Books
Books
in random order
Anxiety vol.1
Featuring poems and short stories by Coco Gordon Moore, Nate Lippens, Jimmy Cooper, Danielle Chelosky, Matthew Kinlin, and Thomas Moore, as well as an interview of Jack Skelley by Lydia Sviatoslavsky and photographs by David Catalano. Edited
sex and place vol 1
Adriano Wilfert Jensen, Andrea Zavala Folache
sex and place is a series of workshops and publications exploring score-based and semi-anonymous writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns.
Vol. 1 ‘preliminiaries’ is written by Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen. In the midst of (learning) child care, (unlearning) performance and (experimenting with) sex, the publication interweaves three registers of writing as analogies and interruptions of each other.
The ‘sex and place’ series is part Domestic Anarchism, a project devoted to coalition-building beyond biological, chosen, or national conceptions of family. Dance serves as a set of tools and knowledge that can be applied beyond “the spectacle” to collectively study, write, and move.
Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen are choreographers and they co-parent three-year-old Penélope Cleo. Andrea and Adriano use dance and choreography to think about the distribution of care and solidarity beyond ‘the family’, and in turn consider how such a distribution could inform their dance practice. Inevitably themes like sex, economy, gender, and class get activated. But also notions such as prefiguration, anarchism, clitoridian* thinking, zones of non-domination and coalition building. They see dance as a knowledge that can be applied to different practices. Some of these include: co-habitations, score based writing and dancing, self-organised study groups and publications, workshops and dance performances.
Archives on Show – Revoicing, Shapeshifting, Displacing – A Curatorial Glossary
Archives on Show brings the potential of reformulating the social and political relevance of archives by curatorial means into focus.
Based on the specific properties, faculties and methods of curation, the volume highlights those techniques and strategies that deal with archives not only to make their genesis and history apparent but also to open them up for the future. The 22 different ways of dealing with archives testify to the curatorial participation in (re)shaping the archival logic, structures and conditions. As process-oriented, collective and relational modes of producing meaning, these curatorial practices allow for the alteration, reconfiguration and mobilization of the laws, norms and narratives that the archive preserves as preconditions of its power.
The contributions to this volume by artists, curators and theorists demonstrate approaches that curatorially insist on building other relations between human and non-human archival participants. Each is using the book to create a curatorial constellation that generates and forms new connections between different times and spaces, narratives, disciplines and discourses. Configured as a glossary, the positions assembled in this volume exemplify curatorial methods with which to treat the archive as site and tool of collective, ongoing negotiations over its potential societal role and function.
Contributions by Heba Y. Amin, Talal Afifi, Eiman Hussein, Tamer El Said, Stefanie Schulte, Strathaus, Haytham El Wardany, Julie Ault, Kader Attia, Roger M. Buergel, Sophia Prinz, Yael Bartana, Rosi Braidotti, Kirsten Cooke, Ann Harezlak, Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, Octavian Esanu, Megan Hoetger, Carlos Kong, Iman Issa, Kayfa ta, Kapwani Kiwanga, Doreen Mende, Stefan Nowotny, Marion von Osten, pad.ma, Abdias Nascimento, Eran Schaerf, Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, Françoise Vergès.
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Pia Arke
Pia Arke, Ros Carter and 1 more
Pia Arke (1958–2007) was a Greenlandic Inuk and Danish artist, writer and photographer. She is known for her self-portraits and landscape photographs of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), as well as for her paintings, collages, performative film works and writing. Arke strove to make visible the silence that surrounded the colonial history and complex political and cultural relationship between Greenland and Denmark.
This publication accompanies the first international exhibitions of Arke’s work outside of Greenland and the Nordic countries, happening over the course of 2024 at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton (UK) and at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (DE). It reflects on Arke’s ideas and legacy in a wider international context and aims to demonstrate how the work she made and the ideas she expressed connect with current discourse and contemporary thinking.
