Exhibition catalogue of filmmaker, visual artist, and writer Pedro Neves Marques's solo project "Vampires in Space" at the Portuguese Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022.

"In space it's always night." A family of vampires travels through space, carrying life to a faraway planet. Alone, they recall their past, offering an open-ended narrative about the role of fiction in our lives, with a special care for transgender experiences.

This book includes an interview, film scripts and poetry by Neves Marques, curatorial texts by João Mourão, Luís Silva, alongside visual documentation and other contributions by Manuela Moscoso and Filipa Ramos.

The work of Pedro Neves Marques (born 1984 in Lisbon, Portugal) combines anthropological research, cinema, publishing, poetic and fictional writing. Their hybrid aesthetic, that blends science fiction and documentary realism is influenced by the history of feminist and queer sciences, and projects us into futures that question the control of our bodies, our desires and the world around us beyond the register of dystopia. In doing so, they explore how we might transform our imaginaries of gender, new technologies, ecology and postcolonial issues.

A visual and poetic investigation of the enigmatic figure of the "Middleman", combining short punchlines and full-page illustrations, which are wryly reminiscent of Kafka's fictional world. The publication comes with a cardboard puppet, to be screwed and assembled.

Who is the Middleman? A viewer? An author who mediates between the world of ideas and the material world by creating drawings, sculptures, and texts? A simplified and symbolic puppet that can be moved by various forces?

In his latest book, artist Honza Zamojski makes an illustrative and poetic attempt to describe the Middlemen, their everyday life, and the realities that surround them. The book's short punchlines mark the rhythm of the Middelmen's life and their movements in the illustrations, which are wryly reminiscent of Kafka's fictional world.

Produced by the International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC) in Ljubljana and realized on the occasion of the exhibition Middleman in 2023, the publication comes with a Middleman cardboard puppet, literally the "hero taken from the book and put aside," a  playful object to be screwed together, assembled, and dealt with, sometimes feeling a bit guilty.

First monograph of the Franco-Iranian artist.

This monographic catalogue looks back over the first 15 years of work by Iranian artist Elika Hedayat through more than 110 reproductions. Two of these are on a 1:1 scale, and a detailed set offers a comparison of the dimensions of the works in relation to each other.

Françoise Docquiert introduces the issues at stake in her practice with an essay, complemented by an interview with Joana P.R. Neves.

"Elika is a Parisian-Iranian artist. This cultural blend  is  slightly  ironic  though  very  significant, as it nourishes her artistic work and practice. Inspired by her childhood, her life, and the violence in her native country, she makes films, videos, and drawings always filled with beauty, scathing humour and cruelty." - Annette Messager

Born 1979 in Tehran, Elika Hedayat lives and works between Paris and Tehran. Arriving in France in 2004, she was admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in Annette Messager's studio, from wich she graduated with the Jury's congratulations in 2008.

For her works, Elika Hedyat often uses testimonies and experimental documentaries stage in a dreamlike and imaginary universe. Her stories are contemporary and her characters are real. All of her works revisits historical references, transferring them to the field of personnal experience, mainly using the various possibilities of her repertoire as a narrative document and memory retrieval tool. Reality, memory and imagination come together in a personal story under different forms : drawing, video, documentary, painting and performance. 

Text by Françoise Docquiert.
Interview with Elika Hedayat by Joana P. R. Neves.

A collection of essays and a critical attempt to rethink and improve the relationship between artists and art institutions and to give visibility to the precarious, complex, and very often existential reality of the art workers.

"Beneath the glamorous surface of the art world—the openings and dinner parties, the record-breaking auction prices, the media attention—lies a reality that is precarious, complex, and very often existential: only a tiny minority of artists support themselves with their work and fewer still manage to do so throughout their lives. This book tells those other stories, for example of artistic practices grounded in performance, research, and political activism. These practices are not necessarily oriented toward producing marketable objects. Thousands of artists around the world, at all latitudes, struggle every day under precarious work conditions, in the absence of shared rules, and with a debilitating sense of insecurity caused not only by the threat of global pandemics but also by war and political oppression, resurgent nuclear threat, competition for dwindling resources, and perhaps most pressing of all, the climate crisis.The economic challenge of supporting oneself as an artist immediately turns into an ethical one." — Andrea Bellini

An experiment in listening to frequencies beyond human sensorial range, Silent Whale Letters is a long-distance correspondence intimately attuned to the infravoice of a blue whale, a document held silent in the sound archive, and other so-called "silent" subjects.

