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Cover of Reading / Feeling

If I Can't Dance

Reading / Feeling

Frédérique Bergholtz ed. , Tanja Baudoin ed.

€20.00

Reading / Feeling examines affect, a term that delineates a field where the personal and political meet in sensory movements between bodies. A pre-emotional experience, affect constitutes the social and economic relationships that make up the fabric of society. Reading / Feeling considers the meaning of affect in theory and artistic practice through texts by theoreticians, artists, and curators read in If I Can’t Dance’s Reading Groups in Amsterdam, Toronto, and Sheffield as part of the programme for Edition IV – Affect (2010–12). It also includes three new essays, short statements by Reading Group members, and artist pages.

Contributors: Sara Ahmed, Rhea Anastas, Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Lone Bertelsen, Gregg Bordowitz, Judith Butler, Jeremiah Day, Gilles Deleuze, Lucien Febvre, Simone Forti, Adam Frank, Andrea Fraser, Félix Guattari, Michael Hardt, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Jutta Koether, Glenn Ligon, Brian Massumi & Mary Zournazi, Helen Molesworth, Andrew Murphie, Sina Najafi & David Serlin, George Orwell, Emily Roysdon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Baruch Spinoza, Susan Sontag, Jan Verwoert; it also includes: essays by Tanja Baudoin, Emma Cocker, Jacob Korczynski; contributions by Reading Group members Stephen Bowler, Alison J Carr, Belen Cerezo, Jon Davies, Anik Fournier, Victoria Gray, Linda Kemp, Wjm Kok, Janice McNab, Gabrielle Moser, Cecilia Paldino, Andrew James Patterson, Hester Reeve, Julie Swalloa, cheyanne turions, Vivian Ziherl; and artist pages by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy.

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Cover of When Technology Was Female: Histories of Construction and Deconstruction, 1917-1989

If I Can't Dance

When Technology Was Female: Histories of Construction and Deconstruction, 1917-1989

Susanne Altmann

Continuities and ruptures between the early Soviet (c.1917) and late state socialist (c.1980s) periods are examined through detailed discussions of a wide range of women’s artistic practices, including Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Tina Bara, Sibylle Bergemann, Věra Chytilová, Natalia LL, Dora Maurer, the Erfurt Women Artists’ Group, Běla Kolářová, Evelyn Richter, Zorka Ságlová, and many others. Featuring over one hundred images of works ranging from costume sketches and stage maquettes, to photographs and film stills, the book offers a sweeping study of over seventy years of women’s artistic production and is meant for any reader engaged at the intersections of feminist and (post-)socialist art histories.

Graphic design: Experimental Jetset
Managing editor: Megan Hoetger
Series editor: Frédérique Bergholtz
Copy editor: Janet Grau

Cover of Black Revelry: In Honor of ‘The Sugar Shack’

If I Can't Dance

Black Revelry: In Honor of ‘The Sugar Shack’

Derrais Carter

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs.

Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

d.a. carter with contributions by Taylor Renée Aldridge; Samiya Bashir; La Marr Jurelle Bruce; DJ Lynnée Denise, Jennifer Harge, Duane Lee Holland, Jr., William H. Mosley, III, Zoé Samudzi, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Melanie Stevens and Phillip B. Williams.

Cover of Writing Out Loud

If I Can't Dance

Writing Out Loud

Jon Mikel Euba

Writing Out Loud is a publication that brings together the transcriptions of eight lectures by the artist Jon Mikel Euba that were live translated from Spanish to English during the course Action unites, words divide (On praxis, an unstated theory) at the DAI. The lectures were delivered across the academic year 2014 – 2015 at the invitation of If I Can’t Dance. They sit within a larger writing-centred project by the artist that he has pursued for almost a decade, through which he aims to define a form of praxis that could evolve into a technical theory.

Cover of Maquillage as Meditation: Carmelo Bene and the Undead

If I Can't Dance

Maquillage as Meditation: Carmelo Bene and the Undead

Sara Giannini

Performance €20.00

Partly a script, partly a personal voyage into the psyche of diseducation, this book happens, has happened and will happen on the 31st of October in a place called ‘The Palace of Melancholy’. In this temporal and spatial loop, the figure of Italian actor, author, director, philosopher, and public persona Carmelo Bene is summoned to hopefully be dismissed once and for all. Bene is looked at by the author reluctantly and yet resolutely through inner voices of dissent, shame and rebellion. He is imagined in gatherings that didn’t happen and read through an epistemology of contradiction. In Giannini’s company and support, Snejanka Mihaylova, Jacopo Miliani, and Arnisa Zeqo probe the walls of the Palace, looking for an exit.

