Wedding Loop

We begin with the image of an idea in ruin. A small field of assumptions disassembled. A question no longer in need of its mark. A thought not sure where it began. It starts from the body and language. The debris of these three words, crumbling already at and, did not break apart but congealed the separations once made. We start from a research (project) undone and just beginning. 

Typesetting and design: Will Holder
Produced by: A.pass

Chloe Chignell works across choreography and publication taking the body as the central problem, question and location of the research. She invests in writing as a body building practice, examining the ways in which language makes us up.

Homophone Dictionary was originally a file that is compiled by the now 96-year-old former schoolteacher Susan Nixon. She has build up many collections throughout her life, almost all of them exist out of objects, except one: after her retirement she compiled a word document that by now exist out of almost 1000 homophones; two, or more words that you pronounce similar but have a different meaning, often the spelling is also different.

The document is structured as a dictionary and the homophones are illustrated with examples that are based on autobiographical information. The structure of Homophone Dictionary also refers to speech therapy exercises and concrete poetry.

“As a student nurse learning medical terminology, I became fascinated with understanding the roots of words. When I had a young family, words were a principal source of entertainment: it was not unusual for one of the children to slip from their chair at the dinner table and fetch a dictionary in order to settle a dispute or satisfy someone’s curiosity. Then I became a teacher and brought this love of words into the classroom. My habit of word collecting became the children’s habit – my pupils became ‘word-lovers’ and ‘list-makers.’

I casually collected homophones for years. When introducing homophones into the classroom, the kids found definitions dull; the typical reaction was, ‘Yes, but give me a sentence using the word!’ and this idea emerged: a book of sentences demonstrating the meanings of homophone pairs or sets.”

Offset print
20,4 × 12,4 cm
edition of 500

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 18th issue, “Recto Verso” is edited by Will Holder, and had its beginnings in prosody, the measure of language, geometry, and a notion of imagist transcription, even. A two-dimensional exercise, it turns out, on paper. Words were tuned out, in favour of the volume of values our bodies exchanged: “the historical and bodily movement of language amongst subjects.” Attentions turned—taking (the measure of) classes in body language: the non-verbal: the insinuated: the reverse-side of image: the backside, and, oddly: Oh no: we don’t speak about that—to the next page…

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, edited by Will Holder, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. This 13th issue of F.R.DAVID is edited with Riet Wijnen, and has its origins in her Registry of Pseudonyms, an online database which accounts for who is who and why who is who. ‘Inverted Commas’ follows ‘pseudonym’ through names, naming, bodies, brains, self, author, other, reader, labour.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises.

“With Love,” takes correspondence and calligraphy—or letter-writing—as model for information theory, and adaptive, cybernetic relations.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises.

This issue, "Spin Cycle", is concerned with captioning, commentary and description. Edited with Mike Sperlinger.

[Ahmed] is the quartet of Pat Thomas (piano), Joel Grip (double bass), Antonin Gerbal (drums) and Seymour Wright (alto saxophone). Since 2014, أحمد [Ahmed] have excavated and re-imagined the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, in an ever ongoing search for future music.

[Ahmed] – Writing (EXV01) gathers together the [Ahmed] ‘paper’ texts from the last decade: liner-notes; covers of the releases; and writing by the band members – Antonin and Joel have written two fresh ones for this book, Seymour’s have appeared alongside the records, and some of Pat’s come from a time (long) before [Ahmed]. “Together, the ideas-energy in these things gives a sense of what we have done, do, think together (and apart) in living music, how our different ways come together, and how, together, we learn through be-doing [Ahmed]… These texts are woven together (the etymology of text is from weave) through (and into) a rich fabric of enquiry. A collaborative weaving together of difference(s) to make a whole (thing).” (Seymour Wright)

Contributions by Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright, Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip, Robert Levin, James G. Spady, John Chantler, Edward George, Fred Moten

Edited by [Ahmed]
Series Editors: Stoffel Debuysere, Jef Lambrechts, Will Holder
Initiated by Stoffel Debuysere
Produced and designed by Will Holder [lps’ original design: Maja Larsson]

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. The 19th issue, “very good*” is edited with Paul Abbott. Like music, the issue’s “theme” is better off unaccounted for, and up in the air, like a flock of birds (creatures who feature heavily), circling around performance, listening bodies, given time, and loving relations.