As part of an ongoing collaboration between Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini the letters consider how the silent document shifts the logic of the archive, figuring listening as a practice of preservation.

As the letters attune to the ocean loud with communications across time and space, the authors write about the movement of matter, of energies, wavelengths, currents and how the ocean preserves as it disperses what it carries. How does working with what we cannot see, or even hear within range, shift the parameters of attention? How does the energetic archival space of the ocean agitate and disrupt claims to knowledge, history, and power?

Moving through three years of call and response the book unfolds through "a joint meditation on the transformative potential of a note, a voice, carried from saltwater into the archive" (Rebecca Giggs).

They chart a process that is equally conceptual and intimate, theoretical and deeply personal, moving through discussions of (amniotic) undercurrents, call-and-response mechanisms, energetic wavelengths, oceanic and archival memory, mysterious scales, and the watery acoustic commons. 

Edited by Kate Briggs.
Contributions by Kate Briggs and Emma McCormick Goodhart.

A publication by artist and teacher-researcher Marie Preston on the alternative pedagogies developed in France during the 1970s-1990s in "open" schools working on the question of the relationship between co-creation and co-education.

The teaching teams at the heart of this book were convinced that, in order to break social reproduction, the school system was in dire need of transformation and they did it! The experiences discussed in this book constitute a truly fertile ground in terms of educational, relational and institutional inventions, and we have much to learn from them today. This is particularly true of cooperative and co-creative artistic practices which convey a true desire for and ways to implement social transformation, joint management, the emergence of collective creation and commons.

The work is built up around a back and forth between interviews and accounts from the participants of this story and contextual and analytical elements opening on co-creative artistic practices.

This book gathers an interview with Jean Foucambert, a discussion with Rolande and Raymond Millot (École Vitruve, Paris and La Villeneuve neighbourhood, Grenoble) and an unpublished text by André Virengue who was the headteacher of the Jacques-Prévert school in Villeneuve d'Ascq for over 20 years. A significant part of this work is dedicated to iconography, a crucial component of research as it enables the discovery of students' realisations as well as the publishing of school newspapers and other print works.

Modernism/Murderism brings together, for the first time in English, a forgotten debate on Modern Art that took place in the pages of India's Gujarati-language literary periodical Kumar between 1959 and 1964.

Published across various issues, the debate brings into conversation Pherozeshah Rustomji Mehta, a writer and art connoisseur from Karachi, and Jyoti Bhatt, a young artist who had just begun teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda. While Mehta chose to defend what he believed were the timeless and traditional values of art, Bhatt proposed that Modern Art was no stranger to these values and in fact had much in common with them.

Alongside the articles by Mehta and Bhatt, the publication also brings together responses to the debate from various readers who interjected in the "Readers Write" column of the periodical, as well as notes from Kumar's editor, Bachubhai Ravat, who informally acted as a mediator. Offering a vantage point from which to view the entry of Modernism and its affiliated discourses into the art practices of the region, this volume proposes itself as a reader to these histories and revisits this crucial moment.

Jyoti Bhatt (born Jyotindra Manshankar Bhatt in 1934) is an Indian artist best known for his modernist work in painting and printmaking and also his photographic documentation of rural Indian culture.

Pherozeshah Rustomji Mehta (1880-1971) was a writer and scholar from Karachi.

The restored and remastered vinyl reissue of a sound performance by American writer Kathy Acker and French noise/experimental band Nox, published in 1987, with a poster and a previously unpublished set of documents, letters, texts and photos.

