Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

Search books by title, author, publisher, keywords...

Cover of Reverse Hallucinations in The Archipelago

K. Verlag

Reverse Hallucinations in The Archipelago

Anna-Sophie Springer ed.

€19.00

Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago unfolds an itinerant encounter with nineteenth-century European naturalists in the Malay world, where the theory of evolution by natural selection emerged alongside less celebrated concerns about mass extinction and climate change; by re-considering the reverse hallucinatory condition of colonial science in the tropics—how scientists learned to not see what was manifestly present—the reader-as-exhibition-viewer may exhume from the remains of this will to knowledge an ethical conviction of particular relevance for confronting forms of neocolonization in the Anthropocene. Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago reflects on the changing role of colonial natural history collections in the current ecological crisis called the Anthropocene. The volume features an essay, a science fiction graphic novella, photographs, interviews, and more.

Contributors: Akademi Drone Indonesia, George Beccaloni, Iwank Celenk, Lucy Davis, Fred Langford Edwards, Christina Leigh Geros, Matthias Glaubrecht, Geraldine Juarez, Radjawali Irendra, James Russell, Mark von Schlegell, SLAVE PIANOS, Anna-Sophie Springer Zenzi Suhadi, Paulo Tavares, Rachel Thompson, Etienne Turpin, Satrio Wicaksono

Language: English

recommendations

Cover of Inserts in Real Time: Performance Work 2000–2023

K. Verlag

Inserts in Real Time: Performance Work 2000–2023

Dora Garcia

Performance €35.00

'Inserts in Real Time' is the first monograph on the performance work developed by artist Dora García over the past twenty years. The book contains a conversation between the artist and curator Joanna Zielińska; a selection of her performance scripts; her performances to date, listed, illustrated, described, and contextualized; and three newly commissioned texts – by art historian Sven Lütticken, performance theorist Bojana Cvejić, and Dora García. The publication is co-published with M HKA, Antwerp, and accompanies Dora García’s exhibition 'She Has Many Names'.

Cover of Play-White

K. Verlag

Play-White

Bianca Baldi

The racist term "play-white" comes from the apartheid era, when it connoted a black or mixed race person who lived as a white person: “So and so is a play-white.” South African artist Bianca Baldi draws from studies of biomimicry and her own family history, as well as literary precedents—such as Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929)—to reflect on racial passing and the instability of racial identities. Play-White alternates between layers of visualization and moments of discretion in order to explore questions of presence and evasion beyond their representation in black and white.

With contributions by Bianca Baldi, Mika Conradie, Shoniqua Roach, Amy Watson, and others; design by Katharina Tauer & Wolfgang Hückel in collaboration with K. Verlag.

Published 2021

Cover of Hack 'N' Slash

La Mousse Éditions

Hack 'N' Slash

Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel

Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel réalise au printemps 2020 la série de dessins Hack’n’slash.

Ces collages sont faits à partir d’aplats de couleur autocollants Letrafilm Color/Tint Overlay, que l’on pourrait traduire par Couleur/Teinte Superposition, permettant ainsi de nommer l’importance des jeux de profondeur qui s’y trouvent. 

L’artiste se calque là-dessus et joue alors avec la confrontation entre le hack: détournement et réemploi d’outils techniques (trames numériques, encres d’imprimante, dessin manuel) – et le slash: le fait de trancher/juxtaposer les formes venant de différentes dimensions pour composer ses dessins.

Chaque édition a une couverture unique sérigraphiée sur du papier Pantone Letraset par l’Atelier PPP et un texte critique-fiction de Mia Brion.

Cover of Derek Jarman's Garden: 30th Anniversary Edition

Timber Press

Derek Jarman's Garden: 30th Anniversary Edition

Derek Jarman

Ecology €30.00

From artist and activist Derek Jaman, a visual and narrative exploration of his singular, paradisiacal garden, set in a most inhospitable place. Derek Jarman, a passionate gardener from childhood, combined his painter's eye, horticultural expertise, and ecological convictions to produce a landscape that combined flints, shells, and driftwood to create a unique paradise. 