Texts by Krist Gruijthuijsen, Woodrow Kernohan, Ros Carter, Alice Maude-Roxby, Mette Sandbye, Tiara Roxanne, Sofie Krogh Christensen, Nivi Christensen, Siri Paulsen, Trinh T. Minh-ha
First Drafts #2: Canonically Speaking
Canonically Speaking is the second title to appear on the First Drafts imprint, a zigzag in Kunstverein Publishing’s output that’s dedicated to publishing completed manuscripts that would otherwise, for an array of reasons, not see the light of day in this rough early form.
Central to Canonically Speaking is the idea that (female) life is an inherently surrealist experience. In this spirit, the ‘absurd’ is embraced as a means to speak out on themes such as self-image, spirituality, mental health and work. While slipping between poetry, comprehensive list-making, knock knock jokes and intertextual references, forms of recital and misinterpretation often take place, whereby characters quote and repeat sentences and words from a large variety of sources, jumping from the health benefits of whale blubber to court transcripts of Bill Clinton's impeachment to the plasma that is released when microwaving two grapes side by side.
Blame It On The Rain
The second poetry collection from artist, curator and writer Hana Pera Aoake. The book begins with a placenta placed into a Pohutukawa tree and spirals out across manifold interrogations and anecdotes of the poet’s life. the poetry harnesses a vibrant decolonial commentary on the life/death cycle:
“Bodies that span the past, present and future
It’s non linear, omnipresent, human and non human”
The poetry maps ways in which the lived and living memories of colonial histories are held, endured and warped inside one’s body, which is to say the whole Earth. “Pain and age are knotted together” she states. In many ways the book attempts to illustrate a delicate symbiosis of all living and non-living things, yet localises the pain and joy which manifests from these systems within her own life. The poetry asks how ideology changes the way we love, parent and make art.
Hana Pera Aoake expands these cyclical frameworks of flux and impermanence across her otherwise diaristic and witty verse. Hana Pera Aoake writes on sculpture, anger, labor, detention, greed, genocide, the ocean, the family, sovereignty, sanity and love. The writing spares no opportunity for irony and opinion, housing articulations of political dreaming within a resilient and potent humour. The book is generous in its exploration of Māori belief systems and indigenous solidarity as much as it is on rhythmic, free-associative verse. An exciting and expansive collection of poems.
49 Venezuelan Novels
Sebastian Castillo, Elisa Díaz Castelo
This new bilingual edition of Sebastian Castillo's long-out-of-print first book reintroduces a classic of American microfiction and features a translation into Spanish by acclaimed Mexican author Elisa Díaz Castelo.
Forty-nine pages of unique and surreal micro-fiction, Sebastian Castillo’s 49 Venezuelan Novels is a magical book with a new story on every page. Full of depth and imagination, Castillo uses imagery in a simple yet intense way. From stories of fish markets to spiteful violins, it almost seems that these novels are snippets of family stories long passed down, just now put to paper. With the nature of a born storyteller, Sebastian Castillo provides the readers of this fantastic read with gorgeous stories that define micro-fiction.
Truth / Untruth
A trenchant, darkly humorous, and unsentimental look at Calcutta society.
Set in Calcutta in the mid-1980s, Truth/Untruth is a fast-paced thriller built around the death of the pregnant Jamuna—a maid in a newly affluent residential apartment complex—and Arjun, the upwardly mobile businessman who seduced her. Packed with a cast of colourful characters, this novel is a trenchant, darkly humorous, and unsentimental look at the different segments of Calcutta society: from the middle-class culture vultures to the unscrupulous ‘promoter’ class and the domestic helpers and slum goons who form an intrinsic part of the city’s life. All are implicated in a complex web of guilt and bizarre twists and turns. Sex, lies, death—the great modernist themes—run like a thread through this book, exposing societal greed, lust, corruption, and moral hypocrisy with a sardonic tone that spares none. An unusual novel by an author who is otherwise known for her hard-hitting activist-feminist stories, Truth/Untruth underlines the exploitative vicious cycle that defines urban relations between the haves and have-nots.
‘Although not of the margins herself, Devi was accomplished in writing from the margins [ . . . ] However, it is indeed worth it if you are looking for an exhilarating social commentary and biting satire that remains relevant today. Devi also reflects the jargon and dialects of the lower classes as deftly as the peculiarities of upper-class speech patterns. A feat of this work is Katyal’s ability to mediate these multiple registers, rewarding the reader with sharp writing that is at once funny, sardonic, and darkly pleasurable to read.‘—Jack Greenbert, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.
