Local Warming

One Big Bang brings together 78 charcoal and pastel drawings from Adel Abdessemed's recent series Nature Morte and Politics of Drawing, where everyday objects, animals, and flowers are subtly charged with tension. Through these works, Abdessemed explores the intersections of beauty, fragility, and unrest. With texts by Hélène Cixous and David Elliott, One Big Bang offers a thoughtful entry into an artist's visual language shaped by memory, myth, and political urgency.

Published following the eponymous exhibition at Projeckt Brussels in 2024.

Adel Abdessemed (born 1971 in Constantine, Algeria, lives and works in Paris and Berlin) deconstructs identity codes, tackling head-on the tensions that permeate our society. His works, with their typical simplicity—sculptural installations, drawings, photographs, videos and performances—echo precise facts and familiar situations, but go beyond narrative commentary and militant criticism. Adel Abdessemed questions, among other things, the social and economic status of the artist in a system where his foothold is slight, by shrewdly keeping a distance in a gesture of subversive and committed resignation.

Abdessemed refuses to be limited to a single ideology. In his early works he passionately tackled religious, sexual, and taboos subjects and his later exhibitions have often focused on the theme of global violence. In an interview with Elisabeth Lebovici he stated, "I do not live between two cultures. I am not a postcolonial artist. I am not working on the scar and am not mending anything. I am just a detector … In the public sphere, I use passion and rage. Nothing else. I don't do illusions."

Sometimes reduced to a simple word, as in "Mohammedkarlpolpot" (1999), a condensation of names evoking totalitarism and religion, and sometimes complex and monumental installations such as "Habibi" (2004), a suspended skeleton of 17 meters propelled by a jet engine, Abdessemed's practice belongs to a new generation of artists who appeared recently on the French art scene, looking to offer another perspective on culture and identity.

Bridget Mullen is the ruler of an unruly roost. Between 2021 and 2023, she gave birth to forty-seven paintings, each twelve-by-nine inches: kin ugly and cute, monstrous, fleshy, repulsive, droopy-eyed, and sneering as they cross the universal threshold into the no less frightening world that awaits. Birthday reunites Mullen's uncanny litter alongside a conversation between the artist and Lucas Blalock.

The paintings in New York-based artist Bridget Mullen's Birthday series utilize two distinct parameters to guide the creation of the iterative works: a vertical orientation at an intimate scale of 12 x 9 inches and a visualization of perhaps the ultimate creative act—the moment of birth. Through this consistent scale and thematic hyper focus, the artist employs endless formal variations in composition, color, and paint application. The result is a series of paintings that share a common structure yet champion individuality.

Contrasting colors provoke a visible tension, one that is at times compressed and, in other moments, elastic. Suddenly, abstract shapes come into focus as human anatomies, capable of expressing emotion. Undulating lines of various thicknesses and layered colors squeeze together, revealing peculiar faces and gestures that emerge from a central point. The repetition of thin lines creates a visual stutter of pigment, alluding to the passage of time or rapid movement.
The works in Birthday build on Mullen's practice, combining color, decisive mark-making, intuition, and experimentation to conjure psychedelic configurations. Sculptural dimensionality and flatness, representation and abstraction, and solidity and fluidity, serve not as dichotomies within these works, but as two complementary halves of a whole. Together, the forms and figures of the Birthday series are imbued with a sense of life, pregnant with agency and potential.

For British artist Delaine Le Bas, dress is divine. Clothes appear as both mask a nd memorial within an expansive body of work exploring mythologies of Le Bas’s Romani ancestry. Embroidered and hand-painted textile is central to the artist’s lyrically activist practice, alongside costume, writing and performance. In a new series of portraits by the British photographer Tara Darby, directed by Jane Howard, gold leaf dances across the planes of Le Bas’s face in repose, it wraps and jangles around her wrists, glimmers across her clothes. In a notebook she has inscribed: “In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold.” The grief is alchemical.

As Stephen Ellcock writes:

‘The maxim ‘Know Thyself’ was inscribed in gold on a column on the threshold of Pythia’s temple, serving as a warning that wisdom, understanding, empathy and anything remotely resembling peace of mind are unachievable without selfawareness, reflection and ruthless self-criticism.’

The fragments of hope, anger, magic and curiosity redolent in Le Bas’s work form a call to action. A reminder of the racism, exclusion and subjugation that abound. Photographs of Le Bas, which Darby has been making for more than a decade, present the artist as truth sayer, inquisitive goddess and modern-day Sibyl.

Through the incorporation of texts—a conversation between gallerists John Marchant and Keiko Yamamoto with curator Claire Jackson—drawings from Le Bas’s journals, archival images taken at her home and the restyling—and reflection—of her own personal wardrobe, In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold radiates psychological, social and political wisdom. Fashion is revealed as both tyrannical disguise and liberating regalia.

The Weight of the Concrete explores the legacy of the Turinese artist and publisher Ezio Gribaudo (1929–2022), examining his multifaceted oeuvre at the confluence of image and language. This publication, named after Il Peso del Concreto (1968)—a seminal work that featured Gribaudo’s early graphic creations alongside an anthology of concrete poetry edited by the poet Adriano Spatola (1941–88)—places Gribaudo’s work in conversation with approximately forty artists and poets from different generations, all of whom similarly engage with explorations of text, form, and visual expression.

Reflecting the editorial premise of Il Peso del Concreto, The Weight of the Concrete revisits the influential anthology, including archive material that documents its production, and reimagines it, pairing Gribaudo’s graphic work with a new selection of historical and contemporary concrete and experimental poetry.

At the heart of the volume is Gribaudo’s emblematic Logogrifi series, developed from the 1960s onward. The Logogrifi reveal his deep engagement with the art of bookmaking and fascination with industrial printing processes, relief matrices, typefaces, and language games.