Originally released in a long sold-out edition of 50 cassette tapes, Love, Emily (Acte 3) was the third and final album of Michel Henritzi's industrial label AKT Production. Recorded in a Paris studio in 1987, this 25-minute collage of spoken word and noise saturations intersects two radical voices from literature and experimental music of the time: American author Kathy Acker reading excerpts from her book My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Nox, mainstay of the French noise and industrial scene. Pulled from oblivion, restored and remastered for vinyl by Slow Moves, this archive gem crosses the clashing worlds of poetry and industrial music, melding Acker's thought-provoking words to absolute and inflexible industrial sounds. A lot of it is noise, but a lot of it is also play; research for a new mystique, generating unusual forms and unknown languages.

Published in a limited edition of 400 copies, this vinyl also comes with a long printed panel of previously unpublished photographs and letters from Kathy Acker, tracing the background exchanges that led to the collaboration between the groundbreaking writer, Henritzi and Nox, a poster of Kathy Acker with French translations and a download code featuring both music and extra archival material (interview and articles).

With Kathy Acker (voice), Gerome Nox (percussion, guitars, vocals), Mikhail H (guitars).

McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York's thriving queer rave scene, showing how raving to techno is an art and technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept, but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them.

Contents
1. Rave as Practice 
2. Xeno-euphoria 
3. Ketamine Femmunism 
4. Enlustment 
5. Resonant Abstraction 
6. Excessive Machine 

"How to write a book about raving as a practice that practices rave? From k-nights spent on Brooklyn's and Berlin's junkspace dance floors, McKenzie Wark abstracts a life practice of ressociation in a dance of autoconceptualization and allotheorization. In crossing toward the stranger's gift of 'letting go of ourselves as private property, ' Raving is nothing less than Wark's femmunist manifesto, her tractatus on techno's blackness, her treatise for a twenty-first-century trans ethics."—Kodwo Eshun

Zeros and Ones is an intelligent, provocative and accessible investigation of the intersection between women, feminism, machines and in particular, information technology. Arguing that the computer is rewriting the old conceptions of man and his world, it suggests that the telecoms revolution is also a sexual revolution which undermines the fundamental assumptions crucial to patriarchal culture.

Historical, contemporary and future developments in telecommunications and in IT are interwoven with the past, present and future of feminism, women and sexual difference, and a wealth of connections, parallels and affinities between machines and women are uncovered as a result.

Challenging the belief that man was ever in control of either his own agency, the planet, or his machines, this book argues it is seriously undermined by the new scientific paradigms emergent from theories of chaos, complexity and connectionism, all of which suggest that the old distinctions between man, woman, nature and technology need to be radically reassessed.

'My aim for Mother Reader has been to bring together examples of the best writing on motherhood of the last sixty years, writing that tells firsthand of the mother's experience.

Many of the writings in Mother Reader comment on and interpolate one another, in citations, in footnotes, in direct homage. As I was assembling this collection one text would lead to one another, treasure-hunt fashion, the clue provided by an acknowledgement or bibliography. And just as often the writing circles back.

In Mother Reader chapters are excerpted from autobiographies, memoirs, and novels; entries are lifted from diaries; essays and stories are culled from collections, anthologies, and periodicals. My project has been to assemble a compendium or sampler of these ''kindred spirit'' works on motherhood, so that readers, and especially mothers with limited time on their hands, can access in one volume the best literature on the subject and know where turn to continue reading." [Moyra Davey in the introduction]

Writings by Margaret Atwood, Susan Bee, Rosellen Brown, Myrel Chernick, Lydia Davis, Buchi Emeta, Annie Ernaux, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Griffin, Nancy Hutson, Mary Kelly, Jane Lazarre, Ursula Le Giun, Doris Lessing, Ellen McMahon, Margaret Mead, Vivian Montgomery, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Alicia Ostrker, Grace Paley, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Lynda Schor, Mira Schor, Dena Schottenkirk, Mona Simpson, Elizabeth Smart, Joan Snyder, Elke Solomon, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alice Walker, Joy Williams, Martha Wilson, Barbara Zucker.

The Loveliest Vowel Empties presents for the first time in English the collected poems of legendary Swiss Surrealist Meret Oppenheim, printed with facing-page originals in German and French.

