Books

To wilt tears for an infatuation who has no name of their own. To weep rain like a sentence that passes through the unrequited glimpse. Language is the instrument of our shivers; literature the wink that slips into a wince.

Out of profane necessity we dress the missing words for each circumstance in ecstatic deprivation. Anticipation and alienation. Shock and sorrow. Craving and cruelty. Elation and tension. Emotion is the borrowed absence of transferred meaning: the sensuous "legs" of a table and the sunrise that falls-in-shadow upon the "foot" of a bed. Quintilian's "thirsty" crops that have neither tongue nor throat. Barthes' compassed "wings" of a house. Augustine's "piscina" in which no fish are to be found (and only humans drown). With delirium we endure, and delight in, the abuse of our sensibilities by the sadistic literalization of metaphor.

Featuring Will Alexander, Kimberly Alidio, César Dávila Andrade, Martine Bellen, Stanislav Belsky, Anselm Berrigan, David Buuck, Garrett Caples, Sam Cha, Logan Fry, Lawrence Giffin, Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough, E. Tracy Grinnell, Karen Holman, Elise Houcek, Andrew Joron, Inna Krasnoper, Carlos Lara, Jonathan Larson, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Michael Leong, Douglas A. Martin, olga mikolaivna, Sheila E. Murphy, Ann Pedone, Sal Randolph, Martha Ronk, Jonathan Simkins, Christophe Tarkos, Edwin Torres, Christina Vega-Westhoff, Wendy Xu & John Yau

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.

Handmade artist's book combining drawings, photographs, and archival materials. This publication reflects on the YouYou Group's ten-year journey and its evolving relationship with space. It marks a transitional moment from the group's long-term engagement with public space toward a growing understanding of spatiality and collective presence.

YouYou Group is a Belgian choir that specializes in what is known in Arabic as zaghareed. This trilling cry is used by women at weddings and festive occasions, but also at funerals. Youyou is the French name for zaghareed. Depending on the regional origin, it is also called kululu, tsahalulim, or irrintzi. It is a long, shrill tone that is modulated (by the throat, glottis, or rapid tongue movements) and can be heard from far away. Brussels artist Myriam Van Imschoot was one of the founders of this singing group.

Published in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, NYC, this book beautifully gathers pictures of the latest series of paintings by Amy Sillman – and, yeah, reproductions of the full series of 74 amazing works on paper, UGH for 2023 – “Torsos” and “Words” – where marks become membres become shapes become letters become layers bodies become shades – a diagram of time, “a broader contemplation of transformation and temporal fluidity”! 

With an essay by Felix Bernstein titled, “AMY SILLMAN’S DIALECTICAL JACULATIONS”

How much distance and difference can intimacy hold? How much proximity and likeness does it require? What can we learn from its capacities? And what could we salvage from its limits?

Curious Affinities unravels the risks and possibilities brought forth by unconventional styles of intimacy. Across kinship, friendship, romance and community, the threads of social relation are entangled by race, class and queerness in unexpected and generative ways, as we find ourselves rent to shreds and stitched back together in the name of common feelings.

In rousing poetry and incisive prose, Sophie Chauhan reflects on the bonds and boundaries that govern our collective ways of life and wonders how they might be reimagined.

Sophie Chauhan is a London-based writer and researcher, born in the UK and raised in Naarm (Melbourne). She is completing a PhD in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at University College London. Her academic, creative and organising work converge around her interest in anti-capitalist, queer and decolonial approaches to radical coalition-building.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Reynaldo Rivera took personal photos of the Los Angeles that he lived in and knew: a world of cheap rent, house parties, subversive fashion, underground bands, and a handful of Latino gay and transvestite bars: Mugi’s, The Silverlake Lounge, and La Plaza. Most of these bars are long closed and many of the performers have died. But in Rivera’s photographs, these men and women live on in a silvery landscape of makeshift old-style cinematic glamour, a fabulous flight from unacceptable reality. 

