Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

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

Cover of When Technology Was Female: Histories of Construction and Deconstruction, 1917-1989

If I Can't Dance

When Technology Was Female: Histories of Construction and Deconstruction, 1917-1989

Susanne Altmann

€22.00

Continuities and ruptures between the early Soviet (c.1917) and late state socialist (c.1980s) periods are examined through detailed discussions of a wide range of women’s artistic practices, including Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, Tina Bara, Sibylle Bergemann, Věra Chytilová, Natalia LL, Dora Maurer, the Erfurt Women Artists’ Group, Běla Kolářová, Evelyn Richter, Zorka Ságlová, and many others. Featuring over one hundred images of works ranging from costume sketches and stage maquettes, to photographs and film stills, the book offers a sweeping study of over seventy years of women’s artistic production and is meant for any reader engaged at the intersections of feminist and (post-)socialist art histories.

Graphic design: Experimental Jetset
Managing editor: Megan Hoetger
Series editor: Frédérique Bergholtz
Copy editor: Janet Grau

Published in 2024 ┊ 320 pages ┊ Language: English

recommendations

Cover of Maquillage as Meditation: Carmelo Bene and the Undead

If I Can't Dance

Maquillage as Meditation: Carmelo Bene and the Undead

Sara Giannini

Performance €20.00

Partly a script, partly a personal voyage into the psyche of diseducation, this book happens, has happened and will happen on the 31st of October in a place called ‘The Palace of Melancholy’. In this temporal and spatial loop, the figure of Italian actor, author, director, philosopher, and public persona Carmelo Bene is summoned to hopefully be dismissed once and for all. Bene is looked at by the author reluctantly and yet resolutely through inner voices of dissent, shame and rebellion. He is imagined in gatherings that didn’t happen and read through an epistemology of contradiction. In Giannini’s company and support, Snejanka Mihaylova, Jacopo Miliani, and Arnisa Zeqo probe the walls of the Palace, looking for an exit.

Cover of Black Revelry: In Honor of ‘The Sugar Shack’

If I Can't Dance

Black Revelry: In Honor of ‘The Sugar Shack’

Derrais Carter

An experiment in book making, which takes up the form of the LP record as a starting point for re-configuring the haptics of the printed book. Presented as a collection of unbound pages inside a gatefold record sleeve, the publication includes a pressed record, as well as written, visual and sonic contributions from scholars, poets, artists, choreographers and DJs.

Through the logic of the detail, each contributor imaginatively (re)produces Ernie Barnes’s iconic painting The Sugar Shack as an archive of personal histories and a universe of intergenerational connections. Held together as an album, it is a performance to be made at home, which invites readers/listeners to feel art’s histories and to be in them with their bodies.

d.a. carter with contributions by Taylor Renée Aldridge; Samiya Bashir; La Marr Jurelle Bruce; DJ Lynnée Denise, Jennifer Harge, Duane Lee Holland, Jr., William H. Mosley, III, Zoé Samudzi, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Melanie Stevens and Phillip B. Williams.

Cover of Writing Out Loud

If I Can't Dance

Writing Out Loud

Jon Mikel Euba

Writing Out Loud is a publication that brings together the transcriptions of eight lectures by the artist Jon Mikel Euba that were live translated from Spanish to English during the course Action unites, words divide (On praxis, an unstated theory) at the DAI. The lectures were delivered across the academic year 2014 – 2015 at the invitation of If I Can’t Dance. They sit within a larger writing-centred project by the artist that he has pursued for almost a decade, through which he aims to define a form of praxis that could evolve into a technical theory.

Cover of Devenir minéral | L’éditeur du dimanche

Avarie Publishing

Devenir minéral | L’éditeur du dimanche

Giuliana Prucca

Essays €38.00

Echoing Jean Dubuffet's idea that thought must arise from material in artistic practice, Giuliana Prucca, through this essay, reinterprets a moment in the history of 20th-century art using materials such as stone, sand, earth, and dust. She employs the mineral to illustrate that the creative act would be a trace of the body's disappearance. The loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject objectify themselves in the image. In other words, art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, ultimately leaving nothing but an image.

Drawing from the influential figure of Antonin Artaud, she weaves critical and poetic connections between the texts and works of various artists, writers, and thinkers, ranging from Jean Dubuffet to Jan Fabre and Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein and Gutaï, Joë Bousquet to Camille Bryen and Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard to Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille to Aby Warburg.

The material is not merely a thematic pretext; it is an active and explosive catapult that questions the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated art history. Following Ponge's example, Prucca applies the principles of poetry to criticism, starting from Artaud's material, the most undisciplined of poet-artist-thinkers of the modern era. This results in a critically inventive approach dangerously suited to its object, celebrating an anti-critique. The chosen writing materials, stonepaper for the cover and recycled paper for the pages, is consistent, intending to give the impression of being covered in dust.

