Breaking Cinema – Experimental Film 2010-2023

Gabriel Abrantes has been making a career in cinema; with numerous international exhibitions, he's been keeping prolific, with video installations, drawing, painting, and now also VR. This book, published by maat and Mousse, attests exactly this. A book that is predominantly visual and clearly structured, efficient in transposing a certain formal and conceptual attitude that runs through Abrantes's work into the book's aesthetic approach, expressing humour and irony visually within a relatively classical framework.

"The juxtaposition of references to art and cultural history with personal and socio-political commentary is a guiding thread throughout Programmed Melancholy." writes Emily Butler, in one of the essays included in this book (other texts are an interview with the artist and short essay by Rosa Lleó). Butler continues: "His works engage with our emotions, with a range of personal feelings, often humorous, potentially rousing ethical and political beliefs. Unstable, multi-faced, polysexual, his characters waver between expressing personal emotions and wider social, environmental and political concerns."

A literary tribute to Sarah Lucas, at once an adroit art-historical study and a poetic travelogue.

“Distance is far, nobody said. (Somebody, surely.)” So begins Quinn Latimer's strange, elliptical account of an exhibition and a body of work by Sarah Lucas that the poet and critic has never seen, made and installed in a city she had not yet visited. In the spring of 2012 the renowned English artist's exhibition “NUDs” was mounted in Mexico City at Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli, the famed pyramid-like museum built by the muralist and architect Juan O'Gorman to house Rivera's approximately 50,000 Mesoamerican artifacts and objects. In the summer of 2012 Latimer found herself in Elba, the island of Napoleon's exile, where she embarked on this small, charged book. In four interconnected essays, the writer limns the myriad impressions, ideas, objects, personages, and histories relevant to Lucas's fantastically transparent yet complicated “NUDs,” and their storied making and installation in Mexico. Exploring shame, passivity, palindromes and fertility statuary, as well as notables including Antonin Artaud, Napoleon, Susan Sontag and Mary Wollstonecraft, Describe This Distance is at once an adroit art-historical study and a poetic travelogue, once or twice removed.

Mousse celebrates its 90th issue with a collectible edition, with a special design and format, entirely focused on fiction.

Bringing together a cohort of writers and artists, Mousse #90 – The Fiction Issue stems from the eponymous Fiction column that has dwelled in our pages for five years, and expands its scope. It was developed together with Rosanna McLaughlin, Skye Arundhati Thomas, and Izabella Scott, who collectively coedited the art and literature quarterly The White Review between 2021 and 2023.

Here you'll find reprints from both Mousse and The White Review as well as new stories and translations we have jointly commissioned. Seven interludes, intended to open up other worlds through images, feature portfolios of drawings by Atelier dell'Errore, Michael E. Smith, Camille Henrot, Michael Landy, Simone Forti, Adelaide Cioni, and Evelyn Taocheng Wang.

An analysis of Mike Kelley's work as a position in materialist philosophy, which appears as the feature that is most at stake in his artistic practice, focusing on the pieces he produced around the issue of memory––his leitmotiv from 1995 onward.

Mike Kelley is best known as one of the most influential visual artists of his generation. But he was also an insightful theorist who wrote profusely about his work as well as on aesthetics in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, an epoch marked, in his view, by victim culture and the pop psychology phenomenon known as repressed memory syndrome. Mike Kelley: Materialist Aesthetics and Memory Illusions presents the artist in a new light, almost as an empirical philosopher delivering his position through art as well as writing. In a meticulous and transdisciplinary approach, Laura López Paniagua presents Kelley's oeuvre as a stance in materialist aesthetics and weaves thoughtful relations between the artist's critique, statements, and comments and the theories of thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. López Paniagua focuses on Kelley's artistic production between 1995 and his death in 2012, analyzing these works vis-à-vis the concept of memory, one of the artist's obsessions and leitmotivs throughout his career.

Essay by Laura López Paniagua; introduction by John Miller.