As a teenager, Rivera took refuge in used bookstores and thrift stores, where he discovered old  photo books of Mexican film stars and the work of Lisette Model, Brassai, and Bresson. Inspired, he bought a camera and began  photographing people at his hotel. In 1981 he moved to Echo Park and began taking photos for the LA Weekly. 

This book is an ensemble of almost 200 images selected by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler spanning more than two decades in Los Angeles and Mexico. The  book also includes Luis Bauz’s story, “Tatiana,” about one of the  subjects of these photographs; a critical essay on Rivera’s work by Chris Kraus; and a novella-length conversation between Rivera and his  friend and contemporary Vaginal Davis about their lives, work, fantasies, and collective histories.

Edited by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler
With Luis Bauz, Vaginal Davis and Chris Kraus

I am not deep, although my eyes are, like a black sea that has been forgotten, as many have told me.

Noura Alsouma’s zine “Nawar’s Sketchbook” is a liquid lament by the Berlin-based Syrian visual artist and printmaker, riveted to eyes that see and therefore shed tears, channeling the heartfelt exposure of the sketchbooks Noura fills to the bleed.

With a moving text by the artist in the original Arabic, reproduced in her handwriting, as well as in English translation by Suja Sawafta.

In a reality in which the boundaries between cinema, art, installation and multimedia experimentation seem to be increasingly blurred, History of a Tree by Flatform is a project that sets out to radically alter the idea of the portrait in western art. 

A non-human living organism – the Oak of the Hundred Knights of Tricase, the oldest Vallonea oak in Europe at the age of 900 years – and the territory in which it has stood for centuries become the subject: through a film and a robotized video installation, statements become a portrait, and are transformed into a work of art. 

The book retraces the genesis, development and implementation of this original idea, providing a visual score, the film in 80 images, dialogues in ten languages, the contributions of a tree searcher, an art historian and two philosophers, as well as a series of in-depth essays drawing on the fields of science, history, anthropology, music and linguistics. 

In 2018, a group of three visual artists — Agathe Boulanger, Signe Frederiksen and Jules Lagrange— started a year-long conversations with Laurence Rassel, exploring her social and educational background, her ways of working, and examining the tools she applies in her daily practice of running institutions: feminism, the open source and free software movements, and the institutional psychotherapy developed by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury in the psychiatric field around the mid-20^th century.

In Bab Al-Saha, a quarter of Nablus, Palestine, sits a house of ill repute. In it lives Nuzha, a young woman ostracized from and shamed by her community. When the Intifada breaks out, Nuzha’s abode unexpectedly becomes a sanctuary for those in the quarter: Hussam, an injured resistance fighter; Samar, a university researcher exploring the impact of the Intifada on women’s lives; and Sitt Zakia, the pious midwife.

In the furnace of conflict at the heart of the 1987 Intifada, notions of freedom, love, respectability, nationhood, the rights of women, and Palestinian identity—both among the reluctant residents of the house and the inhabitants of the quarter at large—will be melted and re-forged. Vividly recounted through the eyes of its female protagonists, Passage to the Plaza is a groundbreaking story that shatters the myth of a uniform gendered experience of conflict.

‘Human beings embody whatever they meet, and it’s all there when you work whether you want it there or not.’ Practice is like the dust that accumulates, and revisiting fragments of essays and talks on choreography Jonathan Burrows ended up embracing the haphazard and the mess, moments of unfocus and focus, harnessing them in pithy formulations and scores, adding room and punctuation and line breaks in the process so readers can hear the rhythm as he writes his dance on writing dance.

Jonathan Burrows is a choreographer, who has worked for many years in collaboration with the composer Matteo Fargion, with whom he continues to create and perform work. He is the author of A Choreographer’s Handbook (Routledge, 2010) and is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

L’ Alpin Chez Lui - Les jolis jouets du Queyras présente une collection de jouets en bois artisanaux fabriqués dans les Alpes. Ces figurines naïves aux couleurs vives et aux contours découpés, montées sur un socle et conçues pour une main d’enfant, attirent le regard par leur graphisme épuré.

