I See / You Mean

Over the years 1919–20, the celebrated medical scientist and doctor Carl Julius Salomonsen began giving public lectures and publishing pamphlets regarding a new “epidemic” that had begun to affect the European populace: the increasing ubiquity of modernist art.

In a 1919 pamphlet titled New Forms of Art and Contagious Mental Illness, he wrote: “We stand, at this moment, before a movement in art which is psychopathic in character, and whose victorious journey through all countries is probably caused by the same spiritual disease that gave the older, religious spiritual epidemic such a powerful spread.” This pamphlet and the accompanying talks were countered by a retaliatory pamphlet published by members of Grønningen, a Copenhagen modernist painters group, to which Salomonsen responded with a further pamphlet.

Translated into English for the first time by literary theorist Andrew Hodgson, the entire altercation is gathered in this book, documenting one of the earliest rejections of modernist art.

Edited & Translated by Andrew Hodgson.

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.

Compiling works from nearly five decades, Headwaters (and Other Short Fictions) provides the first comprehensive overview of the narrative and experimental writing of Lucy R. Lippard. While she is best known for her pioneering work as an art writer and activist, Lippard’s fiction helps frame her broader impact on contemporary culture.

Headwaters anthologizes over fifty short works, many previously unpublished. These often experimental vignettes showcase the range of her literary voice while also challenging our understanding of her oeuvre. Sometimes speculative or fragmented, yet always compelling, these pieces range from short-form narrative stories and conceptual fiction to visual essays and political prose.

Included are excerpts from two never-released novels, as well as collaborations with artists Robert Barry, Sol LeWitt, and Jerry Kearns.

Lucy Lippard is author of thirty books on contemporary art and cultural criticism. She has curated some fifty exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.

Edited by Jeff Khonsary

The book is a sharp and creative reflection on the interweaving of personal and national/ideological dreams. The chapters are on facts and fictions created in both, how one retraces one’s way through them, and through the numerous philosophers/thinkers/ideas (from Sartre to Zizek, Abdel-Nasser to Ibn Taymiya and others) that appear and shape his life journey, studies and dreams.

Amr Ezzat is an Egyptian writer who studied engineering and philosophy. He worked as an engineer and then a journalist before becoming a human rights researcher and a writer for numerous newspapers and other periodicals. He remembers his dreams very well.

Commissioned and published by Kayfa ta in 2019, printed in Beirut in 2021
Translated from English by Jennifer Peterson 
Design template by Julie Peeters 
Cover illustration by Hany Rashed

fanta for the ghosts by Elisabeth Molin

2021, English
46 pages, 120mm x 210mm
edition of 500

Co-published with OneThousandBooks and Elisabeth Molin

Afternoon Editions no. 5: a collection of found papers annotated by Jeroen Peeters, titled Bookmarks of sorts. During several years Jeroen Peeters collected notes left by readers in library books: faded reader tickets, scraps with notes, a shopping list, train tickets and other little papers used as bookmarks. He noted each time the date and the book in which they were found. Afterwards he wrote commentaries to this collection, an essay on alternative reading practices, marginalia and extra-illustration, on the exchange between readers and the imaginary community lingering in all those library books.

Part prose poem, part reflection on the relations between writing and place, Lagoon tells the story of the slow undoing of an idyll. In it the narrator walks for hours during long summer nights, gazing through the windows that line the streets. In between, she reflects on how she might write about the shifting space of the lagoon, where she spent summer holidays with her family years ago. In adolescence, the narrator watches quietly as her mother, father and sister go about building their holiday home. But she can sense something is awry, she just does not fully understand what.

Lagoon is the first novella by McCulloch.

Lagoon by Samantha McCulloch is the first title in Kunstverein Amsterdam's new imprint called First Drafts, which, inspired by artist and publisher Anne Turyn, celebrates experimental and commercially unviable work by publishing completed manuscripts that haven’t yet found a home in their first draft form. Importantly, each title is also the first attempt by the author to write in that particular form, or, to write at all.