The nineteenth issue of ‘F.R.DAVID’ is edited by Will Holder and Paula Abbott, and will serve as a reader for “We can still see the horizon (and it’s curved)”, a summer residency in Scotland led by the editors. It includes a surprising array of contributions from writer Jorge Luis Borges, journalist and writer Italo Calvino, composer Hugo Cole, literary critic and theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith, percussionist Milford Graves, philosopher Michel Serres, novelist and essayist Wilson Harris, poet Bernadette Mayer, composer and music theorist Harry Partch, pianist and poet Cecil Taylor, and several others.

Writing in Space, 1973-2019 gathers the writings of conceptual artist Lorraine O'Grady, who for over forty years has investigated the complicated relationship between text and image.

A firsthand account of O'Grady's wide-ranging practice, this volume contains statements, scripts, and previously unpublished notes charting the development of her performance work and conceptual photography; her art and music criticism that appeared in the Village Voice and Artforum; critical and theoretical essays on art and culture, including her classic "Olympia's Maid"; and interviews in which O'Grady maps, expands, and complicates the intellectual terrain of her work. She examines issues ranging from black female subjectivity to diaspora and race and representation in contemporary art, exploring both their personal and their institutional implications.

O'Grady's writings—introduced in this collection by critic and curator Aruna D'Souza—offer a unique window into her artistic and intellectual evolution while consistently plumbing the political possibilities of art.

Edited by Aruna D'Souza

A workbook by Flatform on displacement, conceived and curated by Giuliana Prucca.

The book is published under four different covers and with four different layouts, randomly distributed.

Founded in 2006 and based in Berlin and Milan, Flatform is a video and media arts collective, at the border between experimental cinema and contemporary art, that creates time-based works, film events, and installations, most of which revolve around landscape and biopolitics. Distributed by Light Cone in Paris and by Video Data Bank in Chicago, works by Flatform have competed in major film festivals including Cannes, Rotterdam, Venice, Toronto, and have been shown worldwide in art venues such as Centre Pompidou, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hirshhorn Museum, MAXXI Museum, Eye Filmmuseum, Wexner Center for the Arts and Garage Center for the Arts.

Co-published by Light Cone and Avarie.

You wake up in the footwell of a mid-sized hatchback somewhere on a highway in outer Bangkok. You compile neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, whilst your work emails pile up without ever being read. You quit your job. You launch a banal start-up. You grieve for a past relationship. You stare endlessly at the waves coming in from a beach in Koh Pha Ngan. You vape intensely. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror.

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which ‘you’ are the main character. Through text and image – autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction – you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product.

i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced whilst living in Thai ‘party hostels’. Although these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.

With a Coda by Hana K. Ohnewehr, commissioned by Yu’an Huang

The first monograph on the work of artist Tony Cokes, creating a visual cartography of a body of moving image work that spans twenty years.

Tony Cokes's video works are eviscerating critiques and affective art works, bringing together color theory, sound, music, and texts, and quoting a polyphony of voices including Aretha Franklin, Mark Fisher, David Bowie, Public Enemy, and Donald Trump. Combining political and social commentary with cultural theory and a critique of capitalism, Cokes's works viscerally confront the social condition, particularly the prejudices and threats suffered by black subjects. This book is the first monograph on his practice, creating a visual cartography of a body of work that spans twenty years.

It features four critical pathways into Cokes's decades-long practice, with essays contributed by notable academics, and conversations between Cokes and artist Kerry Tribe. Cokes's work deals with mediation and distribution, and the book itself becomes another conduit for the dissemination of theory, critique, and counter-narrative—a process that Cokes so powerfully engages in as an artist.

This book accompanies Cokes's solo exhibition, If UR Reading This It's 2 Late: Vol. 1–3, across three international art institutions: Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University; and ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels.