Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Reynaldo Rivera took personal photos of the Los Angeles that he lived in and knew: a world of cheap rent, house parties, subversive fashion, underground bands, and a handful of Latino gay and transvestite bars: Mugi’s, The Silverlake Lounge, and La Plaza. Most of these bars are long closed and many of the performers have died. But in Rivera’s photographs, these men and women live on in a silvery landscape of makeshift old-style cinematic glamour, a fabulous flight from unacceptable reality. 

As a teenager, Rivera took refuge in used bookstores and thrift stores, where he discovered old  photo books of Mexican film stars and the work of Lisette Model, Brassai, and Bresson. Inspired, he bought a camera and began  photographing people at his hotel. In 1981 he moved to Echo Park and began taking photos for the LA Weekly. 

This book is an ensemble of almost 200 images selected by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler spanning more than two decades in Los Angeles and Mexico. The  book also includes Luis Bauz’s story, “Tatiana,” about one of the  subjects of these photographs; a critical essay on Rivera’s work by Chris Kraus; and a novella-length conversation between Rivera and his  friend and contemporary Vaginal Davis about their lives, work, fantasies, and collective histories.

Edited by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler
With Luis Bauz, Vaginal Davis and Chris Kraus

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Unbidden Tongues #5: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Between the Teeth at Manifold Books, Amsterdam, November 28, 2021 – January 22, 2022.

​Drawing on artist, poet and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s extensive and largely unexhibited archive of ‘work on paper’, Unbidden Tongues #5: Between the Teeth is a publication-turned-exhibition and the fifth title in the series. From never-realised film scripts to concrete poetry and artists statements written intimately in the first person, the collection of material selected for this occasion presents the varying ways with which Cha drew on her personal and familial experience as an immigrant to conceptually grapple with language and its mediation and suppression, particularly, in this case, in its written form.

‘I am concerned with the power of sound! and what it can do to the body and the mind,’ wrote composer Pauline Oliveros. In the body, histories and politics come together with sound and listening, memory and feeling. Bodies of Sound offers a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening in over fifty contributions. In this book of echoes, a variety of forms – from essays to text scores to art, fiction and memoir – speak across gender, ways of knowing, witnessing, sounding and voicing, translation, displacement, violence and peace.

With contributions from: 

Sara Ahmed, Ximena Alarcón, Svetlana Alexievich, Ain Bailey & Frances Morgan, Anna Barham, Xenia Benivolski, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson & Kite, Elena Biserna, Karen Barad & Black Quantum Futurism, Anne Bourne, Daniela Cascella, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maria Chávez, Don Mee Choi, Carson Cole Arthur, Petero Kalulé & AM Kanngieser, Lindsay Cooper, Julia Eckhardt, Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, Ella Finer, Annie Goh, Louise Gray, Christina Hazboun, Johanna Hedva, Sarah Hennies, Tomoko Hojo, IONE, Lee Ingleton, Hannah Catherine Jones, Christine Sun Kim, Nat Lall, Cathy Lane, Jeanne Lee & Lona Foote, Marysia Lewandowska, Annea Lockwood & Jennifer Lucy Allan, Cannach MacBride, Elaine Mitchener & Hannah Kendall, Alison O'Daniel, Naomi Okabe, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, Gascia Ouzounian, Holly Pester, Roy Claire Potter, Anna Raimondo, Tara Rodgers, Aura Satz & Barbara London, Shortwave Collective, Sisters of the Order of Celestial Nephology, Sop, Syma Tariq, Marie Thompson, Trinh T. Minh-ha & Stoffel Debuysere, Salomé Voegelin

The theme for each issue of Worms tends to emerge steadily as gathering clouds. Often there is a nebulous sense of something that we want to explore, unripe fruits plucked from things we have read and heard and pocketed without much thought for later examination. It’s only when our pockets grow heavy, when ideas amass into something worthy of a second glance, that we start to name them. In the case of this one, our eleventh issue, its theme has its roots in the previous. The Love Issue—released in July 2025—explored love in all its guises: radical, complex, beautiful, violent. But in our study of the heart’s infinite mysteries there lurked an undercurrent of something else. Faith, close to love, was a persistent reoccurrence. Devotion, strength, clarity, refuge – these emerged as dimensions of love that can also be mapped across a search for something beyond the material. Worms 11: Faith & Worship began here.

FEATURING: Lamorna Ash, Clare Carlisle, Fanny Howe, Chris Kraus, Eileen Myles, Kazim Ali, Fiona Alison Duncan, Lauren J. Joseph, Olivia Laing, aja monet, Charlotte Northall, Arpan Roy, Noura Salahaldeen, Sarah Schulman, Michelle Tea.

CONTRIBUTORS: Temperance Aghamohammadi, Alaa Alqaisi, RZ Baschir, Sarah Burgoyne, F. Tibiezas Dager, Giulia De Vita, Helena Geilinger, Misha Honcharenko, Courtney Ann LaFaive, Ozziline Mercedes, Nicko Mroczkowski, Evie Reckendrees, Charlie Stuip, Clár Tillekens, Phoenix Yemi.