Depuis 1920, les Jouets du Queyras sont fabriqués à Arvieux, dans les Hautes-Alpes. Cet ouvrage, réalisé par Clémence Passot, retrace l’histoire et l’évolution de la coopérative ouvrière « L’Alpin chez Lui », offrant un témoignage unique sur la vie sociale et économique de la montagne.

Conception graphique et direction éditoriale: Magali Brueder & Clémence Passot

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling.

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.

Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong

Introduced by So Mayer
Afterword by Sarah Shin

Jangal est un ouvrage collectif avec la participation d’Ana Pi, Julien Creuzet, Léna Araguas et Éva Barois De Caevel. Il a été conçu lors de l’exposition « Cet ailleurs, qui rejaillit en moi, lorsque je suis là (…) » de Julien Creuzet à la galerie NaMiMa de l’École nationale supérieure d’art et de design de Nancy.

Shulamith Firestone was twenty-five years old when she published The Dialectic of Sex, her classic and groundbreaking manifesto of radical feminism, in 1970. Disillusioned and burned out by the fragmented infighting within the New York City radical feminist groups she’d helped to found, when her book hit the bestseller lists, Firestone decided against pursuing a career as a “professional feminist.” Instead, she returned to making visual art, the profession that she’d trained for. She wouldn’t publish anything again until Airless Spaces, in 1998.

Long before her first hospitalization for paranoid schizophrenia in 1987, Firestone had fallen off the grid and into precarity and poverty. For the next decade, she would move in and out of public psychiatric wards and institutions. Conceived as a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces is a subtle and deeply literary work. Embedded as a participant-observer, Firestone moves beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional life to record individual lives and acts of cruelty and kindness. The existence that she depicts is a microcosm of the world beyond.

After they raised her dose to 42 mg. of Trilafon, Lucy very nearly fainted. She felt a rush of bad sensation comparable to her mental telepathy when her grandmother died. ... But there was a good aspect to fainting too. As she was about to lose consciousness, she felt an overwhelming relief. The black velvety edges of the swoon. If only she could faint all the way, black out, and never wake up again ...

Introduction by Chris Kraus
Afterword by Susan Faludi

Sore is a serial anthology that brings together authors whose writing practices oscillate between the genres of diary keeping and fiction. For the second issue of Sore, ten contributors – both authors and visual artists – were invited to collectively develop their work through a series of informal critiques over the course of five months.

In the first issue of Sore, observations of everyday life intertwined with memories and cultural references to denote the significance of a certain soreness we each carry within us as we negotiate the various challenges of social existence. In this second ensemble, seven new authors widen our understanding of the term ‘sore’ by underlining a need to orient one’s gaze towards what’s hidden underneath, to enter the anatomy of all these necessary contortions and u-turns one performs in order to escape the grip of expected compliance.

With contributions from: Mathilde Heuliez, Lisa Lagova, Muyeong Kim, Nour Ben Saïd, Masha Ryabova, Adrienne Chung, Richard Dmitri Hees, Oscar Le Merle, Morra Kozlitina, Tindra Eliason, Helmer Stuyt, Ilya Stasevich, Kristina Stallvik.

Published by cover crop, Mathilde Heuliez & Lisa Lagova.

