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Cover of Gay Betrayals: Two Works Series Vol. 5

Afterall Books

Gay Betrayals: Two Works Series Vol. 5

Leo Bersani, Hannah Quinlan, Rosie Hastings

€18.00

Bersani’s prescient and long unavailable polemic against gay assimilation, a plea for “antimonogamous promiscuity,” illustrated with artistic interventions
In 1997, during a symposium at Centre Pompidou, pioneering queer theorist Leo Bersani presented a prescient critique of the assimilative tendencies that made “gays melt into the very culture they like to think of themselves as undermining.” For Bersani, queer activism, mired in micropolitics, had relinquished the radical task of reconfiguring the horizon of the possible. Later published as “Gay Betrayals” in the pioneering (and now unavailable) collection Is the Rectum a Grave?, Bersani’s intervention champions a truly disruptive vision of homosexuality, one that betrays the relational, identitarian and communitarian foundations of bourgeois heterosexual respectability through “antimonogamous promiscuity.”

Building on artistic research into the politics of queer spaces and culture some 20 years later, British artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings revisit Bersani’s polemic with a response in three acts. Through a kaleidoscopic array of drawings, preparatory sketches and egg tempera paintings, a narrative of everyday (homo)sociality emerges.

Leo Bersani (1931–2022) was an American theorist best known for his books Is the Rectum a Grave?, Homos and Receptive Bodies. Born in the Bronx, he graduated from Harvard in 1952 and eventually joined the University of California, Berkeley, where he became an influential teacher, remaining there for the rest of his career.

Published in 2023 ┊ 102 pages ┊ Language: English

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Cover of  Sung Hwan Kim: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea

Afterall Books

Sung Hwan Kim: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea

Janine Armin

Essays €20.00

A richly illustrated exploration of Sung Hwan Kim’s complex record of migrant stories, displacement and belonging, border-crossings and translation.

In A Record of Drifting Across the Sea (2017–), Sung Hwan Kim looks at histories of migration. The artist parses the traces –archival and bodily – left by undocumented Korean migrants who came to the US by way of Hawai’i at the turn of the twentieth century, and ponders over their impact on other migrant and indigenous communities. As an ongoing film and installation series, comprising two chapters and a third in progress, A Record unsettles the limits of the ‘one work’ with its distributive, open-ended and collaborative nature.

In this speculative inquiry, Janine Armin explores each chapter in Kim’s multi-layered work as a mycelial network of feelers entangling and extending the wider work in-process. Engaging history through embodiment, folklore and myth, as much as through archival material, Kim navigates and crosses the boundaries between displacement and belonging. Focusing on the artist’s attempt to escape from representation, Armin illuminates and attends to the different stories and non-sovereign ways of being together towards which his work points us.

This title is part of the One Work book series, which focuses on artworks that have significantly changed the way we understand art and its history.

Cover of Palestine is everywhere

Silver Press

Palestine is everywhere

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Poetry €18.00

‘Palestine is everywhere because it names a political subject of radical universal emancipation,’ writes teacher and writer Nasser Abourahme. In Palestine is everywhere, writers, thinkers, poets and artists map the Palestinian struggle for freedom and its global resonances.

Vital dispatches from Gaza, essays, poems, protest chronicles, images and letters from prison reflect upon resistance, solidarity and the right to self-determination. Amid a world-historical moment marked by unknowability and loss, this collection offers essential reading for those interested in Palestinian liberation.

This collection is edited by Skye Arundhati Thomas, with contributions from Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Nasser Abourahme, Amal Al-Nakhala, Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq, Maisara Baroud, Ahmed Bassiouny, Houria Bouteldja, Anees Ghanima, Sahar Khalifeh, Laleh Khalili, Lujayn, Mira Mattar, Lina Meruane, Mohammed Mhawish, Nahil Mohana, Rahul Rao, Nasser Rabah, Adam Rouhana, Ahmad Zaghmouri.

Co-published by TBA21.

All royalties from this project will be donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and The Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN).