Oppenheim's poetry, 49 poems written between 1933 and 1980, moves beyond Surrealism to inhabit a voice all her own, with imagery and sound that, as the Herald Tribune wrote, 'express witty and poetic responses to the surprises of life.' A key figure of the Paris art scene in the 1930s, Oppenheim moved in a circle that included Andér Breton, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Writing for the Village Voice about her work, Gary Indiana noted that 'the singularity of Meret Oppenheim's work is such that nothing seems dated... the range of the work and its quirky self-assurance are striking.' The publication of her collected poems coincides with a major retrospective exhibition of her artwork at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In what ways have women artists come together to investigate their own image? This publication delves into histories of feminist and queer collective practice, expanding on the various ways women claim agency of their identity, via collaborations that connect intergenerational and far-away friendships. Each chapter features artistic and theoretical case studies that discuss images produced by women artists, about women artists; proposing that to gaze upon someone represented with care and autonomy provides more affirmative ways to relate to ourselves. It discovers that to pay homage to overlooked knowledge of women artists builds a case for the artist as researcher. Only by engaging in both roles can we unveil what is not taught in the mainstream and inspire a more inclusive, generous future.

Each aspect of the book’s design is a collaborative endeavour, expanding the notion of individual authorship. It is with this sentiment that creating the publication became research in itself, via collaboration with both direct peers and an extended genealogy.

“Women Looking at Women Looking at Women” is designed by Marijn van der Leeuw, Esther Vane, India Scrimgeour, Hannah Williams and Annemarie Wadlow.

Annemarie Wadlow (1993, UK) is a research-led artist working between moving image, writing and photography. Her work explores the middle ground between image and imagination, questioning notions of inheritance, personal identity and belonging. She is the co-founder of Nice Flaps, an artist initiative that hosts experimental life drawing sessions.

This publication introduces the Katsura tree as a point of departure from which to map a rich ecology of relations and experiences with materials (recipes, exercises, and images) that accompany stories—fictional and “factual”—of a multi-sensorial experience of the fall season. 

The writing questions modern/colonial binaries like east and west, nature and culture, fact and fiction, higher and lower senses, and the human and non-human. It calls readers to not only exercise awareness of their environments but to imagine along with them. 

The Katsura tree is an elemental spirit of the Japanese landscape in the fall season. As the transformation of the Katsura’s colored leaves and their enchanting sweet scent changes the sensorial experience of their environment, they remind us of our connection to the seasons. The tree’s embeddedness in Japanese folklore and traditional storytelling leads us to a yokai supernatural spirit, legend, and gardener: Katsura-Otoko, or, in Chinese; Wu Gang. His efforts in pruning the Katsura tree on the moon to cause lunar cycles connects cosmology to ecology as a natural part of our earthly existence. The story’s premise serves as an inspiration and starting point for this book.

What does it mean to acknowledge one’s closeness to, enmeshment in or even kinship with the material world? And what does it mean to question family structures – the way they organise, coerce and make deviant certain lifeforms – and dwell in other possibilities of kin-making?

Not just a jolly rethinking of objects or a polyamorous romp through relationships, The Material Kinship Reader reckons with the extractavist histories of materials and the social relations that frame much of contemporary life.

Spanning fiction and theory, the collection of texts expand the idea of an artist’s book by bringing words into conversation with an aesthetic proposition. Clementine Edwards’ artwork is the visual weft to the book’s written net. From colonial conquest to climate collapse, The Material Kinship Reader tells toxic and tender stories of interdependence among all things sentient and insentient.

Including contributions by Sara Ahmed, Hana Pera Aoake, Roland Barthes, Joannie Baumgärtner, Heather Davis, Kris Dittel, Clementine Edwards, Ama Josephine B. Johnstone, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sophie Lewis, Steven Millhauser, Jena Myung, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Michelle Murphy, Ada M. Patterson, Kim TallBear and Michelle Tea

Drawing on his experience in the field of contemporary dance, Jeroen Peeters discusses principles, methods and practices that contribute to an understanding of dramaturgy as an experimental, collaborative practice and a material form of thinking.

Written from practice, this book reflects a particular history of collaboration and conversation with dance-makers such as Martin Nachbar, Meg Stuart, Vera Mantero, Sabina Holzer, Lisa Nelson, Jennifer Lacey, Chrysa Parkinson, deufert + plischke, Eleanor Bauer, Philipp Gehmacher and many others.

