Troubling the Stage – The Choreographic Work of Marlene Monteiro Freitas

A complete survey of the cast, forged, and fabricated metal sculptures made by Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen since 2017.

The artist's practice addresses the industrial complex of virtual and robotic bodies and their relationship to labor in tech, pornography and gaming. While some sculptures were conceived as individual pieces, others were created with digital counterparts within installations that typically include CGI animation, documentary video, drawing and prints.

By presenting the metal works as stand-alone pieces, this book adheres to Meineche Hansen's concern with the material means of production, highlighting their concrete yet elusive nature. Several pieces in the publication are accompanied by poems written by artist Diego Marcon in response to the works. As an artist's project and an archival document, the publication echoes the tradition of documentary photography devoted to sculpture.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen (born 1981 in Denmark, lives and works in London) is a Danish artist. She produces exhibitions, interdisciplinary seminars and publications that foreground the body and its industrial complex, in what she refers to as a "techno-somatic variant of institutional critique". Meineche Hansen questions the body in the field of industrial representations: robotic or virtual bodies, and their relationship with the working world of industries of gaming, pornography, and new technologies. Her research-led practice has taken the form of woodcut prints, sculptures and CGI animations, often made by combining her own low-tech manual craft with outsourced, skilled digital labour.

Edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.
Poems by Diego Marcon.

The publication is the first institutional monograph on the multimedia practice of artist and director Ali Cherri. It aims to highlight the constellation of ideas, themes, and formal concerns running through his most recent, highly significant projects.

Edited by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, with Bianca Stoppani, this book provides an overview of the artist's output over the past three years, teasing out both new strands for interpretation and formal links between his films, videos, sculptures, drawings, and installations.

Texts by: Cecilia Alemani, Erika Balsom, Étienne Bernard, Leonardo Bigazzi, Ali Cherri, Lorenzo Giusti, Stefanie Hessler, Priyesh Mistry, Alessandro Rabottini, Stefan Tarnowski.

Video and visual artist Ali Cherri (born 1976 in Beirut, lives and works in Paris and Beirut) received a BA in graphic design from the American University in Beirut in 2000, and an MA in performing arts from DasArts, Amsterdam, in 2005. His current project looks at the place of the archaeological object in the construction of historical narratives.

Antonio Obá: Rituals of Care traces the practice of the Brazilian artist since 2016, offering a broad survey of his recent work, dwelling on the recurring motifs and iconographic sources that feed the complex imagery of his painting. Extensively illustrated, the book returns the richness of Obá's paintings, with enlargements on some of the details woven into the pictorial texture that, in addition to showing his masterful technique, make certain elements of his visual vocabulary stand out.

The conversation between Andrea Bellini and Antonio Obá that opens the book offers the opportunity to learn, through the artist's voice, about the key passages of his research, and to examine his diverse cultural references—from the Baroque of Minas Gerais to traditional Chinese painting, from Rembrandt to the Catholic ex-votos—until we discover the Obá's civic vocation, of painting as a spiritual practice.

The two essays commissioned for the occasion analyze the complexity of these layered signifiers. Lorraine Mendes's essay "Every Boy Is a King" offers an in-depth analysis of Obá's religious syncretism. It suggests an interpretation of its layered symbols, particularly the sankofa and the deity Exú, both of which pay tribute to the artist's West African roots. Above and beyond the specific cultural contexts of this iconography, the author emphasizes the universal value of Obá's work, its evocative, transformative, dynamic power, which—like music or dance—knows no national boundaries or barriers.

Larry Ossei-Mensah's essay "Embodiment: The Art of Antonio Obá" investigates the complex cultural legacy that is intertwined with the artist's practice, connected to his Afro-Brazilian roots, to the social and political realities of the Black diaspora, and to Christian, Candomblé, and Umbanda traditions. In addition to examining the context in which Obá's work is rooted, the author situates it within a galaxy of artists who have focused on questions of identity, often using their own bodies as tools of social and cultural critique.

Completing the book is a chronology, compiled by Sara De Chiara, tracing the artist's formative years and exhibition history, accompanied by rich documentary materials.

Published on the occasion of Antonio Obá: Rituals of Care, the first mid-career survey in Europe dedicated to the Brazilian artist, curated by Andrea Bellini, at the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, in 2025.

Antonio Obá (born 1983 in Ceilândia, Brazil) lives and works in Brasília. His multifaceted practice encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and performance. His œuvre interrogates and subverts historical representations, reappropriating spiritual practices and stigmas of racism. Obá endeavors to reclaim his African heritage in a societal framework that has historically sought to dilute Black culture. His works therefore confront the violence inflicted over centuries upon African-Brazilian traditions and communities with new narratives.

Across objects, writing, sound and choreography, British artist Cally Spooner addresses the manners in which specific technological and financial conditions shape and organize life. This volume surveys her artistic output of the last five years.

