The Marketplace of Art / Commentary

Published in collaboration with Harun Farocki Institut, this book unpacks About Narration [Erzählen], a 1975 essay film directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert, this book focuses on About Narration [Erzählen] directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.
It includes the film's script alongside the historical documents related to its making and Farocki's previously unpublished theoretical and programmatic essay on the film. The publication also includes a retrospective essay by Ingemo Engström on the film's political and artistic background.

Volker Pantenburg's detailed elaboration of the conditions of its making, alongside Boynik and Holert's concluding remarks, further contextualizes the film. The interview with Cathy Porter on Larisa Reisner, a heroine of About Narration, gives an overview of the life of a militant writer who inspired Engström and Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert.

A children's book by Johannes van de Weert, a veteran of the punk underground (Rondos, The Ex, Red Rat, Raket).

The Adventures of Red Rat and BIGGO – The Present is a remake of Bram konijn en Piet de muis [Bram the Rabbit and Piet the Mouse], a 1982 children's book by Johannes van de Weert, a veteran of the Dutch punk underground who played with Rondos and The Ex, and who was the force behind Red Rat and Raket editions.
The Present is a 2010 remake telling the story of a bully pig who terrifies a poor rat on a daily basis. After a while, the rat falls ill with fear and has to stay in bed. The lonely, evil pig has no one to play with and becomes depressed. The pig gives the rat a present—a bunch of beautiful flowers—and all is well. Now the two can play together.
The 2010 remake, featuring different characters and intended for a North Korean audience, was never published. The 2025 English version opens with an introduction by Van de Weert, telling a bizarre story of a failed political career and an absurd vaudeville class struggle behind the seemingly harmless educational children's book.

Johannes van de Weert was a cartoonist active in the Rotterdam punk and squatter's movements of the 1980s. He was a singer with the punk band De Rondos and he started self-publishing small comic booklets in the late 1970s. He created his character "Redrat" for the fanzine Raket in 1980. The character soon became an icon for the squatter's movement.

Edited by Michael Corris, the expanded edition of In the Belly of the Beast: Art & Language New York Project 1972-1978 is a survey of the tumultuous years of the political Conceptualism in the mid-seventies New York.

Artists have always experimented with politics, either by organizing themselves or uniting in support of a broader political movement. Today, "activist art" is taught in universities, supported by foundations, and featured in museums and international exhibitions. Is this the only possible way?

In the Belly of the Beast tells a different story, of the work of politically engaged artists and the conflicts they experienced. It is the history of artists wishing to continue working within the boundaries of the artworld and those who were intent on establishing new ideological and class relationships with activists to build a political party.

During the 1970s in New York, the Art & Language collective pioneered institutional critique; published a Marxist-influenced journal; agitated against racism and sexism in museums; challenged the cultural imperialism of international exhibitions; and forged a framework for a socialist organization of artists. This new edition includes previously unpublished documents illuminating the contradictions and disputes that lay at the center of the organization and practices of Art & Language and left-wing groups, such as the Anti-Imperialist Cultural Union and the Artists' Meeting for Cultural Change, mobilizing artists in New York at the time.

The new and expanded edition of In the Belly of the Beast features an extensive interview with Michael Corris, who annotated a collection of previously unavailable documents from the period, including manuscripts, pamphlets, transcripts, and letters.

Art & Language is the name of a group of English artists who choose to work collectively, and the title of a magazine that they founded in 1968. Proposing a critical analysis of the relations between art, society, and politics, Art & Language marks, even in its name, the importance of the “textual turning point” in the 1960s.

Since 1976, Art & Language's project has continued, through Mel Ramsden and Michael Baldwin, with the literary and theoretical collaboration of Charles Harrison. Working with very varied mediums, from painting to rock, these co-founders of Conceptual art remain, even today, attached to observing the consequences of what they themselves call the “depressing collapse of modernism.”

The English translation of Zdanevich's Dadaist autobiographical lecture in Paris in 1922, where he adopts the name Iliazda. In this entertaining lecture, the achievements of the avant-garde is presented as a combination of zaum, polymorphous sexuality, aleatory forms and scatological interpretation of culture.

