Everything Passes Except the Past – Decolonizing Ethnographic Museums, Film Archives, and Public Space

Isabelle Graw reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus.

By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships." 
— Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Isabelle Graw has written the Elective Affinities for the twenty-first century, as a feminist novel and a dysfunctional family portrait set in the contemporary art world."
— Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder ofTexte zur Kunst in Berlin.

A monograph / artists' book that engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories. Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.

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.

Elizabeth Povinelli's anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In these essays, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishment of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.

This collection of essays by Martin Herbert considers various artists who have withdrawn from the art world or adopted an antagonistic position toward its mechanisms (essays on Lutz Bacher, Stanley Brouwn, Christopher D'Arcangelo, Trisha Donnelly, David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Charlotte Posenenske, and Albert York).

A large part of the artist's role in today's professionalized art system is being present. Providing a counterargument to this concept of self-marketing, Herbert examines the nature of retreat, whether in protest, as a deliberate conceptual act, or out of necessity. By illuminating these motives, Tell Them I Said No offers a unique perspective on where and how the needs of the artist and the needs of the art world diverge.

2nd edition (2025).

The racist term "play-white" comes from the apartheid era, when it connoted a black or mixed race person who lived as a white person: “So and so is a play-white.” South African artist Bianca Baldi draws from studies of biomimicry and her own family history, as well as literary precedents—such as Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929)—to reflect on racial passing and the instability of racial identities. Play-White alternates between layers of visualization and moments of discretion in order to explore questions of presence and evasion beyond their representation in black and white.

With contributions by Bianca Baldi, Mika Conradie, Shoniqua Roach, Amy Watson, and others; design by Katharina Tauer & Wolfgang Hückel in collaboration with K. Verlag.

Published 2021

On the rich history of video art and its enduring relevance to today's artistic and critical practices. 

The New Television delves into the rich history of video art, reexamining the pivotal Open Circuits conference held at MoMA in 1974 and exploring its enduring relevance to today's artistic and critical practices. Open Circuits was an important event in establishing video art in American museums and articulated a range of conflicting teloses for the medium, some which materialized (like local cable television) and others that remain unrealized. The conference proceedings were published in 1977 as The New Television: A Public/Private Art, and the radical design of the book reflected the conference's utopian aims. 

This two-part publication includes a facsimile of the long-out-of-print conference proceedings and new essays and discussions by over a dozen scholars and artists. The new scholarly texts and previously unpublished archival documents in The New Television illuminate the network of institutional histories of video art, consider global televisual contexts and alternative critical approaches, and examine contemporary video art and its continued relevance from new perspectives.

Rachel Churner is the director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation. She is also an art critic and editor, whose writings have appeared in Artforum and October magazine, among other publications. She was a recipient of the 2018 Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and is the editor of multiple books, including Jacqueline Humphries: jHΩ1:) (2022); Yvonne Rainer: Revisions (no place press, 2020), Hans Haacke (MIT Press, 2015), and two volumes of writings by film historian Annette Michelson (MIT Press, 2017 and 2020). Churner is a faculty member at Eugene Lang College at The New School, New York.

Rebecca Cleman is Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and a writer. She has programmed screenings and special projects for such venues as the International House Philadelphia; the Museum of Art and Design, Anthology Film Archives, and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York City; and the Julia Stoschek Collection, Germany; and organized or co-organized many events for EAI, including a panel discussion on the films of David Wojnarowicz and a conversation between Hilton Als and The Wooster Group's director and co-founder Elizabeth LeCompte.

Tyler Maxin is curator at Blank Forms. He was previously the Communications and Special Projects Associate at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). His writing has appeared in publications including Artforum, BOMB, and Film Comment.

Publication documenting the research made by Dora García for a video project on Oscar Masotta, pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Latin America and influential art critic.

It features a selection of Masotta's writings as well as contextual essays on his work.Segunda Vez is an art research project centered on the figure of Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires, 1930, Barcelona, 1979), an author of groundbreaking texts about the Happening, art, and dematerialization, a pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Spanish-speaking world, and a happenista. The project has yielded a full-length and four medium-length films by Dora García, two Cahiers documenting the research, and this book. Segunda Vez: How Masotta Was Repeated offers a selection of Masotta's writings, including his early study of Argentinean author Roberto Arlt, as well as texts that contextualize Masotta's thought and broaden the reach of his reflections on the intersections between performance and psychoanalysis, art and politics.

Edited by Emiliano Battista.
Texts by Dora García, Oscar Masotta, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Jinkis, Inés Katzenstein, Ana Longoni, Emiliano Battista, Aaron Schuster, Julio Cortázar.

English edition

13,5 x 21 cm (hardcover)

320 pages (color & b/w ill.)