In this new edition, the editors take the opportunity to revisit Gribaudo’s pioneering work, examining previously overlooked dimensions—gendered, geographical, and technological—and exploring contemporary associations beyond the original context. The book also includes essays that elucidate the poetic and political interplay between image, language, and materiality.

This publication is released following Ezio Gribaudo – The Weight of the Concrete, an exhibition held at the Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria (2023–24), and at the Museion—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy (2024).

Edited by Tom Engels and Lilou Vidal
Published by Axis Axis and Grazer Kunstverein

Contributions by Anni Albers, Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Irma Blank, Al Cartio, Paula Claire, CAConrad, Natalie Czech, Betty Danon, Constance DeJong, Mirtha Dermisache, Johanna Drucker, Bryana Fritz, Ilse Garnier, Liliane Giraudon, Susan Howe, Alison Knowles, Katalin Ladik, Liliane Lijn, Hanne Lippard, Sara Magenheimer, Françoise Mairey, Nadia Marcus, Giulia Niccolai, Alice Notley, Ewa Partum, sadé powell, N. H. Pritchard, Cia Rinne, Neide Dias de Sá, Giovanna Sandri, Mary Ellen Solt, Alice Theobald, Colleen Thibaudeau, Patrizia Vicinelli, Pascal Vonlanthen, Hannah Weiner, and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt

Essays by Alex Balgiu, Tom Engels, Nadia Marcus, Luca Lo Pinto, Mónica de la Torre, and Lilou Vidal

Special issue of this US magazine dedicated in its entirety to the late Australian artist/compositional linguist/raconteur Chris Mann, who died in 2018. The magazine contains tributes from Mann associates and admirers, including Warren Burt, Amanda Stewart, Pi-0, Ronald Robboy, Linda Kouvaras, Alvin Lucier, Ruark Lewis, Annea Lockwood, as well as Mann’s own writing and an interview with him by Philip Blackburn.

88 pages bound in soft-cover glossy colour cover by Brigid Burke.

"From this moment / and hence backwards / a visitation / echoes thru the apparent opening / to the tomb / the narrow passage is the mind's reasoning / in clarity / as she moves like a shadow / having lived her life before " — Joanne Kyger, from Places to Go (Black Sparrow, 1970)

"All processes measured as form are traceable in curved decay. Seemingly unmeasurable, unquenchable, the heart stone harbors its own native entropy. The evolution of organs is not ours to decipher. We’re drawn slanting toward the stone in helices of approaching circles. Our movements throw shadows, our bodies ring haloes." — Michael Cavuto, "Isis Theses"

"In the dual work of Isis Theses & Pyre I-V, living, death, language’s work of remembrance, place & poetic lineage all take part in shifting throughlines of recombinant forms, as a spiral spirals back on itself, changed over time. Early on, here, Cavuto writes “There is not enough wood for coffins. There is wood enough for a boat.” a Pyre then is a boat, a burning that is going somewhere, not death-as-end but as an upward & outward movement into collectively shared air, an archeology of connection. “Kyger wrote that memory is a weird dimension carried around invisibly in the ‘mind’’ Cavuto writes, in one of those moments that feels like a key, “Writing, she said, gives history back to you.” But it is not only history that Cavuto is carrying forward in these poems, it is something more spatially complex, enlivened & embodied in the dance of the words, & in the vital breakdown of the words themselves. The poems in Pyre I-V enact their answer to the question ‘what essence is left us when no words are left,’ & leave us, after the ritual process, dazzled with the true sense that something is left, something important of resonance & remembrance, in the atomized language-space; the air around the dis-integrating morphemes shimmering on the page as dissipative, potentiate sparks. —Cody-Rose Clevidence

Michael Cavuto is a poet based in Brooklyn, New York. His books include Country Poems (Knife Fork Book, 2020) and Pyre (Spiral Editions, 2025). With the poets Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen, he publishes the Slow Poetry in America Newsletter. Along with Tessa Bolsover, he publishes hand-bound poetry books through auric press.

Pyre, Michael Cavuto. Illustrations by Astrid Terrazas. 52p, 8.5" x 6.75", hand sewn with red linen thread. Covers letterpressed on a 1963 Vandercook proof press with Strathmore Premium Grandee paper. Copy text and illustrations printed both offset and digitally on Mohawk felt paper in a first edition of 275. Printed, assembled, and bound in “Kingston, New York,” the unceded and currently occupied lands of the Haudenosaunee, Mohican, Munsee Lenape, and Schaghticoke. With thanks to Vladimir Nahitchevansky and the various friends who helped assemble.

Tongue Touching the Other / Dil Ötekine Değince is a result of a research project on the Turkish language and its exchanges mainly with Arabic, Farsi and Kurdish. Through language, it aims to follow a common, transnational history and how modern national identities affected our knowledge of that history, and sense of belonging. However, as much as commons, varied forms and dimensions of marginalization are also deeply embedded in our history, culture, language, and as a result, in our everyday lives and in our collective unconsciousness. This book is an attempt to rethink the social, economic & cultural contexts of identity and the concept of “othering” and reflect on inherited motives of imperial and colonial structures, racism, colourism, classism & gender roles.

The book was created through a multi-layered process involving research, conversations, and design. The research phase explored academic texts, etymology, and visual culture to uncover narratives of commons and division. Conversations with 18 people across 9 countries—based on trust and anonymity—provided personal, subjective insights, recorded between July 2022 and January 2025. These dialogues were transcribed and, rather than presented chronologically, were edited into a montage alongside archival visuals and texts, shaping the book's four-chapter narrative:

Yabancı / Stranger / یابان
Misafir / Guest / مسافر
Eğitim / Education
Temsil / Representation / تمثيل