Unfinished Histories – Radical Rediscoveries: Performance Texts from the Women’s Theatre Movement 1969-1987
Jane Arden, Winsome Pinnock and 1 more
Radical Rediscoveries: Performance Texts from the Women’s Theatre Movement 1969–1987 is the first of three volumes by Unfinished Histories as part of Montez Press imprint Scores, in collaboration with the Associate Artists programme at London Performance Studios. This collection brings together six seminal works of British alternative feminist and women’s theatre from the archive, with a contextual introductory text by Dr. Susan Croft, co-founder of Unfinished Histories.
The play texts included are: Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven by Jane Arden (1969), Go West Young Woman by Pam Gems (1974), Ophelia by Melissa Murray (1979), Minutes by Hesitate & Demonstrate (1979), Room by Natasha Morgan (1981) and The Wind of Change by Winsome Pinnock (1987).
SABR N°01 - Trois dattes et une dent
« [...] la stratégie de la terre brûlée c’est aussi un héritage mais adaptation 2024 on brûle désormais des arrêts de bus et des commissariats et si à la télé iels disent ces jeunes sont complètements cons détruire leur propre ville c’est que Bolloré a rien compris [...] »
Fanny Souade Sow est artiste plasticienne, son travail est habité par des questionnements d’ordre sociopolitique et historique et évoque en outre la violence latente des structures urbaines qui excluent, séparent, condamnent et contraignent un certain nombre de corps et d’existences minorisées.
SABR/Collection est une série de publications qui rassemble des œuvres littéraires de format court et de genres variés. Dirigée par Nesrine Salem, la collection souhaite mettre en avant les macro-réalités des auteur·ices choisi·es pour rendre visible le caractère intersectionnel des luttes.
Amalgamemnon
History and literature seem to be losing ground to the brave new world of electronic media and technology, and battle lines are being drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and the third world, women and men. Narrator Mira Enketei erases those boundaries in her punning monologue, blurring the texts of Herodotus with the callers to a talk-radio program, and blending contemporary history with ancient: fairy-tale and literal/invented people (the kidnappers of capitalism, a girl-warrior from Somalia, a pop singer, a political writer), connected by an elaborate mock-genealogy stretching back to the Greek gods, move in and out of each other's stories. The narrator sometimes sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesy but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy. Brooke-Rose amalgamates ancient literature with modern crises to produce a powerful novel about the future of culture.
Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels.
Movement Research Performance Journal
Issue #62 - We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers
Anh Vo, maura nguyen-donohue and 1 more
What began as a project responding to the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘end’ of the Vietnam War became a project of inhabiting the Movement Research Performance Journal (MRPJ) from within the landscape of contemporary Vietnamese performance art. The result, Issue #62, is a window onto a community of insiders who reflect a set of concerns, questions, historical trajectories, and aesthetic legacies that differ from what has more often been foregrounded in our U.S./New York City-centric publication. Like other documents of this kind, which endeavor to portray a performance scene that will be foreign to many readers, the texts from this group of intergenerational, contemporary artists demonstrate a careful navigation of the dialectics of inside and outside, self and other, performer and audience, seeing and being seen, that informs every exchange across cultural difference.
The texts are also not monolithic, suggesting a range of relations to the Vietnam of the past and present, from within Vietnam’s national borders and among the diaspora. Especially for contributors living and working in Vietnam, writing has also been a practice of choreographing words within a political landscape where to speak publicly, in itself, is a performance of negotiated risk. Embracing the complexities of these differing positions has been the focus of our editorial process—one that has asked the editorial team to embrace the limits of our own knowledge, to recognize we will not be able to recognize all valences others may discover in these texts, and not to edit these layers out of the works that follows.
Au fort les âmes sont
Exclusive works designed by Laure Prouvost for her carte blanche at the Mucem in Marseille, a series of immersive and poetic installations in the heart of Fort Saint-Jean, photographed by Raphaël Massart for this cut-out book, between an artist's book and an exhibition catalogue, accompanied by drawings and critical texts.
