Encircling the Image of Trauma

I went to the field; I became many.

Majnoon is an oil field in the global south. Majnoon is also the violence, and the state of mind that survives the violence. How can this be a field guide in any customary sense? Latitudes have been taken. Words are written in disrupted or troubled syntax. Rather, this book proceeds alongside a search for what many call emancipatory practice; to been acted in the field, where we feel most alive. The volume is divided into five parts, preceded by maps and legends. First in the sequence is a colour-coded soil map,“Majnoon and Hir Environs”, adapted from material originally published in 1960 by the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture. It was the product—relic, really—of a brief era that saw fields and farmlands redistributed among labourers and peasants. Since then, the map has changed with the shifting substance of our earthly constitution; it pivots on the example of Majnoon. Any map is appended by its legends, and I rewrite them from the perspective of dismantling. A longish colour key unfolds with the likeness of a poem pursuing return, inspite of scorch and ruin. It should be mentioned that ‘hir’ recurs multiple times throughout the book as gender-nonconforming pronoun—suggestive, ambiguous, and, in my opinion, sufficiently sound for the moment. It is essential to keep needling the problem of language.

A second, simpler map charts water flow as casualty of upstream accumulation. Dams are borders, after all, and we are lousy with them; downstream is sentenced to the whims of an architecture whose gates are mostly closed. On the map, a symbol resembling a small, numbered page locates Majnoon as point of interest. A subsequent diagram also contains this motif—not for navigation through the field, butt hrough the book itself.

Not Working brings together the contributions by artists, theorists and writers who in their work examine the interdependence of artistic production and social class.

The complex structures and substantial rise in social inequalities, particularly visible in light of the current pandemic, have given the concept of class a wide range of connotations. Despite the ongoing attempts to view contemporary art in the sense of "class homogeneity"; it remains complicit in the reproduction and masking of existing conditions which it often claims to overcome. The texts in this book form a ground were class can be mediated with respect to artistic practices and other structures in the art world.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Not Working, Artistic production and matters of class at Kunstverein München in 2020.

Contributions by Maurin Dietrich, Melanie Gilligan & Marina Vishmidt, Annette Wehrmann, Stephan Janitzky & Laura Ziegler, Lise Soskolne, Josef Kramhöller, Leander Scholz, Dung Tien Thi Phuong, Steven Warwick, Mahan Moalemi.

Archives on Show brings the potential of reformulating the social and political relevance of archives by curatorial means into focus.

Based on the specific properties, faculties and methods of curation, the volume highlights those techniques and strategies that deal with archives not only to make their genesis and history apparent but also to open them up for the future. The 22 different ways of dealing with archives testify to the curatorial participation in (re)shaping the archival logic, structures and conditions. As process-oriented, collective and relational modes of producing meaning, these curatorial practices allow for the alteration, reconfiguration and mobilization of the laws, norms and narratives that the archive preserves as preconditions of its power.

The contributions to this volume by artists, curators and theorists demonstrate approaches that curatorially insist on building other relations between human and non-human archival participants. Each is using the book to create a curatorial constellation that generates and forms new connections between different times and spaces, narratives, disciplines and discourses. Configured as a glossary, the positions assembled in this volume exemplify curatorial methods with which to treat the archive as site and tool of collective, ongoing negotiations over its potential societal role and function.

Contributions by Heba Y. Amin, Talal Afifi, Eiman Hussein, Tamer El Said, Stefanie Schulte, Strathaus, Haytham El Wardany, Julie Ault, Kader Attia, Roger M. Buergel, Sophia Prinz, Yael Bartana, Rosi Braidotti, Kirsten Cooke, Ann Harezlak, Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, Octavian Esanu, Megan Hoetger, Carlos Kong, Iman Issa, Kayfa ta, Kapwani Kiwanga, Doreen Mende, Stefan Nowotny, Marion von Osten, pad.ma, Abdias Nascimento, Eran Schaerf, Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, Françoise Vergès.