PHOTOGRAPHERS: Antonia Adomako, Eve Delaney, Jen Dessinger, Isabel Maccarthy, Britteny Najar, Katarzyna Postaremczak, Honor Weatherall.

ILLUSTRATORS & ARTISTS: Clara Esborraz, Eric Hesselbo, Lily Makoski, Samantha Rosenwald, Ivy Shepherd-Barron, Mary Watt, Shu Hua Xiong.

EDITORS: Caitlin McLoughlin, P. Eldridge, Clem MacLeod, Arcadia Molinas.

Proof Reader: Annalise June Kamegawa.

DESIGN: Caitlin McLoughlin & Clem MacLeod.

RUNWAY JOURNAL SUPPLEMENT

Contributors: Wassila Abboud, Anna Carlsson, Alexander Cigana, Bree Turner, Amelia Zhou.

Editors: Debris Facility, Ena Grozdanic, Victoria Pham.

Runway Supplement Design: SM Studio (Safiye Gray & Molly Cranston).

Cover Credits: Photo of Fanny Howe by Lynn Christoffers, Illustration by Mary Watt.

distinguish the limit from the edge is an intergenerational dialogue between Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Jimmy Robert. Their connection emerges through the intersection of text and image between selected work from Cha’s oeuvre and Robert’s practice that share the formal strategies of the fold.

Robert’s work utilizes paper as a sculptural material, and his hand sometimes appears to shape the page. For Cha, the fold is present in her compositions enmeshing language through strategies of visual poetry, as in L’Image Concrete feuille L’Objet Abstrait (1976),  and Untitled (après tu parti) (1976) which are both previously unpublished. The possibility of overlaying one’s work with the other, emphasised by the book’s spiral-bound double spine, and reverse fold-outs, forges an intimacy, a shared sensibility, and an encounter with the corporeal. In conversation with editor Jacob Korczynski, Robert refers to Fred Moten’s In The Break, stating, ‘Suddenly time falters. Words don’t go there. And if words don’t go there, then what does?’ 

distinguish the limit from the edge is commissioned by Book Works, edited by Jacob Korczynski and designed by Wolfe Hall. The book is published in association with Participant Inc. with the support of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Korea Arts Management Services, after the exhibition:

flipping through pages keeping a record of time: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha & Jimmy Robert curated by Jacob Korczynski at Participant Inc., 6 September – 3 November, 2024, supported by a Fall 2020 Curatorial Research Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

An artistic exploration of the political and emotional stakes of translation in the context of asylum law, through the lens of rarely heard testimonies: those of interpreters.

The Interpreter Dis/appears stems from an investigation conducted between 2019 and 2023 by curator, editor, and translator Virginie Bobin, focusing on both professional and volunteer interpreters and translators, as well as representatives from the state and organizations working with exiled individuals navigating asylum application procedures in France. By redirecting attention to the voices of interpreters—rarely visible figures in this ecosystem—the project delves into the ambiguous role of translation at the intersection of those who govern and those governed by asylum law. Within such a controlled environment, can the act of translation, with all its complexities, still express fleeting gestures of solidarity or even resistance? Through the exchanges prompted by these questions, the book seeks to reframe the prevailing public and political discourse on asylum, harnessing the embodied experiences of a small group of interpreters as an alternative lens to reveal the underlying power dynamics at play. It also probes the ethical and political potential of translation. The Interpreter Dis/appears unfolds across a variety of theatrical, artistic, and theoretical writing, alongside insightful contributions from artists and researchers who open up different perspectives for understanding and activating these issues.

The reader series Scriptings: Political Scenarios, edited by Achim Lengerer, publishes carefully selected scripts and texts by artists that refer neither to academic forms nor to purely literary forms of writing, but rather embed "text" as a fully integral part of contemporary political and visual art practice.

Contributions by Alix Eynaudi, Vir Andres Hera, Mihret Kebede, Franck Leibovici, Serena Lee, Marianne Mispelaëre, Eliana Otta, Rester. Étranger, Olia Sosnovskaya, Myriam Suchet, TOGETHER UNTIL _ __ (what)* ?

Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism’s arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston’s entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston’s journalism and criticism—in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980—and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston’s appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston’s criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston’s feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism’s roots in avant-garde art practice.

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

Over the last three decades, religious practices and belongings have gained increased visibility across the globe, turning secularity and its relationship with religion into subjects of intense interdisciplinary and international debate. Previously marginalized in gender studies, the secular and the religious now attract growing interest in academic and activist feminism, prompting a critical reflection on secularity's emancipatory potential. This publication aims to foster this interest by providing a platform for interdisciplinary and transregional discussions on the complex dynamics of secularity, religiosity, and gender, as well as new approaches to explore these relationships.
 The contributions examine the entanglements and boundaries of religions and secularities in everyday life, art, culture, and knowledge production. By presenting relevant case studies, this book underscores an understanding of religion as both a category of knowledge and a marker of identity.