For the Mucem, Laure Prouvost has created a series of immersive installations in the heart of Fort Saint-Jean. Repurposed everyday objects, glass sculptures, sound mirages, and underwater videos shot in the depths of the calanques and around Frioul compose a sensitive and poetic universe. Between fiction and reality, the artist invites visitors on a sensory journey where everything is transformed: forms, narratives, and life itself.
The book was conceived as a visual journey leading from the Old Port of Marseille to Fort Saint-Jean and into the very heart of each work. To recreate this encounter between artist Laure Prouvost and the Mucem, there is a constant dialogue between the exterior—the sea, the stone of the fort—and the interior—the intimacy of the installations that unfold in the air, in the bowels of the earth, and underwater... Designed in close collaboration with the artist, the book captures this moment through photographic work carried out especially by Raphaël Massart and an evocative form designed by the artist: like a book that also floats in the Mediterranean. To accompany this visual unfolding, a booklet embedded in the heart of the book contains texts by Hélia Paukner, curator of the exhibition, and Mathilde Roman, art historian.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Mucem, Marseille, in 2025.
The Lesbian Avenger Handbook
Launched in New York City, in 1992, the Lesbian Avengers rejected the picket line and ordinary demo for media-savvy, nonviolent direct action.
They were superheroes arriving "to make the world safe for baby dykes everywhere;" warriors with capes and shields doing a line dance; dykes "Lusting for Power," pushing a giant bed float down Sixth Avenue in New York (with lesbians on it); nationally-ambitious Avengers eating fire in front of a hostile White House; lovers reuniting a statue of Alice B. Toklas with Gertrude Stein, then waltzing in the snow in Bryant Park. And homos who shamelessly chanted, "Ten percent is not enough, recruit, recruit, recruit."
Originally published in 1993, Homocom edition 2021
Aisopika Aesopica
The bilingual book ‘Aesopica’ documents and extends Rūta Junevičiūtė’s research on the Aesopian language and the influence of political censorship to contemporary collective body, first presented in 2020 as the eponymous solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and as a permanent outdoor installation at the Rupert Art Center, Vilnius.
Taking as a starting point the historical phenomenon of Aesopian language, which was widespread in Lithuanian culture during the Soviet era, and in parts of the Russian Empire as early as the 19th century, Junevičiūtė aims to investigate the interrelationship between generations, the gray zones of collective identity creation and the processes of (un)censoring the archives of our bodies.
Aesopian language – a term coined after Ancient Greek fabulist Aesop (gr. Aísōpos), is a type of cryptic communication system, where a text has several layers of meaning often contradictory to each other and which seek to convey official and subversive hidden meanings simultaneously. It is usually employed under conditions of omnipresent state censorship to communicate officially forbidden or taboo subjects and opinions. As a system it contains three members – an author, a censor, and a reader. It uses various modes of circumlocution and euphemisation, innuendo and poetic paraphrasing, which can also be seen as an aesthetic style. It has been advocated for artistic benefits as poetics of omissions, concealment, and travesty. On the other hand, it has been criticized as a sign of conformity and humiliation. In Lithuania, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been popularly regarded as a position of dissent, but such an interpretation received criticism from contemporary scholars. “Such a mode of expression is probably as old as censorship itself” – a historian told us.
Text contributors: Alfonsas Andriuškevičius, Edgaras Gerasimovičius, Rūta Junevičiūtė, Goshka Macuga, Anastasia Sosunova, Grėtė Šmitaitė, Tomas Venclova, Ana Vujanović
Language editors: Dangė Vitkienė, Aira Niauronytė, Gemma Lloyd
Translators: Alexandra Bondarev, Erika Lastovskytė, Justinas Šuliokas, Mantė Zagurskytė-Tamulevičienė, Aistis Žekevičius.
Illustrations: Rūta Junevičiūtė.