The essay disrupts traditional reading habits and shatters the conservatism of art criticism by inhabiting writing space differently, presenting a physically engaging interaction. This is an essay in the literal sense, an experience where form never contradicts content, urging readers to take the risk of thinking deeply and embracing a new rhythm. A complex and challenging design invites them to choose different reading options, ultimately treating criticism as one would poetry.

Giuliana Prucca [Paris | Berlin] is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She is the founder and art director of the publishing house AVARIE, specialising in contemporary art books that explore the relationships between text and image, body and space.

Graphic design, art direction by Vito Raimondi

Cover of Movement Notation

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König

Movement Notation

Noa Eshkol, Abraham Wachmann

Eshkol and Wachmann focused dance on its basic element: the movement of the human body. They treated the different parts of the body as separate instruments, similar to the musical instruments of an orchestra–each with its own rules for the movements to be performed. This new edition of the 1958 publication is supplemented by contributions from Eshkol’s companions and further archive material, which contextualizes and supplements the history of the 'EWMN’s‘ origins and embeds it in contemporary discourses on dance and movement. 

The publication is published in the context of the performance 'Pause: The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group‘ at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (August 2023), as well as the exhibition 'Noa Eshkol: No Time to Dance‘ at the Georg Kolbe Museum (15 March–25 August 2024). The new edition was developed together with the 'Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation‘.

Cover of Tongue Touching The Other

Cutt Press

Tongue Touching The Other

Bilge Emir

Tongue Touching the Other / Dil Ötekine Değince is a result of a research project on the Turkish language and its exchanges mainly with Arabic, Farsi and Kurdish. Through language, it aims to follow a common, transnational history and how modern national identities affected our knowledge of that history, and sense of belonging. However, as much as commons, varied forms and dimensions of marginalization are also deeply embedded in our history, culture, language, and as a result, in our everyday lives and in our collective unconsciousness. This book is an attempt to rethink the social, economic & cultural contexts of identity and the concept of “othering” and reflect on inherited motives of imperial and colonial structures, racism, colourism, classism & gender roles.

The book was created through a multi-layered process involving research, conversations, and design. The research phase explored academic texts, etymology, and visual culture to uncover narratives of commons and division. Conversations with 18 people across 9 countries—based on trust and anonymity—provided personal, subjective insights, recorded between July 2022 and January 2025. These dialogues were transcribed and, rather than presented chronologically, were edited into a montage alongside archival visuals and texts, shaping the book's four-chapter narrative:

Yabancı / Stranger / یابان
Misafir / Guest / مسافر
Eğitim / Education
Temsil / Representation / تمثيل

Cover of Choquer le monde à mort – Elles sont de sortie – Pascal Doury – Bruno Richard

Editions L'Amazone

Choquer le monde à mort – Elles sont de sortie – Pascal Doury – Bruno Richard

Bruno Richard, Pascal Doury and 1 more

"Elles sont de sortie" is the title of a periodic publication launched in 1977 by Pascal Doury and Bruno Richard. The plural and feminine form of the enigmatic phrase "elles sont de sortie," chosen almost by chance, announces a protean work and often collective experience. From its origins to the most recent iterations, including Doury's more confidential individual trajectory after "Elles sont de sortie," Choquer le Monde à Mort traces five decades of a corpus of nearly three hundred publications. It addresses some of the most emblematic editorial works, as well as others that remain unpublished, alongside ambitious and sometimes scandalous exhibitions, few of which are documented.

This work is the result of several years of research, enriched by numerous firsthand interviews, and unfolds in three parts: a chronology and analysis of a singular and marginal artistic history, works and iconographic documents, and an anthology bibliography. Together, these elements reveal the complexity of an editorial object with porous boundaries, both in its forms and its contents, oscillating between graphzine, artist book, poetry collection, and personal journal. Its ramifications, status, and legacy retrospectively reveal the importance of a discreet yet seminal work.

Thus, "Elles Sont de Sortie" also serves as an opportunity to revisit the paths of two aesthetic and provocative artists, deeply devoted to their art and true free spirits in an art world often too narrow for them. It immerses us in a plethora of works that are intimate and raw, as well as subtle and refined, all in service of a project that, in Doury's words, aims to "shock the world to death."

Edited by Tiphanie Blanc, Jonas Delaborde, Anna Lejemmetel.
Contribution by Anna Lejemmetel.

Cover of Time Suspended

Netwerk Aalst

Time Suspended

Herman Asselberghs, Els Opsomer and 1 more

Photography €25.00

The first thing a traveller has to learn in Palestine is to wait: the Palestinians have been doing it for more than 50 years. In the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank, they have been waiting for permission to return ever since the Nabka, the catastrophe of 1948, when they were driven out of their houses and away from their land.

In November 2002, the Brussels-based authors of Time Suspended went on a ten-day visit to Palestine. Like most, everything they knew of the country came from media. They discovered a complex and intricate society that could not be summed up in a soundbite. The many full-bleed images of Palestine presented here (many of them depict a somewhat deserted, laid-back, sleepy, place) challenge years of media-tainted observation and truly give insight into the daily lives of its inhabitants.