Lovebug

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling.

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.

Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong

Introduced by So Mayer
Afterword by Sarah Shin

The book Posting brings together a selection of feminist posters from Dutch archives to reflect on posting as an activist strategy, holding the potential to create counter-publics to mainstream culture and to fight against the erasure, exoticization, or tokenism of bodies and experiences that deviate from normative preconceptions.

As is the case for many professions, in the history of Dutch graphic design the absence of women, non-binary, queer, Black designers is striking. This doesn’t only point back to systematic processes of exclusion in the first place, but also to the biases at play regarding whose work is remembered and archived. While efforts have been made to add forgotten names to the existing canon, the many posters, flyers and other printed matter shelved in queer and feminist archives remind us to question the notion of single authorship altogether and instead study graphic design as a decisively collaborative and transdisciplinary practice, which is especially true for community-led and volunteer-based projects.

The posters featured in this book point to this rich landscape of feminist organizing, and were found at the International Institute of Social History and the International Archive for the Women’s Movement (IAV-Atria) in Amsterdam.

A collection (montage) of biographies and themes written by Jairus Banaji.
Wanting Something Completely Different discusses a range of political figures, themes, directors and writers in a series of brief, evocative descriptions ('vignettes') aimed at laying out a vision of a modern, cosmopolitan left that can think creatively about the world we live in. The political figures include both thinkers and activists from a wide range of backgrounds—from Frantz Fanon and the Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani to the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The themes range equally widely from the death of Walter Benjamin (reconstructed here from a remarkable documentary on the same theme) and the slaying of Pasolini to the work of British Marxist Perry Anderson, or the corrupt nature of India's leading corporate groups, or the outstanding contributions of Italian and U.S. Black feminists to feminist theory. And under the rubrics which discuss film and literature, there is the same striving for diversity and depth.

The vignettes collected in this Rab-Rab book first circulated on Facebook over some seven years or more and are reproduced here with a new introduction and extensive bibliographical references and notes.

Jairus Banaji is a historian and revolutionary Marxist activist. He received the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2011. His academic work has ranged widely across sources and languages, with major books on Late Antiquity and commercial capitalism as well as numerous papers and articles.

Johanna Drucker's The Century of Artists' Books is the seminal full-length study of the development of artists' books as a twentieth-century art form. By situating artists' books within the context of mainstream developments in the visual arts, Drucker raises critical and theoretical issues as well as providing a historical overview of the medium. Within its pages, she explores more than two hundred individual books in relation to their structure, form, and conceptualization. This latest edition of the book features a new preface by Drucker and includes an introduction by New York Times senior art critic Holland Cotter.

Five Stars: Selected Amazon Reviews, Volume 4 by Kevin Killian, selected by Ted Rees & David Buuck, with introductory words from Kevin edited by Dodie Bellamy. Curated from the over 2500 reviews that William Hall has lovingly archived, this latest edition showcases Kevin’s incomparable mix of wit and sincerity, pleasure and playfulness, his deep love of popular culture, and his unique critical voice.

This comprehensive publication is the result of a two-year collaboration within the platform Islands of Kinship, which interconnects six mid-scale visual art institutions across diverse regions in Europe (Prague, Bratislava, Bitola/Skopje, Cologne, Helsinki, Riga). The project represents an innovative model of collaboration addressing issues of inclusion, kinship and togetherness, democratic exchange, and the ethics, emotions, and practical solutions needed for fair and sustainable institutional operations.

In this publication a unique group of curators, artists, and experts involved in their respective organizations as inclusion and sustainability coordinators reflect on social and environmental responsibility in artistic and institutional practice from theoretical, political, and practical perspectives. Through essays, mind maps, codes of conduct, and lists of principles and recommendations, they address issues such as accessibility, just representation, and participation. Apart from these contributions, the publication also features artistic projects that were presented in exhibitions and public programs in the framework of Islands of Kinship.

Texts by Ieva Astahovska, Jana Brsakoska, Veronika Čechová, Kris Dittel, Daniel Grúň, Michal Klodner, Eloïse Bonneviot & Anne de Boer, Jussi Koitela, Karina Kottová, Diana Lelonek, Nikola Ludlová, Aneta Rostkowska, Paulina Seyfried, Katarína Slezáková, Taka Taka, James Taylor-Foster, Fran Trento, Ivana Vaseva.