Flood Tide
In moderate physical decline, and with an immoderate weed habit, the novelist Dunja Anko returns home to the Adriatic coast to play detective and solve the mystery of her brother’s death. The going is arduous, the people inscrutable; her old friends have had years to forget – or to convince themselves they don’t remember. Dunja must contend with desire and disgust, curiosity and fear, as she begins to doubt her reasons for returning. Elegantly plotted, funny and self-reflexive, Flood Tide is a psychologically deft exploration of the trauma wrought by human limitation and indecision.
"A dazzling mix of narrative styles (even genres), a linguistic rollercoaster, and a book that demands both close attention and literary sensibility . . . The reader is hooked." — Boštjan Videmšek
"Mysterious, precise and haunting, Flood Tide suggests that every homecoming is a return to a crime scene." — Chris Kraus
Ana Schnabl (b. 1985) is a Slovenian writer and editor. She writes for several Slovenian media outlets and is a monthly columnist for the Guardian. Her collection of short stories Razvezani (Beletrina, 2017) met with critical acclaim and won the Best Debut Award at the Slovenian Book Fair, followed by the Edo Budiša Award in Croatia; the collection has been translated into German and Serbian. Three years later Schnabl published her first novel Masterpiece (Mojstrovina, Beletrina, 2020). She toured Europe with the English, German and Serbian translations of the book, which included a residence in the Museumsquartier in Vienna, the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, and the first European Writer’s Festival in London. The novel was given favourable reviews and mentions in numerous Austrian, German and English media, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel Flood Tide (Plima, Beletrina, 2022) was nominated for the Slovenian Kresnik Award. Her third novel September (Beletrina, 2024) won the Kresnik Award in 2025.
Rawley Grau has been translating literary works from Slovenian for over twenty years, including by such first-rate novelists as Dušan Šarotar, Mojca Kumerdej, Sebastijan Pregelj, Gabriela Babnik and Vlado Žabot. Six of his translations have been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, while his translations of Šarotar’s Panorama and Billiards at the Hotel Dobray were shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He has also translated poetry by Miljana Cunta, Miklavž Komelj, Janez Ramoveš and Tomaž Šalamun, among others. In 2021, he received the prestigious Lavrin Diploma from the Association of Slovenian Literary Translators. Translations from other languages include A Science Not for the Earth: Selected Poems and Letters by the Russian poet Yevgeny Baratynsky, which received the AATSEEL prize for best scholarly translation, and, co-translated with Christina E. Kramer, The Long Coming of the Fire: Selected Poems by the modernist poet Aco Šopov, which won the 2025 International Dragi Award for best translation from Macedonian. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he has lived in Ljubljana since the early 2000s.
A Queer Theory of the State
How queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state.
Queer theory has often been hesitant to align itself with a politics of the state, approaching it with a negative or pragmatic framework. A Queer Theory of the State offers a more optimistic perspective. Rather than eschew engagement with democratic theorizing, the historian Samuel Clowes Huneke asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answering this question, Huneke shows how the state is an integral component of a politics that seeks to subvert and undo the oppression of queer lives.
Samuel Clowes Huneke is assistant professor of history at George Mason University. His first book, States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (2022), won the Charles E. Smith Award for best book in European History from the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. Huneke has written for Boston Review, the Washington Post, The Point, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
After Delores
A new edition of Sarah Schulman's acclaimed 1988 novel, a noirish tale about a no-nonsense coffee-shop waitress in New York who is nursing a broken heart after her girlfriend Dolores leaves her; her attempts to find love again are funny, sexy, and ultimately even violent. After Delores is a fast-paced, electrifying chronicle of the Lower East Side's lesbian subculture in the 1980s.
Sarah Schulman is the author of sixteen books, including the novels The Mere Future, The Child, Rat Bohemia, and Empathy (all from Arsenal Pulp Press) and the recent nonfiction works The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination and Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. She was also co-producer with Jim Hubbard of the feature documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP and is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project. She lives in New York, where she is Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York (College of Staten Island) and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.
Mirrorstage
A raw and profound novel in verse about mental health, addiction, queerness and shame that explores ideas of hybridity and identity.