This major new work is thought, spirit and sense (in every sense) ‘fleshed out’ in ‘all the corners’ by being unmade – as poetry, as music, as (black and white) images, and as attention to the interconnected circuitries the One has with the social, historical and environmental ‘to / link us outside’. These elements are no sooner embodied than they slip, shift, carousel and spin away. As Goodwin puts it: ‘no longer a bodily reference to an individual subject’s presence; not obliterated but made into an element, air or breath, as black poetry’s condition of im/possibility for, and refusal of subjecthood.’ Hence it is that this poetry achieves ‘flightacross precipitous intransigence’ (Will Alexander), perhaps flights of manifestations of spirit, ‘ghostly crowned / apogees’, like duppies, which is to say, sacred. Hence too the work’s urgent task to avoid ‘thingification’: the conscription and exploitation of thought &/or body for neo-colonialist, which is to say, neo-liberal ends. Goodwin eschews identity politics for a phenomenology that is more properly radical in both the etymological sense of the term – rooted and vital to life – as well as situated within a history of experimental black thought which, simultaneously, rejects normative traditions of meaning, signification and value. Both meanings are central to the anti-racist core of this important work – ‘when i don’t know you but you must know who i am’ – in a poetry that’s as breath-taking as it is breath-making. ‘Inexpressibly full with what words can do’.

— Emily Critchley, author of Home (London: Protoype, 2021), Arrangements (Shearsman Books, 2018) and Ten Thousand Things (UEA: Boiler House Press, 2017)

James Goodwin is a poet doing a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London with a thesis on the blacksociopoetics of marronage, breath, sacrality and emanation. His pamphlet, aspects caught in the headspace we’re in: composition for friends, was published by Face Press; and his debut book, Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip, is forthcoming with the87press. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

What is an artists’ life made of? From the home to the studio, from the studio to the gallery, from one exhibition to the next, from one place to another – a suite of moves and a list of addresses. Tobias Kaspar’s work sheds light on the ambivalent position of the artist, taken in a web of social and economic relations: in the second volume of New Address, he uses the tone of the diary, combined with the code of the moodboard, to document the side aspects of the life of a “stereotypical artist.”

The book gathers black & white photographs taken between 2018 and 2024, during the installation or the opening of exhibitions; at performances, dinners, parties; in different homes and rooms Kaspar has been living in; and in the course of daily activities. Contrary to an exhibition catalogue, projects by the artist such as his line of jeans, or his series of bronze sculptures made from disposable packaging, are thus shown “in the middle of affairs.”

An additional booklet opens with a short essay by artist Mikael Brkic, reflecting on the “behind the scenes” logics, followed by a letter penned by writer Leif Randt, and a text in which curator Kari Rittenbach discusses Tobias Kaspar’s work in relation to the economics and aesthetics of display and fashion. It concludes with a list of artworks in the order as they appear in the main book.

Published with the support of Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung, Pro Helvetia, Kultur Stadt Zürich.

Traditions of realism are brought together with the decolonial and ecological concept of "planetarity" to understand a new realism in contemporary art.

The devastation left in the wake of modernity and globalization is revealing a fragile and unfamiliar planet, and humanity has awakened to a new real. If the old "realist" tools of objectivism have contributed to capitalist society's divorce from the natural world, how are artists finding new ways to make us really see—and feel—the planet?
Surveying a body of planet-facing art, communal practices, and activism, Josephine Berry investigates art's power to break with capitalist realism and decarbonize the imagination. With chapters on feeling as world-making, the rupture of petroleum landscapes, artists' urban exodus, and migration as survival, Planetary Realism delves deeply into art's necessary reimagining of life on Earth.

"Planetary Realism is a deeply necessary book to add to our toolkit of struggle against a corporate world intent on destroying our planet for nothing but profit. Berry's book is a wake up call to artists and all those whose imaginations have not been destroyed by the consensensual silence surrounding the life or death issue of climate catastrophe. She dismantles the concept of art's autonomy to describe how artists all over the world are becoming artworkers for Planet Earth." — Peter Kennard, London-based artist and activist, and Emeritus Professor of Political Art at the Royal College of Art

"Through this superlative and vigorously argued version of a realism for today—meticulously attuned to planetary predicaments and the art and culture that inhabits them—Berry gives us means to map ways of being more hospitable, disobedient, migratory, alive, in the present." — Matthew Fuller, co-author of Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility, and Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth

Josephine Berry is an art theorist, writer and editor. She supervises thesis only and practice based PhDs in the School of Arts and Humanities, Royal College of Art, London, and teaches in Media Communication and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a member of Mute magazine's editorial collective Mute and is a peer reviewer for the journal Theory, Culture & Society.