Cover of The Almond

1080 Press

The Almond

Theadora Walsh

Poetry €25.00

“Today is the day with the letter,” Celan writes to Bachmann on October 30, 1957. Theadora Walsh’s essay-poem, The Almond concerns, for I hesitate to write “about” or “is in relation to”, the love between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. Two Austrian writers flung across Europe by the atrocities of the Holocaust, excavating the narrows of a language not theirs, or taken from them. An almond is the closest two people can be, and becomes the binding structural conceit of the book, two segments reaching across the blank page to each other, across history, time and language.

Cover of Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018

The Song Cave

Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018

Alice Notley

Poetry €27.00

An Expert Array of Talks & Essays by One of Our Greatest Living Poets.

One of our greatest living poets, Alice Notley, the author of more than 40 books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of talks and essays over the last three decades.

The publication offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets—Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver, or William Carlos Williams—noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams and what they're for, or giving us insight into her own work, Notley's observations are original, sobering, and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.

Cover of Planetary Realism – Art Against Apocalypse

Sternberg Press

Planetary Realism – Art Against Apocalypse

Josephine Berry

Essays €22.00

Traditions of realism are brought together with the decolonial and ecological concept of "planetarity" to understand a new realism in contemporary art.

The devastation left in the wake of modernity and globalization is revealing a fragile and unfamiliar planet, and humanity has awakened to a new real. If the old "realist" tools of objectivism have contributed to capitalist society's divorce from the natural world, how are artists finding new ways to make us really see—and feel—the planet?
Surveying a body of planet-facing art, communal practices, and activism, Josephine Berry investigates art's power to break with capitalist realism and decarbonize the imagination. With chapters on feeling as world-making, the rupture of petroleum landscapes, artists' urban exodus, and migration as survival, Planetary Realism delves deeply into art's necessary reimagining of life on Earth.

"Planetary Realism is a deeply necessary book to add to our toolkit of struggle against a corporate world intent on destroying our planet for nothing but profit. Berry's book is a wake up call to artists and all those whose imaginations have not been destroyed by the consensensual silence surrounding the life or death issue of climate catastrophe. She dismantles the concept of art's autonomy to describe how artists all over the world are becoming artworkers for Planet Earth." — Peter Kennard, London-based artist and activist, and Emeritus Professor of Political Art at the Royal College of Art

"Through this superlative and vigorously argued version of a realism for today—meticulously attuned to planetary predicaments and the art and culture that inhabits them—Berry gives us means to map ways of being more hospitable, disobedient, migratory, alive, in the present." — Matthew Fuller, co-author of Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility, and Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth

Josephine Berry is an art theorist, writer and editor. She supervises thesis only and practice based PhDs in the School of Arts and Humanities, Royal College of Art, London, and teaches in Media Communication and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a member of Mute magazine's editorial collective Mute and is a peer reviewer for the journal Theory, Culture & Society.

Cover of Exhibiting for Multiple Senses

Valiz

Exhibiting for Multiple Senses

Eva Fotiadi

Essays €25.00

Exhibiting for Multiple Senses looks into artistic and curatorial research practices that emphasize the multisensory character of the human body in the encounter with artworks. For some time now, numerous contemporary artists and curators have moved beyond the primacy of the visual in the experience of art exhibitions. The book discusses this shift by bringing together experimental exhibition-making, curatorial theory, art, design, and museum research, disability activism and crip theory. Its intent is to demonstrate resonances between curatorial theory and practice and between disability and crip art activism. While the latter is still often regarded as relevant for only small portions of visibly disabled people, in recent years neurodiversity and invisible disabilities have proven to be relevant for the sensory experiences of much larger parts of exhibition audiences.

Exhibiting for Multiple Senses shares famous and lesser-known examples of experimental exhibitions as well as of artistic practices linked to exhibitions. By mobilizing the senses of touch, smell, taste, and hearing, as well as applications of multimodal technologies and insights from neuroscience, these examples all explore abilities and possibilities of the complex and diverse sensory apparatus that is the human body.

Contributors: David Bobier, Luca M. Damiani, Stephanie Farmer & Hettie James, Eva Fotiadi, David Gissen & Georgina Kleege, Adi Hollander, Lilian Korner, Elke Krasny, Renata Pękowska, Caro Verbeek