Confidences / Baseline

The uprising was staged by the minority, and a downfall is remembered by the majority.

Gilgamesh “Gil” Gupta is a theatre maker and self-defined “avant-gardist.” As a young vampire, Gil’s alienation from time, body, and identity only increases with the murder of his sire, Patrice. Seasons pass in spite of this, and Gil endeavours to circumvent inter-species edicts to foster a meaningful audience. Recognition becomes a vocation.

Confidences / Majority is a novel that presents entertainment as critical gospel. Seething a trail of cultural debris, Majority is the second instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which deploys a version of the vampire and performance as sites for transformation and maintenance.

Ivan Cheng (b. 1991, Sydney) produces films, objects, paintings and publications as anchors for the staging of complex and precarious spectacles. His background as a performer and musician form the basis for his using performance as a critical medium and questioning publics and accessibility. He holds an MFA in Critical Studies from Sandberg Instituut; his work has recently been presented at Voiture14 (Marseille), La Maison Pop (Montreuil), Les Urbaines (Lausanne), Volksbühne Roter Salon (Berlin), Oude Kerk (Amsterdam), Belvedere21 (Vienna), MuHKA (Antwerp), Carriageworks (Sydney), Federation Square (Melbourne). In 2017 he initiated the project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam.

Confidences / Majority is published simultaneous to Cheng’s solo presentation Milieu at Édouard Montassut, Paris.

Acting like an academic endpoint, cuneiform everything.

Conlan Eliseu is a vampire and an out-of-vogue fashion stylist who takes a job as an advisor at the Gatlin Finishing School, a three-year vocational program for talented teens in a theatre town. Human teen Doeke Schreyer wants to be a star and isn’t afraid of hard work. He just can’t seem to get it. Will his corporeal charms help him exceed the curse on his name, inherited from his adoptive parents?

Confidences / Production deals with the process of keeping the past alive, whether as image or restaging. It is the fourth instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which uses the figure of the vampire as shorthand for cultural movement. Following Confidences / Baseline, Confidences / Majority, and Confidences / Oracle, this new episode contains excerpts or elements from scripts by the artist, as well as documents and reflections on the tradition and transmission of theatre. 

Ivan Cheng (b. 1991, Sydney) produces films, objects, paintings and publications as anchors for the staging of complex and precarious spectacles. His background as a performer and musician form the basis for his using performance as a critical medium and questioning publics and accessibility. He holds an MFA in Critical Studies from Sandberg Instituut. His performances, works and writings have been recently presented at Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; galerie Édouard Montassut, Paris; Villa Imperiale, Pesaro; OCTO, Marseille; Volksbühne Roter Salon, Berlin; gta Exhibitions, Zurich; and Mind Eater Festival, Oslo. In 2017 he initiated the project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam.

Confidences / Production is published in collaboration with Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Naarm/Melbourne, in conjunction with the presentation of the project, Ivan Cheng: NP in September 2024.

faits divers are the various reports in a news bulletin, miscellaneous human interest stories, theorised by Roland Barthes as ‘total’ and ‘immanent’ information.

ferrara deux (faits divers) scrolls around the discovered corpse of a talented street musician named Landau, mangled and sealed into vacuum bags in the walk-in of a modern Italian-American restaurant. Street performance is content for an attention economy, playing on authenticities and profiting from recognition.

In this debut novel, artist Ivan Cheng reconfigures recent performance texts into an approximation of a murder mystery.

Oracles don’t require belief—they now theatrically suspend disbelief. No longer advisors of world policy, they run Locus Solus, a town that has come to ramble around an eponymous theatre and chocolate factories. Theo, a centuries-old vampire intent on remaining contemporary through performance, visits Locus Solus, which is hosting Praise Estate, an international theatre festival. He uses the festival as an opportunity to stay with Gean, his oracle boyfriend, who is there visiting family. Theo has a fetish for the future, fixated on the one thing he is in no shortage of.

