The Carrier Bag of Recipes

"I spent some time looking for this quote in Moyra Davey’s Index Cards: “To do without people is for photography the most impossible of renunciation.” When I found it, I realized Davey was quoting “George Baker quoting Walter Benjamin.” Later on, I came upon the same quote again in Quinn Latimer’s Woman of Letters, where Latimer also talks about the way “critics adopt Davey’s unique literary style when writing about her work.” For writing to do without repeating the words of others is clearly an impossible renunciation.

Davey, who had internalized the critique of representation in the 1980s, describes the set of circumstances and coincidences that led her to photograph people in the subway after years of self- imposed restraint. For photography to do without people is not impossible, but merely hard and conceivably lonely. Until recently, Kristien Daem’s photographs mostly did without people. It took the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing obligations for her to feel the urge to photograph fellow artists. Daem has most often aimed the lens of her camera towards the quiet architecture of her native Belgium. She spent time researching and unearthing the unrealized works or forgotten projects of artists such as Fred Sandback. And when documenting the work of others, she tries to turn the task into a trade of her own."

The work of Iranian-Belgian artist Mashid Mohadjerin (°1976, Teheran) is an intricate tapestry of personal and collective memory, weaving together photography, text, video, and archival material to explore themes of displacement, resistance, and identity.

Family chronicles merge with momentous political events and are set against the background of a broader history of the MENA-region. Mohadjerin uncovers invisible nuances hidden beneath the extraordinary and the familiar.

In Riding in Silence & The Crying Dervish (2025), Mashid Mohadjerin draws from the depths of her family history, unraveling the echoes of migration, forced departures, and the quiet endurance of those caught between worlds. The book builds on her previous work, Freedom is Not Free (2021), where she explored the role of women in movements of resistance across the MENA region. However, in this latest series, she turns her gaze towards the intersection of masculinity, political ideology, and displacement, examining how historical forces shape personal narratives in ways both visible and unseen.

"At the tip of the hand" explores the nail salon as a space of labour and social exchange. The act of two women holding hands, applying polish, and waiting for it to dry is more than a beauty ritual. It is a moment of care, but also a reflection of the social expectations placed upon ‘cultivated’ bodies and the invisible work behind them. Beneath a flawlessly coated nail, unseen bodies persist—serving, tending, remaining out of sight.

Zoo Index Reader examines the relevance and effect that zoos have in shaping our gaze towards non-human animals and by extension ourselves/each other.

Through a mixture of visual research into zoological space—in the form of an A-Z glossary—and written contributions on the history of menageries, the confinement and privatization of land, pets, zoo architecture, the "naturalization" of animals, and the role of zoos and animals in the history of cinema, among many other things, this first volume asks: Do we need zoos? What does a meaningful coexistence with animals look like? Why have we decided to give a balloon to an elephant?

With Terezie Štindlová, jacob lindgren, A+E Collective, Chanelle Adams, John Berger, Andrea Branzi, David Hancocks, Eliot Haworth, Institute for Postnatural Studies, Suzanne van der Lingen, Angelo Renna, Laurel Schwulst, Richard Weller.

Designed by Terezie Štindlová

This publication is based on a project by Despina Vassiliadou that ran from 2015-16. It presents a collection of photographs taken during the period, accompanied by fictional short stories.

In Perpetuity is part of Ivey Wawn’s project of the same name. With contributions from those involved in the making of what would have been the live performance, it is an accumulation of thoughts, reflections and associated pieces of work that give some idea of what the work could, would, or may in the future come to be. 

In Perpetuity is an ongoing project that has taken a variety of forms, from publication, through video and into live performance.

Great is the Power of the Name considers the works of authors Elena Ferrante, Pauline Reáge, Karl Ove Knausgård, Colette and artist Lee Lozano. 

In 2016, when Anne-Mette had invited Signe to take on the role as editor of her text The Institute of Applied Speech, they both began reading Elena Ferrante's The Neapolitan Novels. They were specifically fascinated by the author’s use of pseudonym. Anne-Mette's Institute of Applied Speech was a tale of a fictive place, a pseudo-topos, and Elena Ferrante’s ideas about the pseudonym as a space for the writing itself was useful in thinking about fictive authorship. In a number of written interviews, Elena Ferrante unfolds the feminist perspective of her use of pseudonym. They were attracted by the idea that the author could avoid the biographical question; that she could disappear behind her own writing. 

To them, the artist Lee Lozano is the ghostly presence of hard-core moralist and humorous fuck-off art from another decade. During the course of her life, Lozano continuously reconfigured and gradually dissolved her own name, starting from Leonore Knaster ending up with E. Her work Boycott Women, in which she decides not to have any contact with women, expands the notion of feminist critique. 

Great is the Power of the Name publishes a readership interested in the position of the artist, and how it conditions the way we make art.

Once more, an astonishing issue of OEI – a thrilling, compelling, stimulating feast of ideas regarding publishing and the book: the perfect big companion to read and hug in bed while the virus spreads outside.

Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures, publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavors, artists, poets, writers, editors, theoreticians, curators, scholars, and art bookstores, OEI # 86–87 reflects upon the challenges, pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in different contexts and places in a time of far-reaching – economical, medial, political, social, technological – transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversity of practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form of art, a collective or micro-collective work with shared responsibilities, it is also a never-ending process of “crafting a variegated approach to how you create, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem around your efforts”, of trying to “build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms” (Temporary Services).

It is the conviction of OEI #86–87 that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of social spaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of the essays in the issue, “conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as well as making things public is not a pun – insofar as the artists/publishers encompass, beyond the book itself, its possible ‘lives’, imagining the different spaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate.” This is what Michael Warner has called “a public [as] poetic worldmaking”, implying “that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”

This is also, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can make publishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publications and publics. Indeed, with Michalis Pichler, it is tempting to say that in publishing as practice – perhaps more than in any other art field – “artists have been able to assert the aesthetic value of their own socio-politically informed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in cultural activities fully aligned with their political values.”

OEI #86–87 also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry from Canada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD (Öyvind Fahlström); Lars Fredrikson; Claude Royet-Journoud’s poetry magazines; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; Ållebergshändelser; OEI #79: edit/publish/distribute!; “det offentligas försvinnande” and many many other things. [publisher’s note]

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