This collection of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film scripts vividly evokes the close connection between their influential work as theorists and their work as filmmakers. It includes scripts for all six of Mulvey and Wollen's collaborative films, Wollen's solo feature film, Friendship's Death (1987), and Mulvey's later collaborations.

Each text is followed by a new essay by a leading writer, offering a critical interpretation of the corresponding film. The collection also includes Wollen's short story Friendship's Death (1976), the outlines for two unrealised Mulvey and Wollen collaborations, and a selection of scanned working documents. The scripts and essays collected in this volume trace the historical significance of a complex cinematic project that brought feminist, semiotic and psychoanalytic concerns together with formal devices and strategies.

The book includes original contributions from Nora M. Alter, Kodwo Eshun, Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Esther Leslie, Laura Mulvey, Volker Pantenburg, Griselda Pollock, B. Ruby Rich and Sukhdev Sandhu.

This publication departs from three video works by the artist Hu Wei, exploring the possibilities of devising new scripts within the manifold connections between materials for creative works, images, and texts.

The first part of the publication transcribes and recompiles the narrations in his videos into three sets of juxtaposed scripts. Each of these textual fragments showcases an “anatomical section of an era” from disparate geopolitical contexts: a family letter from Sabah, a set of Rashomonian testimony, and an anecdote about the anonymous.

The second part is a notebook-like atlas that unfolds following the clues of three keywords: “Fabrication,” “Anonymity,” and “Boundary.” Within this section, different types of images and texts, including factual materials, embodied research and survey records, as well as fabricated documents, interlace with each other. They serve as an interrogation, extension, reconstruction, and reassemblage of three muted histories or events.

A multimedia meditation on the many meanings of the ocean across history.

This volume closely follows the development of Joan Jonas' (born 1936) multiformat project Moving off the Land. The artist's most recent body of work, it encompasses three years of research into the significance of the ocean throughout history, and features sculptures, drawings, sound and new video productions. Jonas combines poetry and prose by writers such as Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville with texts by Rachel Carson and Sy Montgomery, and with moving images filmed in aquariums and in Jamaica, where algae bloom and over-fishing pose urgent threats to the ecosystem. The monograph includes the complete script for the performance along with annotations, images of Jonas' live performance, and a complete chronology with documentation of the performance's history.

Première publication dédiée à l'œuvre singulière de l'artiste coréenne-américaine Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), à la croisée de la performance, de l'art conceptuel, de la vidéo et de la poésie, dont l'un des motifs principaux concerne sa représentation de l'Histoire, marquée par l'expérience de l'exil et de la migration, de la dislocation temporelle, culturelle, géographique et sociale.

Dans le courant de sa brève vie, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha a produit un travail artistique, littéraire et critique qui en fait une figure exemplaire, même si encore trop méconnue, de l'art contemporain américain. Est ici retracé ce parcours singulier qui se forge à la lumière d'une période exceptionnelle à la fois de l'histoire et de l'histoire de l'art. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha est à Berkeley en 1968, à Paris en 1976, à New York en 1980 et s'engage dans une pratique de l'art et de la pensée où sont brassés les concepts les plus novateurs des théories visuelles ou filmiques, de la philosophie, de la linguistique et de la littérature comparée. 

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Berkeley, 1968 est aussi une réflexion inédite sur la représentation de territoires culturels déplacés et leur rapport à la mémoire.

Historienne de l'art contemporain, Elvan Zabunyan est maître de conférences habilitée à l'université Rennes 2 et critique d'art. Ses recherches portent sur l'art nord-américain depuis les années 1960 et notamment le tournant 1970 autour des questions raciales et féministes. Elle travaille depuis le début des années 1990 sur les problématiques issues des cultural studies, des théories postcoloniales et des études de genre en cherchant à construire, grâce à ces pensées critiques, une méthodologie de l'histoire de l'art contemporain articulée autour d'une histoire culturelle, sociale et politique. Elle a publié Black is a color, une histoire de l'art africain américain (Dis Voir, 2004), co-dirigé plusieurs livres et a écrit de nombreux articles dans des ouvrages collectifs, des catalogues d'exposition et des périodiques.