Confidences / Oracle is a lover’s trip to a weeklong theatre festival. A vehicle for recontextualising recent performance scripts and texts, Oracle is the third instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which intertwines vampires and performance as sites for circulation and recognition.

Writing Out Loud is a publication that brings together the transcriptions of eight lectures by the artist Jon Mikel Euba that were live translated from Spanish to English during the course Action unites, words divide (On praxis, an unstated theory) at the DAI. The lectures were delivered across the academic year 2014 – 2015 at the invitation of If I Can’t Dance. They sit within a larger writing-centred project by the artist that he has pursued for almost a decade, through which he aims to define a form of praxis that could evolve into a technical theory.

A novel about escape and connection, class, sex, and queer intimacy in the American Midwest. 

The oldest story: an insider pretends to be an outsider and receives praise for his empathy and imagination and intelligence. Maybe some asshole even says bravery. An outsider pretends to be an insider, is exposed as a fraud, a liar, and burned to the ground. 

In Ripcord, Nate Lippens continues his meditations on escape and connection, class, sex, and intimacy. Stuck in Milwaukee, the narrator cobbles together a living by bartending and catering weddings, enmeshed in a semiaffair with a younger, married man. Cruising apps while tallying his youthful romantic failures, he fantasizes about disappearance but finds both solace and frustration in his friendships with Charlie, an aging punk who was prominent in the 1990s Chicago queercore scene, and Greer, a painter who never broke through but continues making work.

A vivid, haunting tale of intergenerational trauma and survival under Israeli occupation. 

A New Arab Book of the Year 2021.

The year is 1968. The recent Arab defeat in the Naksa has led to the loss of all of historic Palestine. In the midst of violent political upheaval, Mahmoud, a young Palestinian boy living in the Galilee, embarks on a school trip to visit the West Bank for the first time.

For Mahmoud, his mother and his grandmother, the journey sets off a flood of memories, tracing moments that bond three generations together. How do these personal experiences become collective history? Why do some feel guilty for surviving war? Is it strange to long for a time never lived?

In this groundbreaking novella, Yara Hawari harnesses the enduring power of memory in defiance of the constrictions on Palestinian life. Against a system bent on the erasure of their people, the family’s perseverance is unbroken in the decades-long struggle for their stone house.

Yara Hawari is a Palestinian writer and political commentator. She completed her PhD in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, where her research focused on oral history and Indigenous Studies. She currently works as a senior analyst at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank. The Stone House is her first book.

In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on an experiment: for one month she shot a roll of 35mm film each day and kept a journal. The result was a conceptual work that investigates the nature of memory, its surfaces, textures and material. Memory is both monumental in scope (over 1,100 photographs, two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording) and a groundbreaking work by a poet who is widely regarded as one of the most innovative experimental writers of her generation. Presaging Mayer's durational, constraint-based diaristic works of poetry, it also evinces her extraordinary —and often unheralded— contribution to conceptual art.

Mayer has called Memory "an emotional science project," but it is far from confessional. This boldly experimental record follows the poet's eye as she traverses early morning into night, as quotidian minutiae metamorphose into the lyrical, as her stream of consciousness becomes incantatory. In text and image, Mayer constructs the mercurial consciousness of the present moment from which memory is —as she says— "always there, to be entered, like the world of dreams or an ongoing TV show."

This publication brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form, making space for a work that has been legendary but mostly invisible. Originally exhibited in 1972 by pioneering gallerist Holly Solomon, it was not shown again in its entirety until 2016 at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and then again in 2017 in New York City at the CANADA Gallery. The text was published without the photographs in 1975 by North Atlantic Books in an edition that has long been out of print.

Bernadette Mayer (born 1945) is the author of over 30 books, including the acclaimed Midwinter Day (1982), a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994) and Work and Days (2016), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Associated with the New York School as well as the Language poets, Mayer has also been an influential teacher and editor. In the art world, she is best known for her collaboration with Vito Acconci as editors of the influential mimeographed magazine 0 TO 9.