Dance as Moving Pictures

Oracular Transmissions weaves together three of the most recent collaborative projects Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby have completed through processes of exchange and translation: Back, Back Again to Paris (2013), The Alhambra (2016), and Transmissions (2017). 

The book also includes poems by Denise Newman, a friend to both Adnan and Kirby, and an introduction by Kadist Foundation curator Jordan Stein presenting their works and performances.

Edited by Astrid Kaminski, Jeroen Versteele, Julie De Meester. A personal and intimate look behind the scenes of Meg Stuart's creative process over more than a decade. 

Since the early nineties, Meg Stuart, and her dance company Damaged Goods, based in Brussels, have produced a remarkable and audacious body of choreographic work. In 2010, Damaged Goods published Are we here yet?, which spans the first twenty years of Meg Stuart's career. In the follow-up book Let's not get used to this place, the choreographer looks back on more than a decade of works through reflections, interviews, scores, and notes on the practice of creating, performing, teaching and living dance. These are mixed with reports, essays and poetry by collaborators and other observers, photos, performance texts and archive material. The book's title, gleaned from one of Stuart's recent video works, ties together these multifarious sources in a desire to discard tried and tested strategies, explore new contexts, and transgress the edge of what we (do not) know. 
Let's not get used to this place gives a sense of the plentitude of motions, inspirations and personalities that energize Meg Stuart's creative cosmos. It offers a personal and intimate look behind the scenes of the creative process, and expands this to include the world around it. As a journey through her more recent career, an inspiring manual and a work of art in its own right, it has a wide appeal to an international base of artists, students and peers, and to anyone who is interested in performance.

Contributions by Jean-Marc Adolphe, Preethi Athreya, Mariana Tengner Barros, Sandra Blatterer, Esther Boldt, Márcio Kerber Canabarro, Varinia Canto Vila, Descha Daemgen, Jorge De Hoyos, Igor Dobricic, Brendan Dougherty, Doris Dziersk, Tim Etchells, Moriah Evans, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Jule Flierl, Alain Franco, Davis Freeman, Ami Garmon, Philipp Gehmacher, Jared Gradinger, Ezra Green, Claudia Hill, Maija Hirvanen, Elise Misao Hunchuck, Astrid Kaminski, Kiraṇ Kumār, Göksu Kunak, André Lepecki & Eleonora Fabiano, Jean-Paul Lespagnard, Marc Lohr, Matthias Mohr, Anne-Françoise Moyson, Anja Müller, Kotomi Nishiwaki, Jeroen Peeters, Alejandro Penagos, Léa Poiré, Leyla Postalcıoğlu, Ana Rocha, Tian Rotteveel, Hahn Rowe, Isabela Fernandes Santana, Maria F. Scaroni, Bernd M. Scherer, Kerstin Schroth, Gerald Siegmund, Charlotte Simon, Mieko Suzuki, Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Poorna Swami, Meg Stuart, Margarita Tsomou, Kristof Van Boven, Elke Van Campenhout, Myriam Van Imschoot, Jeroen Versteele, Doug Weiss, Stefanie Wenner, Jozef Wouters, John Zwaenepoel.

Alvin Ailey is one of the most celebrated choreographers of the twentieth century. The creator of iconic works such as Blues Suite, Revelations, and Cry, he is widely recognized for the dance company he founded in 1958 when he was just twenty-seven years old. Ailey imagined and cultivated a platform for modern dance through his innovative repertoire, interdisciplinary sensibility, and support of dancers and choreographers. This expansive volume situates Ailey within a broader social, creative, and cultural context, looking at the artists who influenced and collaborated with him, the spaces and scenes he frequented, the dynamic themes within his dances, and how his vision and work changed contemporary dance. 

Essays by artists, scholars, and critics cover topics ranging from the Black church, the South, and the Great Migration to nightclubs, musical influences, and queerness. With more than four hundred images including photographs of works Ailey choreographed, archival materials such as notebooks, sketches, letters, and never-before-published behind-the-scenes photos, and conversations about the legacy of the company with Sylvia Waters, Judith Jamison, and Masazumi Chaya as well as several contemporary dancers and scholars, this study offers an unprecedented full picture of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists and the way his work continues to inspire today’s generation of dancers.

