Hand Reading Studies

In 1971, Michael Morris and Vincent Tarsov—founders of the Vancouver-based artist network Image Bank—invited Eric Metcalfe, Gary Lee Nova, Glenn Lewis and Paul Oberst to create their own, unique alphabet. NowForty years later, with the permission of the participating artists and the help of Image Bank, these historic silk-screened alphabets have finally been published together. The Alphabet Book is designed by Marc Hollenstein, who was inspired to reinitiate the alphabet publication project after having a conversation with Glenn Lewis during the opening of Lewis’ retrospective exhibition at Kunstverein back in 2014.

Grace Crowley is a publication based on letters sent to the Australian artist and pioneer of modernist painting Grace Crowley (1890–1979) by friends, family and colleagues. Parts of those letters, which are now housed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the State Library of New South Wales archives in Sydney, were transcribed and categorised by Riet Wijnen in subsections such as ‘Marital Status’, ‘Teaching’, ‘Hosting’, ‘Eurasia’, ‘X’, ‘Being A Woman’, ‘War’, ‘$’ and ‘Making Work’. The result is an alternative biography constructed solely through a living set of relations.

Tense is a never-realised publication, written and composed by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in 1984, that only now has been released in a very limited run on our imprint. The book accompanied the exhibition Top Stories, which took a closer look at the 29 issues of the prose periodical with the same title, founded in the late 1970s by Anne Turyn.

Top Stories was dedicated to fiction by emerging women artists and writers from that time. Tense was originally intended to become part of the series as well, but never made it to print. It was only recently – during the making of the exhibition at Amsterdam’s Kunstverein – that the original mock-up was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer.

Lip Magazine was self-published by women in Melbourne from 1976 to 1984 and stood as a lightning rod for Australian feminist artistic practice throughout the Women’s Liberation era. The art and ideas expressed over Lip’s lifetime track groundbreaking moves in performance, ecology, social-engagement and labour politics—all at an intersection with local realities. Collecting and presenting the materials of Lip for the first time since their original appearance, The Lip Anthology, edited by Vivian Ziherl, privileges the range and dynamism of contesting feminisms that comprised the Lip project.

Designed by: Marc Hollenstein

Canonically Speaking is the second title to appear on the First Drafts imprint, a zigzag in Kunstverein Publishing’s output that’s dedicated to publishing completed manuscripts that would otherwise, for an array of reasons, not see the light of day in this rough early form.

Central to Canonically Speaking is the idea that (female) life is an inherently surrealist experience. In this spirit, the ‘absurd’ is embraced as a means to speak out on themes such as self-image, spirituality, mental health and work. While slipping between poetry, comprehensive list-making, knock knock jokes and intertextual references, forms of recital and misinterpretation often take place, whereby characters quote and repeat sentences and words from a large variety of sources, jumping from the health benefits of whale blubber to court transcripts of Bill Clinton's impeachment to the plasma that is released when microwaving two grapes side by side.

The new issue consists of 8 plays and performance texts by Iranian women writers living in or outside Iran. Whether based on actual experience, fictional, or drawn from archives, these texts deal in one way or another with the question of the stage. They produce a contested space of performance that is inevitably linked to the performer's body, whose thresholds are stretched and contracted into potentially new forms of staging. The authors in this issue place their writing in performative relation to the specific historical and sociopolitical conditions in which they live and work. In many ways, the writings interrogate the politics that delineate the stage itself.

The authors in this special issue are: Nasim Ahmadpour, Nil (Alista) Aghaee, Naghmeh Manavi, Athena Farrokhzad, Nazanin Sanatkar, Azade Shahmiri, Zahra Mohseni and Naghmeh Samini.

An incisive poetic sequence that tracks the relationship between migration and complex traumas in this unsparing critique of the unjust conditions that brought us the global pandemic.

Ante body is a poetics of [un]rest. A project that started as an exploration of how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease and grew into a critique of the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. Continuing her use of the invented poetic form, the Arabic, and integrating Fred Moten's concept of "the ANTE," Helal creates an elliptical reading experience in which content and form interrogate the inner workings of patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and globalism.

Marwa Helal is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019) and the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear, 2017).

18 Brum’Hair est un recueil de poèmes écrits à quatre mains par Martin Desinde et Phœbe Hadjimarkos-Clarke au rythme du calendrier révolutionnaire. Si son titre fait référence—non sans un humour capillotracté—au coup d’État de Louis Bonaparte et au livre de Karl Marx traitant du dit-sujet, les auteur·ice·s écrivent ici en ping-pong sur notre temps présent et divaguent autour de sujets divers tels que l’état du monde, la vie urbaine, les drogues et l’alcool, la séduction, la sexualité, l’amour, le chagrin, l’amitié, la révolution... Ces 18 poèmes sont accompagnés de 12 allégories dessinées par Flore Chemin.
Un 18 brumaire littéraire, sans doute plus proche de la farce que de la tragédie.

Martin Desinde est auteur, éditeur et graphiste installé à Paris. Son travail fait dialoguer poésie et idéologie au travers de multiples formes: textes, objets éditoriaux, ready-mades, performances... Il fonde en 2017 la maison d'édition Dépense Défensive avec l’artiste Louis Somveille.

Phœbe Hadjimarkos-Clarke écrit des romans et des poésiesoù elle explore la vie organique et sentimentale au temps du capitalisme tardif. Elle vit dans de grandes villes et de petits villages.

Flore Chemin vit et travaille entre Paris et la Corrèze, sa pratique s’articule autour de la peinture, l’édition et l’installation. Elle y cultive une esthétique de l’à peu près qui répond à divers principes: faire d’abord / comprendre après, rester floue.s pour résister sous cape, inviter le monstre et les mauvaises herbes au cœur du jardin.