The second volume of the bie bao series presents a eulogy entitled Iliazda at the Birthday Party, a pseudo-autobiographical lecture delivered by Ilya Zdanevich in Paris in 1922. It reports on Zdanevich's artistic and political adventures up until then. Along with an autobiography full of self-admiration, in this lecture Zdanevich gives an interpretation of his zaum dramas inspired by Freudianism, and humorously describes a colourful image of the Russian microcosm in Montparnasse. 

Additionally, this second volume also includes Iliazd's letter to Ardengo Soffici from 1964, where one can read, in the most unambiguous terms, about Zdanevich's positions against war, imperialism, and all forms of nationalism. Subtitled 50 Years of Russian Futurism, the letter to Soffici presents us with an altogether new Zdanevich—a "fellow traveller" in both leftist and avant-garde circles. As well as the extended introduction and extensive annotations, the texts are further contextualised with Johanna Drucker's visual presentation of the birth of the Iliazd cult.

The bie bao series will include eight publications, covering many layers of Zdanevich's rich theoretical and artistic output. Each volume consists of a bio-bibliographical introduction, a commentary, a translation with annotations, and artistic intervention.

Iliazd (Ilya Zdanevich, 1894-1975) was a Russian poet, designer, typographer, theoretician, art critic, and publisher, close to the avant-garde circles and one of the promoters of Futurism in Russia, author of a poetic work, drama written in zaum abstract poetic trans-sense or "transrational" language, and novels.

Extensive survey of the politically outward-looking Conceptualism emerging from Art & Language in the UK. Especially considering its critique of the norms of Modernist art practices in contemporary art, particularly practices of art education.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood, Biting the Hand: Traces of Resistance in the Art & Language diaspora is about a dissident formation of artists active in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.

The book tells the story of artists engaging with a critique of then-contemporary modernist art education, who have embarked on a series of theoretical investigations which became increasingly politicised under the pressures of an evolving social crisis. Increased racism, unemployment and attacks on the organised working class all raised questions about how a critical art might respond.

By the late 1970s, these radical artists, mostly in the orbit of the Art & Language group, were producing posters and leaflets for a wide range of left-wing causes, as well as analyses of the politics of art and design education and the role of cultural ideology in maintaining consensus. In the 1980s, as Thatcherism tightened its grip, those involved went their separate ways into areas as diverse as media work, trade unionism, health and education.

Biting the Hand has three parts: a retrospective introduction setting the formation in its historical context, and two annotated documentary sections presenting examples of the work as both text and image, written and edited by Paul Wood.

It also includes a foreword by Sezgin Boynik, publisher, and an afterword by Ann Stephen, curator and art historian, further expanding on the book's subject.

For many years Paul Wood worked for the Art History Department of the Open University. His publications from that period include Conceptual Art (2000), Western Art and the Wider World (2013), and the four-volume anthology Art in Theory (1990-2020), co-edited with Charles Harrison and others.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood.
Foreword by Sezgin Boynik; afterword by Ann Stephen.

Ian Burn has been described as many things: an activist, a trade-unionist, a journalist, an art critic, a curator and an art historian—or, as he once described himself in a moment of self-deprecating alienation, ‘an ex-conceptual artist’. Born in Geelong in 1939, Burn studied painting in Melbourne and went on to live and work in London and New York. Burn moved back to Australia in 1977 and passed away in 1993 at the age of 53. Burn sought to grapple with how art history intersects and engages with contemporary art and political debate, arguing for a decentred view of the world. 

His legacy is international and can be seen in retrospective exhibitions as recent as 2022, and his work remains a key touchstone in art history. Edited by Burn’s friend, frequent collaborator and eminent art historian, Dr Ann Stephen, this volume brings together 49 pieces of Burn’s own agile and expansive writings alongside a vast collection of his artworks. The collection concludes with reflections on Burn’s life and work from prominent figures and past collaborators in the form of memorial lectures.

Ian Burn: COLLECTED WRITINGS 1966–1993 is edited by Ann Stephen and designed by Robert Milne, with contributions by Art & Language, Adrian Piper, Paul Wood, Allan Sekula, and Mel Ramsden.

Look at Hazards, Look at Losses developed out of a series of conversations, exchanges and visits between kuda.org, Anthony Iles and Marina Vishmidt over 2015-2017 through which different approaches to common problems of cultural production in early-21st century Europe and its peripheries were debated and conceptually probed. Setting out from Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of ‘the aesthetic relations of production’ these discussions proceeded to explore problems bearing upon organisation in small groups in the field of culture, philosophical idealism and materialism, poetry, error and crisis.