This book documents an installation by Eric Baudelaire revisiting the political and personal saga of the Japanese Red Army as an anabasys—an allegory of a journey that is both a wandering into the unknown and a return back home.

“This book is not for reading but for wandering. Its lines do not roll out continuously but superimpose each other to infinity, creating not a compendium of knowledge but a web of prescience. It does not follow a logical framework but unfurls a grid with multiple entries. It does not assert a set subject or conclusive postulate. At most it invites us to probe the recesses of a mind in motion, and steeps us in the driving material that brings it to life. It reflects the works it exhibits, the documents it discloses and the commentary it generates: it aspires to ubiquity. Anabasis, the very real linking thread that stitches it together, serves not just as an archaeological enigma, but also as an allegorical force. The main author of this ocean crossing, Eric Baudelaire, is both a collector of vestiges and a sketcher of wandering lines who has surrounded himself with other meticulous voices (Pierre Zaoui, Homay King, Jean-Pierre Rehm), fellow-travellers in this library secret. Readers will be able to enjoy the gradual unfolding of the story of war and politics whose underlying intellectual and poetic adventure this book enables us to recall—that of its repetitions, ramifications and hybridisations: the story of Anabasis after Anabasis (or from Xenophon's Anabasis to that of Paul Celan by way of Alain Badiou's), from an ancient narrative to its modern reappropriation.” — Morad Montazami 

Edited by Eric Baudelaire and Anna Colin.

Texts by Morad Montazami, Pierre Zaoui, Homay King, Jean-Pierre Rehm.

First comprehensive monograph of the Swedish queer and feminist performance artist.

Holes Dug, Rocks Thrown is the first comprehensive presentation of Line Skywalker Karlström's work. It documents a practice, that over a period of more than twenty years have been committed to "queer feminist world making" using a performative and embodied approach. Correspondingly with Skywalker Karlström's understanding of art as a chaotic and associative knowledge production, which unfolds as a collaborative and ongoing conversation, their book has become a bastard monograph, which describes an artistic practice through its relationships and its flock. For the book, Skywalker Karlström has invited a number of colleagues to engage in conversations with them departing from selected works and jointly attempt to expand upon the strengths and qualities of queer and feminist artistic strategies. In addition to an extensive documentation of works, drawings and ephemera, Holes Dug, Rocks Thrown contains a number of inserts with works by other artists, which have informed Skywalker Karlström's art practice.

Line Skywalker Karlström (born 1971 in Karlstad, Sweden, lives and works in Berlin) is a Swedish performance artist who works with a diverse range of materials dealing with the role of art in life, lesbian and gay identity and the perception of space. Her performances take place in the public realm and also in gallery installations. Karlström was a member of the feminist performance group High Heels Sisters (2002-2007), and a founding member of YES! Association / Föreningen JA! (2005-2018), a group of Swedish artist activists that she left in 2009.

Two clock-faces are staring at each other.
They are two sides of one thing, as different as they are the same.
They move as two bodies revolving around each other, into a tender embrace.
A kiss, made of time, in time.
Mirrored shape shifters, their hour-numbers climbing on each other's shoulders.
Running up against the limits of their own usefulness, clocklikeness.

A book by Katja Mater, with a text by Amelia Groom designed by Elisabeth Klement
79 clocks, 192 pages, open spine, 17 × 21 cm
Printed by Wilco Art Books on Arena White Rough by Fedrigoni 

A secret can be a private space for self-creation – or a shared site of pleasure.

We explore secrets in a plethora of forms and contexts. From layered accounts of mediaeval ecstasy to the unexplored sensory experience of smell. From camouflaged play to queer readings of astrological charts and the hidden history of house music. From a very analog point of view to the outskirts of the internet.

Featuring Zoe Leonard, Eileen Myles, Jimmy DeSana, Princess Julia, Olivia Laing, Simon Costin, Timothy Thornton, Mary Manning and many more. Published 2020.