In 2019 SOTA finished the first Fair Arts Almanac. The content of the book was generated during a week long summer camp in 2018 with about 70 contributors. The result was a bundling of tips & tricks, statements & demands, visions & ideas, dates & data, testimonies & voices, addresses & announcements on fairness within the complex relationships between the artistic, political and economic sphere. The compilation of various contributions in this first edition was deliberately associative and open for debate, full of contradictions, loose ends and inconsistencies.

The story of failure asks one question only: What do people who lose do next? “Let the best one win.” War is one way. The other way is religion. Let me at the stakes. It’s so much a matter of patience. No fury, beyond all reason, no sequence broken, but diverted. Nothing seems to cooperate when you lose control. Blue becomes violet. Bend your head to the blank. The solution is so simple: don’t identify yourself with your description of yourself.

"It feels we aren’t reading prose but language that oscillates between liturgy and prayer." — Eugene Lim

The success of new far-right movements cannot be explained by fear or rage alone – the pleasures of aggression and violence are just as essential. As such, racism is particularly intense when it is erotically charged, migration presenting as a sexual threat to white women being one of many examples. Germany’s strikingly successful right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland is, according to the historian Dagmar Herzog, characterized by this “sexy racism,” with its second main feature being that of an obsessive antidisability hostility—both elements resonating strongly with Nazism. In The New Fascist Body, Herzog connects her analysis of fascism’s libidinous energy with its animus against bodies perceived as imperfect. Only by studying the emotional and intellectual worlds of past fascisms can we understand and combat their current manifestations.

The book features an afterword by Alberto Toscano, author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso 2023).

faits divers are the various reports in a news bulletin, miscellaneous human interest stories, theorised by Roland Barthes as ‘total’ and ‘immanent’ information.

ferrara deux (faits divers) scrolls around the discovered corpse of a talented street musician named Landau, mangled and sealed into vacuum bags in the walk-in of a modern Italian-American restaurant. Street performance is content for an attention economy, playing on authenticities and profiting from recognition.

In this debut novel, artist Ivan Cheng reconfigures recent performance texts into an approximation of a murder mystery.

Superior and Inferior presents a facsimile reprint of Italian abstract artist and feminist Carla Accardi's provocatory publication Superiore e Inferiore and the first ever English translation of the full text.

"In this book, I have bought together the transcripts of dialogues I recorded on tape in three girls' classes from the first, second and third year of a state middle school. For having proposed this unauthorised activity, I was dismissed from teaching in the light of a formal complaint". – Carla Accardi introducing her book Superiore e Inferiore, 1972.

First published in 1972 by Carla Accardi, the book Superiore e Inferiore features discussions among girls at a middle school—all between 10 and 13—about society's discriminatory behaviour towards women. They also commented the Manifesto of the revolutionary feminist group Rivolta Femminile—collectively written by Accardi, art critic and feminist activist Carla Lonzi, and Elvira Banotti—which first appeared posted on city walls in Rome in July 1970. For having discussed sex-related issues with pupils, Accardi was fired and permanently suspended from teaching. (Her letter of dismissal issued by the Italian Ministry of Education forms part of the introduction to the book.) Along the lines of Pasolini's Comizi d'Amore (Love Meetings), Accardi's own voice is secondary in the book, giving way to the thoughts, narratives, opinions, and debates expressed among girls on the role of women and girls, family conflicts and intimate relations.

Carla Accardi (1924–2014) was an Italian abstract painter associated with the Arte Informale and Arte Povera movements, and a founding member of the Italian art groups Forma (1947) and Continuità (1961). She experimented with different forms of art, such as black and white painting and Sicofoil. During the late 1970s, she became part of the feminist movement with critic Carla Lonzi. Together, they founded Rivolta femminile in 1970, one of Italy's first feminist groups. Accardi's first solo exhibition in the United States was in 2001 at MoMA PS1.