The anthology assembled reflects these concerns through engagement with the writing of others who have helped orientate us through these discussions. The book which is the outcome consists of seven original contributions by poets and theorists which attempt to move toward new political interventions in culture and beyond ‘crisis as a way of life’.

The second work in Belladonna* Collaborative’s Germinal Texts series, Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun is a book of twenty-six interlocking “essays with characters” that explores the mid-2000s financial “crisis” through the movements and daily lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters located in the Bay Area.

In Positions, Hejinian plays the bricoleur, bringing together whatever’s needed in her to approach to the subject—whether the paratactic tactics of poetry, scholarship’s critical patchwork, or dramatis personae set in time that evokes but frustrates narrative.

Earlier iterations of essays 4, 14, and 17 appeared in Belladonna*’s Elders Series #5, edited by Jennifer Scappettone with work by Etel Adnan, Lyn Hejinian, and Jennifer Scappettone.

‘Palestine is everywhere because it names a political subject of radical universal emancipation,’ writes teacher and writer Nasser Abourahme. In Palestine is everywhere, writers, thinkers, poets and artists map the Palestinian struggle for freedom and its global resonances.

Vital dispatches from Gaza, essays, poems, protest chronicles, images and letters from prison reflect upon resistance, solidarity and the right to self-determination. Amid a world-historical moment marked by unknowability and loss, this collection offers essential reading for those interested in Palestinian liberation.

This collection is edited by Skye Arundhati Thomas, with contributions from Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Nasser Abourahme, Amal Al-Nakhala, Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq, Maisara Baroud, Ahmed Bassiouny, Houria Bouteldja, Anees Ghanima, Sahar Khalifeh, Laleh Khalili, Lujayn, Mira Mattar, Lina Meruane, Mohammed Mhawish, Nahil Mohana, Rahul Rao, Nasser Rabah, Adam Rouhana, Ahmad Zaghmouri.

Co-published by TBA21.

All royalties from this project will be donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and The Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN).

Isabelle Graw reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus.

By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships." 
— Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Isabelle Graw has written the Elective Affinities for the twenty-first century, as a feminist novel and a dysfunctional family portrait set in the contemporary art world."
— Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder ofTexte zur Kunst in Berlin.

Publié en 2018 par Kayfa-ta (Égypte), Comment réparer : la maternité et ses fantômes propose une réflexion sur la maternité et ses représentations. Plusieurs fois réimprimé, ce livre jouit d’une très grande réputation dans le monde arabophone, notamment auprès des jeunes générations.Mobilisant différentes formes d’écriture (essai, récit, poème, journal) et des images photographiques tirées de sources diverses (archives personnelles, presse, portraits vernaculaires, etc.), la trame du livre s’articule autour des relations de l’autrice avec sa mère, sa grand-mère et ses deux fils. Déjouant les clichés et les formes narratives établies, Iman Mersal décèle les complexes réseaux symboliques dans lesquels s’inscrivent la filiation et la maternité, depuis la grossesse jusqu’à l’éducation des enfants, et ce de génération en génération.À l’écoute des silences de la mémoire, explorant ses labyrinthes, le livre porte un regard critique sur la violence et le sentiment de culpabilité qui traversent le corps maternel, notamment dans ses rapports au langage, au travail ou aux institutions. Iman Mersal élabore ainsi une sorte d’art poétique : la réparation dont parle le titre passe par l’écriture, elle est donc d’ordre créatif ; mais l’écriture s’insère dans un quotidien qui lui fait obstacle, qui met au défi la possibilité même d’écrire dès qu’on devient mère. Comment réparer : la maternité et ses fantômes est en ce sens un formidable texte de résistance, un geste d’émancipation.

Née en 1966 en Égypte, Iman Mersal est poète et professeur associé de littérature arabe à l’université d’Alberta, au Canada. Ses récents livres sont des écrits très originaux qui mêlent recherche académique et réflexions intimes sur une grande variété de sujets, dont la plupart ont trait à son identité de femme et d’artiste. Une anthologie de ses poèmes – Des choses m’ont échappé (2018) – et un récit – Sur les traces d’Enayat Zayyat (2021) – ont été traduits en français par Richard Jacquemond pour les éditions Actes Sud