This book is Derek Jarman's own record of how this garden evolved, from its earliest beginnings in 1986 to 1994, the last year of his life. More than 150 photographs taken by his friend and photographer Howard Sooley capture the garden at all its different stages at every season. For both gardeners and admirers of this extraordinary man, this 30th anniversary edition, with a foreword by Jamaica Kincaid, marks three decades of the book as a gardening classic, and the ongoing impact of Jarman's transformative garden—proof of the garden space as one of ideas, philosophy, and myth—more than just a place of retreat.

Cover of Protoplasmic Flow

Samara Editions

Protoplasmic Flow

Jenna Sutela

Ecology €27.00

One of artist Jenna Sutela's regular collaborators, Physarum polycephalum, is often referred to as a natural computer. This yellow, ‘many-headed’ slime mold is an ancient, decentralized, autonomous organism that processes data without a nervous system, operating via communities of coordinated nuclei that demonstrate advanced spatial intelligence. If the slime mold cannot find the resources it needs, it hibernates until better conditions arise; theoretically, it is immortal. Over the years, Sutela has, for example, ingested the slime mold in her performances as a form of artificial intelligence, letting its hive-like behavior program her own.

Sutela's work for Samara reactivates this line of work, delivering co-existence with the slime mold to people's homes in the form of a dried sample of Physarum polycephalum as well as related performative instructions. Inside the box, the audience receives everything necessary to grow slime mold at home, and witness the behaviour of this fascinating organism. With the set of performative instructions, Jenna Sutela proposes the ways of co-existing and engaging with Physarum polycephalum.

Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living media, such as Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria and the “many-headed” slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela's work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Moderna Museet, and Serpentine Galleries. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-21.

Protoplasmic Flow contains everything required to activate the slime mold in a location of your choosing.

Duration: take all the time that you need
Language: Instructions are in English and Italian.

Cover of Flesh Idol

Doyenne

Flesh Idol

Flora Yin-Wong

Part historical and folkloric research, part auto-fiction, FLESH IDOL draws from a solitary journey through the Holy Mountains last winter to find meaning in suffering. A parallel search for internal solace, consideration of the voluntary abandonment of the body on this plane, and respect of the holy men who achieved it. 

Delving into the fog-covered terrain of Yamagata Prefecture, the book documents the author’s passage taken in order to pay homage to the monks of Sokushinbutsu - the now outlawed ritual practice of self-mummification in the Japanese mountain religion of Shugendō. 

As the second title to come from Doyenne founder and artist Flora Yin Wong, the new book - first conceived at the start of the year and released to coincide with the end of 2025 - is an abstract retelling of a personal journey, mytho-historical facts, their geographical locations and local lore under the domain of the ascetic religious sect.

Cover of Sleigh Ride

Bored Wolves

Sleigh Ride

Joe Fletcher, Mikołaj Moskal

Fiction €20.00

In Sleigh Ride, a kinetically wondrous prose tale from poet Joe Fletcher, a father and his convalescing son plunge in carpentered, stallion-drawn sleigh slashing through lush forest, advancing through a sequence of diorama-like settings. The books ten chapters are interspersed with gouache collages by Kraków artist Mikołaj Moskal (REMMUS), rooted and riverine, functioning as curtains swept aside to reveal each chapter of Fletcher’s exhilarating nocturne.

There was a sleigh: jet black and gleaming.

The long steel runners curved at their termini like arabesques of ice. It was too dark to clearly discern the design on its side, but it was intricate, ornate, suggestive of cuneiform and the minarets of Cairo. Two orange lanterns mounted above the driver’s chair were each encircled by a cloud of gnats and moths. Draped in fabulously embroidered saddlecloths, Ajax and Hector stomped the earth.

Given that the only exit from the cellar was the door, hardly wider and taller than a man, I marveled at how father could have extracted his creation from his smithy and pointed it at the forest. But I said nothing as I climbed unaided onto the purple velvet couch.