that come through and alongside choreographic thinking. It’s a recipe, but not for eating; a sequel to everything up until now; horizontal tourism; many feminists’ elegy; opinions weakened with time; an inaudible lesbian opera; a future ballet manifesto; dances and desires; cheating discipline; purposely misplaced; only poems; statements and speculations; a diagram for artistic research; and an incomplete encyclopaedia of random knowledge and dear dances. This Container takes shape according to its content, without organising through prominent narratives or figures, this container wants to weave, leaving holes and threads between the forms of writing.

Jul/Aug 2017

With
Sarah Aiken 
Anna Bontha
Chloe Chignell
Angela Goh
Rebecca Jensen
Maia Means
Rasmus Ölme
Frida Sandstrom
Ellen Soderhult
Louise Trueheart
Vanessa Virta
Jan Nyberg

More info at www.thiscontainer.com

Mo-Leeza Robert's novel Head describes the desperate future that clusters around Head Gallery like cockroaches swarming over a pig's head. It is at once critical and complicit, deluded and envious. Jerry-rigging saccharine sci-fi, with a leavened mush of curatorial artspeak, artists, collectors, hanger-ons and other art world actors explode in ecstasy, pain, or self-induced eradication – all, according to the whims of the Head Gallery, which remains an anonymous and inviolate force, the overseer of events and a selfless accumulator of prestige and wealth. Familiar contemporary artists are reanimated for the future, giving the events described an unsettling familiarity. Any reader familiar with the art world should feel both seduced, and infected. It is like Dickens but with laughs induced by our approaching extinction, and like Salò, written, directed and starred in by Barbara Gladstone.

Drawing on the postmodern perspective and concerns that informed her groundbreaking Terpischore in Sneakers, Sally Bane's Writing Dancing documents the background and development of avant-garde and popular dance, analyzing individual artists, performances, and entire dance movements. With a sure grasp of shifting cultural dynamics, Banes shows how postmodern dance is integrally connected to other oppositional, often marginalized strands of dance culture, and considers how certain kinds of dance move from the margins to the mainstream. 

Banes begins by considering the act of dance criticism itself, exploring its modes, methods, and underlying assumptions and examining the work of other critics. She traces the development of contemporary dance from the early work of such influential figures as Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine to such contemporary choreographers as Molissa Fenley, Karole Armitage, and Michael Clark. She analyzes the contributions of the Judson Dance Theatre and the Workers' Dance League, the emergence of Latin postmodern dance in New York, and the impact of black jazz in Russia. In addition, Banes explores such untraditional performance modes as breakdancing and the drunk dancing of Fred Astaire.