Sweat Shame Etc. includes a lecture by Spooner along newly commissioned essays by Laura McLean Ferris, Pierre Bal-Blanc, and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti. A 2018 series of drawings on paper, from which the monograph takes its name, features hastily sketched figures that take care of their bodies while shedding clothes, socks, limbs, and torsos. Though their heads are scratched out, they remain unexpectedly determined and unperturbed.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at the Swiss Institute, New York, in 2018-2019.

Cally Spooner (born 1983 in Ascot, UK, lives and works in London and Turin) is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings.

Edited by Alison Coplan and Laura McLean-Ferris.
Texts by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, Laura McLean-Ferris, Cally Spooner.

Hardscapes / Here documents and brings together two exhibition projects by artists Nina Canell and Maria Hassabi. Produced on the occasion of the exhibitions of the same name curated by Samuele Piazza at the OGR Torino, the publication consists of two graphically specular books that merge into a single volume. Essays, unpublished materials and a rich set of photographic materials form the driving force behind two visual narratives that offer new keys to understanding the research of the two artists.

Hassabi's live installation Here calls on visitors to share space and spend time with six performers portrayed in a decelerated rhythmic choreography within a sculptural environment. In constant motion, the dancers contribute to a situation of shifting presence, demonstrating the contestable nature of the "here and now." Immobility and slowing down are thus used both as techniques and as subjects of representation: the performing bodies oscillate between dance and sculpture, subject and object, living body and static image.

Canell's Hardscapes combines two works that focus on the concepts of circulation and transformation as well as on unexpected forms of coexistence. Energy Budget (2017–18), a video that alternates between two subjects: a basement in which a leopard snail crawls over an electrical panel, and the gradual shifting of the frame away from "dragon gates"—portal-like openings in huge buildings on the Hong Kong waterfront. Muscle Memory (16 Tonnes) (2020–21) is a floor sculpture, decomposed and transformed by the density of moving bodies, which literally crumbles under the soles of passing visitors.

In addition to texts by the curator, the publication includes essays by Felicia Leu and Laura Preston, along with a conversation by Maria Hassabi and Nina Canell with Lorenzo Giusti.

Published on the occasion of the epoymous exhibitions at OGR Torino in 2022.

Edited by Samuele Piazza.
Texts by Lorenzo Giusti, Felicia F. Leu, Samuele Piazza, Laura Preston.

Greer Lankton’s iconic and startling doll sculptures as we have never seen them before: through her own eyes. 

Magic Hour Press is proud to present the first monograph on the trans visionary artist Greer Lankton (1958–96), whose lifelike doll sculptures shocked 1980s New York. Lankton’s dolls, which she began making as a child and produced obsessively until her death at age 38, were a means to explore her fraught relationship with the human body. In the book’s 100 photographs, all shot by Lankton herself, these figures take on a life of their own, kvetching at a party, strolling along a beach, or lounging on a stoop in the East Village. Among this extraordinary cast of oddballs—usually femme, often freakish, always radiating a glamorous confidence—we find characters of Lankton’s own invention alongside well-known icons such as Divine, Coco Chanel, Andy Warhol and even Lankton herself. 

Born in 1958 to a Presbyterian minister in Michigan, Greer Lankton moved to New York in 1978 and became a rising star of the downtown scene. There, her deviant elegance was immortalized in photographs by Peter Hujar, David Armstrong, and Lankton’s close friend Nan Goldin, who described her as “one of the luminaries of the East Village renaissance: beautiful, glamorous, wild and hysterically funny.” 

Edited by Francis Schichtel, Jordan Weitzman and Nan Goldin
Text by Hilton Als

Issue 05, Flow, moves like water through rupture and release. Guided by the I-Ching, we drift into synesthetic rope rituals in Germany, spiral through Taijiquan in Canada, sway in sacred dances under Ethiopian stars, and lose ourselves in the rapture of Krishna Vandana. Here, flow is both a political current and a state of surrender. From Gabriel Semerene's meditations on faith and protest across Gaza and Brazil to Nerda Khara's navigation of societal constraints in Pakistan, these pieces explore how movement becomes both resistance and surrender. Tejaswini Loundo ponders flow states in Indian classical philosophy while Erika Mattio finds unity in the sacred dances of Lalibela. Shanny Rann discovers spirit in Taijiquan's slow power, Antje Brockmüller maps synesthesia through rope flow, and Anna Chwialkowska questions ghosts’ choreography. Each piece paired with its own hexagram, creating a map of emergence and dissolution. Maria Harfouche's photography dissolves structure into motion where edges blur and time becomes fluid, capturing the moment when form gives way to flowing energy.