Cover of Stories of Wounds and Wonder

If I Can't Dance

Stories of Wounds and Wonder

Nuraini Juliastuti

This experimental children’s book narrates cross-species practices of survival across the Indonesian archipelago, centring the perspectives of local animals such as endangered monkeys, cosmopolitan rats, migrant sparrows and fugitive dogs. Written in the form of a play, its six episodes ground the readers in the animals’ struggles and aspirations as they go about their daily lives and face the consequences of postcolonial erasure, ecological destruction and capitalist expansion. While the stories unfold, their interconnected existences become an archive of uncertainties, where the fate of many different creatures, humans included, is inseparable from each other.

As a script for intergenerational transmission, the book thoughtfully combines dialogues, songs and drawings, with contextualising essays and extensive notations. Through these different modes of reading, children and adults alike will learn about cross-species solidarity and rebellious movements, but also about disappearing Indigenous cosmologies, and the brave women who wove cloths around the mountains in eco-political resistance.

Cover of Second Sex War

Paraguay Press

Second Sex War

Sidsel Meineche hansen, Robert Leckie

Monograph €12.00

Stemming from a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, this monographic catalogue offers a range of perspectives on urgent issues around gender, sexuality and labour in the digital age.

This book orbits “Second Sex War”, a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen addressing political and ethical questions arising from the use of digital bodies in contemporary visual culture and the means of production and distribution for these commodities. Realising that the same avatars are used across the pornographic, gaming and cultural industries, she investigates the working conditions and relationships that structure these fields. Through numerous essays and conversations, Second Sex War, the book, emphasises her collaborations with various practitioners (animators, musicians, writers) and the way they have inflected her practice. Media theorist Helen Hester (author of the Xenofeminist manifesto) reflects on the limitations of the porn industry and the use of female avatars. Artists collective Radclyffe Hall talks to photographer Phyllis Christopher about early lesbian erotica magazine in the 1980s. Linda Stupart compiles quotes by Sara AhmedKathy Acker and Ursula K. Le Guin to consider what is radical sex today.  Artist Hannah Black's contribution, which opens the publication, reads like a manifesto for artists being crushed under the weight of current political circumstances. 

Edited by Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Robert Leckie.

Texts by Robert Leckie, Hannah Black, Helen Hester, Phyllis Christopher & Radclyffe Hall, Linda Stupart, Josefine Wikström. Entretiens with Helena Vilalta, James B Stringer, Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) by Sidsel Meineche Hansen.

Cover of Initiales #05 — Andrea Fraser

École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon

Initiales #05 — Andrea Fraser

Claire Moulène, Emmanuel Tibloux

Periodicals €15.00

Le cinquième numéro de la revue d'art et de recherche « rétro-prospective » est consacré à l'artiste et performeuse Andrea Fraser, figure clé de l'art des années 1990 et 2000 et du courant de la « critique institutionnelle » (une monographie complétée par une grande enquête sur l'espace critique réalisée auprès d'une cinquantaine d'artistes, critiques et philosophes internationaux).

Avec contributions de Kader Attia, Eva Barto, Sophie Bonnet-Pourpet, Marie de Brugerolle, Gregory Buchert, Daniel Buren, Marie Canet, Gregory Castéra, Inès Champey, Thierry Chancogne, Claire Fontaine, François Cusset, Judith Deschamps, Paul Devautour, Philippe Durand, Joao Enxuto & Erica Love, Andrea Fraser, Nicolas Frespech, Dora García, Romain Grateau, Emmanuel Guez, Thomas Hirschhorn, Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quirós, Béatrice Josse, Franck Larcade, Ju Huyn Lee, Sven Lütticken, Fabrice Mabime, Bartomeu Mari, Chus Martínez, Gwenael Morin, Claire Moulène, Jean-Luc Moulène, Yan Moulier Boutang, Vincent Normand, François Pain, Gerald Petit, Anne Querrien, Thierry Raspail, Sinziana Ravini, Delphine Reist & Laurent Faulon, Christophe de Rohan Chabot, Phillippe Roux, Jean-Baptiste Sauvage, Thomas Schlesser, Ida Soulard, Fabien Steichen, Michel Surya, Emmanuel Tibloux, Vier 5, Ulf Wuggenig, Italo Zuffi.

Cover of Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths: Revisiting the Black Dada Reader

DABA

Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths: Revisiting the Black Dada Reader

Adam Pendleton

Essays €40.00

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.