Phantasmal archaeology, unfolding material, literal and physical reading, crafting method, articulating process, witnessing and performing not-knowing, naming and ritual destruction, conceptual landscapes, symbolic waste, internal fictions and foreign objects – they may all play a role in creation and in exploring the unfamiliar in pursuit of making sense.

And then it got legs is an invitation to think along or against, to discuss those ideas with others or explore them in the studio, and eventually to imagine and devise one’s own methods of research, observation, reflection and creation.

Going Out explores the relationship between walking, listening, and soundmaking in the arts – from the first soundwalks and itinerant performances in the 1960s to today’s manifold ambulatory projects. The book consists of an extensive essay by Elena Biserna followed by an anthology of 51 historical and contemporary contributions in the form of documentation, essays, interviews, manifestos, scores, narratives and reflections.

Essay by Elena Biserna.

Contributions by Max Neuhaus, Willem de Ridder, William Levy, Collective Actions Group, David Helbich, Janet Cardiff, Jacek Smolicki, Carolyn Chen, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, Hildegard Westerkamp, Albert Mayr, Tim Ingold, Akio Suzuki, katrinem, Beatrice Ferrara & Leandro Pisano, Catherine Clover, AM Kanngieser, Gascia Ouzounian & Sarah Lappin, Ultra-red, Vivian Caccuri, Stefan Szczelkun, LIGNA, Edyta Jarząb, Oupa Sibeko, Brian Hioe, Brandon LaBelle, Adrian Piper, Andra McCartney & Sandra Gabriele, Amanda Gutiérrez, Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Stephanie Springgay, Carmen Papalia, Christine Sun Kim, Charles Eppley, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Viv Corringham, BNA-BBOT, Ella Parry-Davies & Ann, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Gwenola Wagon & Stéphane Degoutin, Eleni Ikoniadou, Justin Bennett, Christina Kubisch & Christoph Cox, RYBN, Alisa Oleva, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Anna Raimondo, Libby Harward.

In On the Inconvenience of Other People Lauren Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world. Berlant focuses on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced. Drawing on a range of sources, including Last Tango in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Claudia Rankine, Christopher Isherwood, Bhanu Kapil, the Occupy movement, and resistance to anti-Black state violence, Berlant poses inconvenience as an affective relation and considers how we might loosen our attachments in ways that allow us to build new forms of life. Collecting strategies for breaking apart a world in need of disturbing, the book's experiments in thought and writing cement Berlant's status as one of the most inventive and influential thinkers of our time.

The first monograph on the work of artist Tony Cokes, creating a visual cartography of a body of moving image work that spans twenty years.

Tony Cokes's video works are eviscerating critiques and affective art works, bringing together color theory, sound, music, and texts, and quoting a polyphony of voices including Aretha Franklin, Mark Fisher, David Bowie, Public Enemy, and Donald Trump. Combining political and social commentary with cultural theory and a critique of capitalism, Cokes's works viscerally confront the social condition, particularly the prejudices and threats suffered by black subjects. This book is the first monograph on his practice, creating a visual cartography of a body of work that spans twenty years.

It features four critical pathways into Cokes's decades-long practice, with essays contributed by notable academics, and conversations between Cokes and artist Kerry Tribe. Cokes's work deals with mediation and distribution, and the book itself becomes another conduit for the dissemination of theory, critique, and counter-narrative—a process that Cokes so powerfully engages in as an artist.

This book accompanies Cokes's solo exhibition, If UR Reading This It's 2 Late: Vol. 1–3, across three international art institutions: Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University; and ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels.

The collected life-work of an interdisciplinary writer, performer, and central figure in the Black Gay cultural arts and AIDS movements.

In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage, and a politics of liberation to weaves together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death. Influential to contemporary writers such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, and Melvin Dixon, Sacred Spells is Saint’s crucial legacy–five hundred incandescent pages of painful, lyric writing that exemplifies the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and LGBTQ activist movements worldwide, both historic and present.

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.

Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.

Saidiya Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is a scholar of African American literature and cultural history.

Preface by Maboula Soumahoro.

Translated from the English (American) by Maboula Soumahoro (original title: Lose Your Mother. A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).