Contributions by Horace D. Ballard, Harmony Bench, Kate Elswit, Aimee Meredith Cox, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Malik Gaines, Jasmine Johnson, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Uri McMillan, Ariel Osterweis, J Wortham, CJ Salapare, Kyle Abraham, Claire Bishop, Masazumi Chaya, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Jennifer Homans, Judith Jamison, Sylvia Waters, Jamila Wignot and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

Authored by twelve diverse American dance artists in the form of twelve small booklets, Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Studyapproaches and celebrates dance history as a subjective, artistic inquiry. It reimagines and radicalizes our understanding of dance throughout human history through the voices of working choreographers. Simultaneously, the project is dedicated to the power of an artist-centric view of history itself, thus placing the dance history back into the body, where it began. Here, history occurs in vertical layers of time and space and moves into the street, the football field, the yard, the screen, the memory, the womb, the sky, and the future.

Text by mayfield brooks, thomas f. defrantz, maura nguyễn donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Frésquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne

STILL LIFE is an online and printed zine about relationships and configurations in which one person is still while others are not. Or where one person is passive and others are active. It’s about how we put ourselves in other people’s hands. Or how we are put in other people’s hands. It’s about care and power and vulnerability and agency. And other things not so clearly named. It’s about the different kinds of knowledge that people have about their own and other people’s bodies. And the kind of philosophical and political understandings woven into that knowledge.

Over the past two decades, artist Germaine Kruip has steadily developed a practice, which merges time, space and perception. Like an anthropological stage director, she investigates, simplifies and presents her observations in a subtle manner often through architectural interventions. In each of these interventions, she changes a location into a stage, with the audience as actors in a play of substantive absence. By doing so, she activates both physical and mental awareness.

This publication presents an overview of the Kruip’s practice since 1999, two years prior to her engagement with the art context. Presenting over 40 works, the publication reflects on three periods in the artist’s practice, each accompanied by an essay contributed by Anna Gritz, Eva Wittocx and Stephanie Bailey. The idea of a catalogue raisonné came out of a conversation that followed Kruip’s ambitious project Geometry of the Scattering, which was presented at de Oude Kerk in Amsterdam in 2015 – 2016.

First monograph in French: from Rod Stewart to the Industrial Revolution, Art is Magic collates all of acclaimed artist Jeremy Deller's cultural touchstones into one lovingly curated volume, balancing these artistic inspirations with examples of Deller's visionary work.
 
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Jeremy Deller: Art is Magic at Frac Bretagne, Musée des beaux-arts and La Criée art center, Rennes, in 2023.

Texts by Jeremy Deller; interview with Jeremy Deller by Daniel Scott, Alan Kane, Mary Beard, Jonny Banger, Cheerio. Translated from the English by Sandra von Lucius.

Two Revolutions a Day marks the first in-depth publication devoted to the work of Sophie Nys, whose artistic practice over the past two decades has unfolded through an enterprising interplay of research, observation, and formal experimentation. Moving between exhibition-making, design, and subtle acts of re-framing, Nys has developed an oeuvre that resists fixed categories while remaining acutely attentive to the structures – historical, linguistic, psychological – that shape how meaning is produced and circulated.

Rather than presenting a linear retrospective, Two Revolutions a Day is organised as an extended conversation between Nys and critic Christophe Van Gerrewey that mirrors the artist’s own methods. Together, they revisit key works and exhibitions from the early 2000s to today, tracing recurring motifs and questions while allowing contradictions and shifts in perspective to remain visible.

Throughout the book, Nys’s fascination with systems of power and authority intersects with a sensitivity to intimacy, subjectivity, and the everyday, engaging with feminist perspectives that examine the politics of representation. Historical figures, marginal anecdotes, and overlooked documents appear alongside reflections on resistance, collaboration, design, and the conditions under which artworks –and the social roles they inhabit – come into being. Language, in particular, emerges as both material and problem: a tool that promises clarity while constantly slipping, misfiring, or revealing its own limits.