A Dance Mag is an independent magazine that looks at the world through the lens of dance. It transcends differences, distances, and disciplines to tell the stories of people from all over the world, who are dancing their lives and giving their bodies a voice. 

A transdisciplinary investigation and a choreographic performance, between Umeå and Oslo, about ecological grief, cultural panic, and a feeling of collapse.

How to Die – Inopiné is a performance and a practice. It thinks through, in an embodied manner, the prevailing contemporary moods of ecological grief, cultural panic, and collapse. As a performance in a theater or outdoors, an audience encounters five dancers who are constantly building, unbuilding, and rebuilding. Afterwards, stories are told around a bonfire. As a practice in the studio, school, or street, a group of dancers, artists, writers, and architects meet for a year of residencies between Oslo and Umeå. They host a working process and encounter external informants. The goal is to displace oneself into the unexpected. This publication, two years in the making, engages with the challenges of translating a choreographic process into the space of a book. It both documents the project's development as well as offering the reader-doer different modes of thinking-doing, from somatic practices to proposals for a curriculum. Experiments in writing, mapping, and moving are played with, all engaging with the question, "what is the future of displaced thinking?"

Published following the series of eponymous events held in Umeå, Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Reykjavik in 2019-2020.

Contributions by Harald Becharie, Mia Habib, Jassem Hindi, Asher Lev, Marie Kraft Selze, Namik Mačkić, Ingeborg Olerud, Anna Pehrsson, Ashkan Sepahvand, Nina Wollny.

The Brotherhood fait suite à La Mariée et Bonne nuit Cendrillon qui avait provoqué une onde de choc lors de sa première à Avignon où Carolina Bianchi amenait des réflexions sur la performance et la théâtralité, sur un lit d'histoires de viols brutaux et de meurtres de femmes. 

Dans ce deuxième chapitre de la Trilogie des chiennes, Carolina Bianchi se penche sur la complexité de certains « pactes de masculinité », notamment sur les origines de la fraternité entre les hommes, mettant en lumière les codes mutuels violents qui contribuent à normaliser et perpétuer le viol et la violence sexuelle à travers leur lexique. Carolina Bianchi utilise les principes du théâtre pour articuler des voies possibles à cette discussion, créant des liens forts entre la représentation et le traumatisme réel, les structures de pouvoir dans l'art et la poésie radicale, les origines de la misogynie et une sexualité en crise. La structure de cette réflexion se révèle être un piège, affaiblissant l'auteurité de Bianchi et la transformant en un personnage qui subit les conséquences d'avoir scruté cette « fraternité » de si près. 

Texte portugais (Brésil) traduit par Thomas Resendes. 

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The Brotherhood follows La Mariée and Bonne nuit Cendrillon, which caused a shockwave when it premiered in Avignon, where Carolina Bianchi explored reflections on performance and theatricality against a backdrop of stories of brutal rapes and murders of women.

In this second chapter of the Trilogie des chiennes, Carolina Bianchi examines the complexity of certain “pacts of masculinity,” particularly the origins of male brotherhood, highlighting the violent codes of conduct that contribute to normalizing and perpetuating rape and sexual violence through their lexicon. Carolina Bianchi uses the principles of theater to articulate possible avenues for this discussion, creating strong links between representation and real trauma, power structures in art and radical poetry, the origins of misogyny, and a sexuality in crisis. The structure of this reflection turns out to be a trap, undermining Bianchi’s authority and transforming her into a character who suffers the consequences of having scrutinized this “brotherhood” so closely. 

Translated by Thomas Resendes.  

Livre d’images sans images by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen borrows its title from a book by H.C. Andersen, also referred to as The Moon Chronicler. The book follows a conversation between a painter and the Moon, where the Moon describes to the painter what she sees on her journey around the world every evening, telling the painter to paint what she describes. “This conversation, as in the now obsolete meaning of the word (‘a place where one lives or dwells’), was the starting point for our work. Using the weather report as dramaturgy, (‘the moon did not show up every evening, sometimes a cloud came in between’), we have created and collected materials from our conversations in the form of recordings, text, voice, drawings, references, found images, loose connections, inspirations and imaginations, in the order they came to us. They are at the same time sources and traces, material and support for new imaginations or events to come.” The work consists of three different media: vinyl, paper and live performance. 

Mette Edvardsen is a choreographer and performer eager to explore the performing arts as a practice and situation, also in relation to other media such as books and writing. This work is in collaboration with her daughter, Iben Edvardsen.

Published by Xing & Varamo Press
XONG collection – artist records XX10 (2023)
First edition, September 2023
Recorded and edited by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen
Format white 12’ vinyl LP in cardboard sleeve
Released in a numbered edition of 300 copies, including collector’s edition of 25 copies, each accompanied by a unique poster hand drawn with black marker by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen, 59,4 x 84 cm, folded, signed by the artists