Following their discharge from hospital, Mirrorstage follows its narrator on a road trip through the grey, liminal landscapes of modern Britain. As they pass graffitied bus shelters, construction sites and flooded motorways, factories and high-rises, the narrator’s internal and external journeys begin to converge, leading them down paths they have been trying to avoid: the mental illness and substance use that led them to the inpatient ward, the uneasy balance of their own gender identity, their troubled relationship with their estranged father, the perils and pleasures of the queer scene, and the shame that has haunted them throughout their life.
Woven around the psychoanalytic concept of its title, Mirrorstage is an experimental fable exploring the boundaries of selfhood and literary forms, told in fragments of prose and verse that are equal parts heartbreaking, sexy, and witty.
Twenty Bookmarks
Twenty Bookmarks is a result of Production & Workflow class of Graphic Design Department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Ba1 Class of 2026.
You Who Suffer, Because You Love, Love Still More
In You Who Suffer, Because You Love, Love Still More, Serubiri Moses offers an intimate and personal study of the lives and loves of pop star Freddy Mercury, combining a detailed epigraphy on the duplicitous nature of Mercury's origins, sexuality, and artistic talent with his own delicate memoir as a poet. Through this series of interlocked poems, yet again Moses lures us into an atmosphere both sensual and scholarly that echoes well past its last verse.
With ardor and grace, Serubiri Moses traverses a catalogue of pop music, visual art, and cultural history to bring his readers to a state of openness — to love, to art, and the freewill of ecstatic experience. Moses’s writing forefronts pleasure as a gateway for deeper critical inquiry, braiding personal memory and epigraphic excursions into sex, stardom, and poetry, reminding us in this journey that "pleasure almost happens without us knowing."
— Tausif Noor
Serubiri Moses, Ugandan curator and author, lives in New York City. He serves as a part-time faculty member at Hunter CUNY, and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He previously held faculty positions at New York University, and the New Centre for Research and Practice, and delivered lectures at Chazen Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, The New School, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, and basis voor aktuelle kunst (NL), and University of the Arts Helsinki (FL). As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; the Hessel Museum, Bard College, NY; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. He has curated solo presentations of Carl E. Hazlewood, Reza Aramesh, and is working on a retrospective of Taryn Simon. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth, and received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and is an alumni of the Àsìkò International Art Programme. He serves on the editorial team of e-flux journal and his short stories have appeared in print in Ursula, and online in Lolwe. He has published poetry in the online journals Jalada and Badilisha Poetry Exchange, as well as in print journals Kwani? 7, Kwani? 8, and READ: A Journal of Inter-Translation (2022). He is the author of the poetry collection THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK (2023; Pântano Books).
Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal
Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.
Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.
Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.
How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.
Against Morality
A manifesto against the current moralizing trend in the arts.
Should art be determined by political ideals? In recent decades art institutions have sought to embody liberal values of universal equality and social justice. This move toward greater inclusivity has borne witness to a countervailing trend: artworks are increasingly scrutinized for their political implications, and artists must take care not to transgress particular moral fault lines.
Examining contemporary exhibitions as well as works of art and film, and the broader cultural reactions to them, Rosanna McLaughlin investigates the consequences of this moralizing approach to creative work. She invites us to rethink the connection between political values and art—and to ask whether a relationship between them should exist at all. In arguing against morality in the arts, McLaughlin lays the groundwork for a more expansive concept of difference in twenty-first-century art making.
"What if ambivalences were seen as productive, and not a danger to erase? Would we not begin to know ourselves better? What is it that we are so afraid of finding out? Art is a testing ground for ideas, a means of reaching. What a shame, if we use the space it offers to destroy it entirely."
Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer based in East Sussex and the author of Double-Tracking: Studies in Duplicity (2019) and Sinkhole (2023). Her writing on art and culture has featured in ArtReview, Frieze, Granta, The Guardian, and The White Review, among other publications. Between 2021 and 2023 she was co-editor of The White Review.
Sonic Meditations
Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) Pauline Oliveros' life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others' sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960's she influenced American music profoundly through her inclusive work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.
She founded 'Deep Listening(R), ' which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. 'Deep Listening is my life practice, ' Oliveros explained, simply. Oliveros founded Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer, NY. Her creative work is currently disseminated through Pauline Oliveros Publications and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc