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Cover of 24 European Ethnographic Museums

Roma Publications

24 European Ethnographic Museums

Sara Sejin Chang

With the series '24 European Ethnographic Museums' Van der Heide questions the construction and identity of the ethnographic museum today. Here, the project becomes a collection of artefacts in and upon itself and by recording the names of these institutions Van der Heide places the viewer in front of the dilemma: who is authorized to decide what is an artefact, and what should be collected and for what reason? In the 19th century, with the birth of the current European nations, museums openly referred to their colonial past. Today the museums bare more euphemistic names like: ‘Museum der Kulturen’ or ‘World Museum’ but still place the West as the self-acclaimed center of the world.  The existence of the ethnographic museum, which is intertwined with the complicated and loaded colonial past, has been subject to contemporary criticism. While some of the European ethnographic institutions have attempted to come to terms with the past of their collections and their heritage, Van der Heide focuses upon how language continues to reflect the political present of the institutions.

Cover of Heatwave #2

Bleed Print

Heatwave #2

Various

Periodicals €17.00

 In an era when many “radical” theorists were seeking out the peaceable expression of politics in “everyday utopias,” Joshua Clover stressed that politics was always, at root, a fiery confrontation with the powers that be. To these ends, he not only helped bring together a new generation of young communists but also pushed them to engage directly with the rising tide of class conflict, understanding full well that the street and the shopfloor are the true classrooms of the partisan.

Heatwave is, in a sense, an attempt to embody this spirit at a larger scale. Like Joshua, we hope to serve as an engine of engagement, linking our readers to their own history and to one another. Like Joshua, we adopt a principle of ecumenicism, refusing the false dividing lines inherited from the long dissolution of the last global communist movement. At the same time, like Joshua, we also insist on a theoretically rigorous approach that invokes the real complexity of revolutionary theory and history, actively seeks evidence for its claims, and engages in good faith with opposing positions. And, like Joshua, we maintain that the partisan project is inherently incendiary, requiring confrontation with the rulers of the world, rather than gradualist compromise or secessionist retreat. Finally, communism requires an unambiguous commitment to internationalism. Although our project is currently anglophone, we recognize that elaborating a partisan politics requires learning from the self-activity of the dispossessed at the global scale.

The name "Heatwave" echoes that of an old Situationist magazine ("Britain's most incandescent journal" of 1966), but with added urgency in an era where every summer is the hottest on record. While the statistical certainty of catastrophe is inescapable, "revolt" names many species of conflagration, including that peculiar variety we call communism. We must sift through the ashes to find it.

Cover of Postcommodity, Alex Waterman and Ociciwan: “in memoriam…”

uh books

Postcommodity, Alex Waterman and Ociciwan: “in memoriam…”

Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective

Eighty-page programme book score, and libretto, for performances by Indigenous musicians of in memoriam…Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau and Robert Ashley’s in memoriam... Curated and edited by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective.

[from back cover] …in memoriam Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau adds a new score and production by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman to a suite of four early scores by the American composer Robert Ashley. The fifth score honours the lives of Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau, three Indigenous women from territory at the turn of the Century as it became the province of Alberta. This significant addition continues Ashley’s project investigating the connections between musical forms and constructs of historicization, opening a conversation regarding whom and how we memorialize individuals and inscribe their legacies.

[from essay by Candice Hopkins] What histories are remembered and who is doing the remembering? What form do these rememberings take? It is not as simple as taking down one monument and replacing it with another. We need to ask more questions, take note of the voids that stand in for the past, and actively make way for other voices, particularly those are trapped under the ‘sea ice of English’. “Listen for sounds”, writes the Tlingit poet and anthropologist Nora Marks Dauenhauer, “They are as important as voices. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen.”

Cover of My Earliest Person

The Last Books

My Earliest Person

Jennifer Soong

Poetry €15.00

Lyrical drifts warped by syntax into blizzarding softness; odes to beauty, meaning, and inexperience splintered by history and grammar. An aqueous surface marbled with the lightest possible touch, lost footings arrested by change’s near-griplessness. 

None of this matters. It’s only supposed
to save you from yourself. None of this
matters, when I try to take it out of me into
the world, which to find I can praise
                                                          I go out to

Composed across two winters between late 2022 and early 2024. Contains 43 poems.

“This luscious and needle sharp collection is a real feat of the textual imagination, wow.”   —Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold, no. 34

Cover of A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

Picador

A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

Dionne Brand

Memoir €19.00

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond.

The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history — the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

Cover of Salvation

Primary Information

Salvation

Jimmy DeSana

Art €20.00

Salvation is a previously-unpublished artist book by Jimmy DeSana that he conceptualized shortly before his death in 1990. The publication contains 44 of the artist’s late photographic abstractions that quietly and poetically meditate on loss, death, and nothingness. Depicted within the works are images of relics, body parts, flowers, and fruits that DeSana altered using collage and darkroom manipulations to create pictures that are both intimate and other-worldly. Salvation provides a nuanced and sophisticated counterpoint to the prevailing work around HIV/AIDS at the time, which tended to favor bold political statements.

Variations of many of the works in this book were first presented at DeSana’s last show with Pat Hearn Gallery in 1988. Shortly thereafter, the artist began assembling a maquette of Salvation, using black and white images as place holders for the color works that he intended to comprise the final layout of the publication. Sadly, he was unable to fully realize Salvation in his lifetime, but on his deathbed, he dictated instructions to his longtime friend Laurie Simmons for completing the work; instructions which she noted on each page of the single-copy maquette. With these notes, Simmons was able to match extant slides  and sequencing. Simmons’ studio chose color gels from DeSana’s archive for each corresponding black and white image in the assembly of the publication. Thankfully, due to this recuperative work, Salvation—long-considered to be DeSana’s last major work—is now available for the first time, with every step taken to honor and embody DeSana’s original vision.

Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) grew up in Atlanta, GA, and received his bachelor’s degree from the Georgia State University in 1972 before relocating to New York’s East Village in the early 1970s. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy DeSana and Marlon T. Riggs, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada, 2020, and Remainders, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY, 2016. DeSana’s work can be found in numerous public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. A major retrospective of DeSana’s work was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2022, accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Brooklyn Museum and DelMonico Books.

Cover of Lex Icon

Ugly Duckling Presse

Lex Icon

Salette Tavares

Poetry €20.00

Appearing for the first time in English translation, LEX ICON presents everyday objects through the lens of modern art and abstraction. As abstraction distills the geometrical shape of an object by shedding its function, so too do Tavares’s poems distill the essence of everyday items in language. LEX ICON connects Tavares’s early poetry to her later graphic sculptural poems. Foregrounding insights into human sociality, labor, and domesticity that dwell in simple household objects, the poems collected here also present these as almost mystical artifacts that partake in some unnamed ritual.

Salette Tavares (1922-1994) was a Portuguese writer, theorist, and visual artist. She was a member of the experimental poetry group PO.EX and was involved in the publication of the first issues of Poesia Experimental. Her books include Quadrada (Moraes Editores), Lex Icon (Moraes Editores), Obra Poética 1957-1971 (Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda), and Poesia Gráfica (Casa Fernando Pessoa). Her spatial poems were exhibited at the 2014 retrospective, Salette Tavares: Spatial Poetry, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.

Translated by Isabel Sobral Campos, Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton

Cover of Art Notes, Art

CARA Center for Art, Research and Alliances

Art Notes, Art

Cynthia Hawkins

Painting €20.00

Since the 1970s, Cynthia Hawkins has investigated the potentials of abstract painting. While often beginning a work or series with a predetermined concept or strategy, Hawkins’s process-oriented practice simultaneously embraces the improvisational to create a systemized space for her continually evolving vocabulary. From 1979 to 1981, important early years in the elaboration of her work, Hawkins documented these developments in a journal. A record of routine and the everyday, the journal also gathers sketches, notes for new and in-progress works, and responses to contemporary art and criticism, bringing the artist’s process, experimentation, and reflections on materials, formalism, abstraction, and figuration into relief. 

Art Notes, Art also offers a picture of the burgeoning Black-owned gallery scene in 1970s and ‘80s New York that Hawkins was an important participant in—including Cinque Gallery, Kenkeleba Gallery, and Just Above Midtown, where she had her first solo exhibition in 1981–as well as the women artists’ circle she was an active member of, which hosted weekly shares, critiques, exchange, and amplification of each others’ work. An important glimpse into Hawkins’s creative process and artistic community, Art Notes, Art is richly illustrated with works by the artist produced during this key period–some of which are now lost–photographs and ephemera, and a visual archive of contemporaneous work by her peers.

Editor: Ananth Shastri
Managing Editor: Rachel Valinsky

Cover of High Shine

De Nieuwe Dansbibliotheek

High Shine

Tamara Antonijevic

High Shine is boek zes van de groeiende collectie van De Nieuwe Dansbibliotheek en boek nul van de Notebooks die opgezet zijn door de fellows van THIRD, het derde cyclus onderzoeksprogramma van DAS Graduate School, ondersteund door DAS Publishing (lectoraat van de Academie voor Theater en Dans) en gefinancierd door de Quality Funds.

Als co-publicatie van DAS Publishing en De Nieuwe Dansbibliotheek, luidt High Shine een nieuw partnerschap in tussen nieuwe platforms en oude vrienden.

Cover of Elegies of the Earth

World Poetry Books

Elegies of the Earth

Ahmad Shamlou, Niloufar Talebi

Poetry €24.00

A sweeping centennial edition of Iran’s iconic twentieth-century poet of liberty, whose work shaped modern Persian poetry. Known for his political engagement and deep humanism, and his pivotal role in Persian poetry’s modernist turn toward free verse, Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) crafted poems that carried both lyrical intimacy and cultural force. A central, defiant voice in Iran’s modern literary history, Shamlou championed the power of poetry as an instrument of liberation. His work, long suppressed in his homeland, remains urgent for readers everywhere confronting censorship, exile, and erasure. This bilingual edition honors Shamlou’s centennial with the most expansive selection of his poetry to date in English, encompassing his wide thematic range: from fierce protest to intimate love, mythic storytelling to existential reflection. Niloufar Talebi’s vibrant translations and deeply researched commentary shine new light on Shamlou’s legacy and his relevance today.

Cover of Verdant Inferno/A Scabby Black Brazilian

Urbanomic

Verdant Inferno/A Scabby Black Brazilian

Alberto Rangel, Jean-Christophe Goddard

Fiction €19.00

A classic of Brazilian literature is twinned with an overheated tract in which tropical delirium swallows up Western philosophy. Both attack the decolonial question with poetic ferocity, ignited by the moment when colonialist rationality meets its limits in the "magnificent disorder" of the Amazon jungle. 

Described in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's foreword as "no longer an interpretation of Brazil but an interpenetration with Brazil," Jean-Christophe Goddard's strange theory-fiction plunges Western philosophy into the great American schizophrenia, where its ordered categories are devored by uncontainable contaminations—first and foremost the rainforest itself, a "monstrosity unapproachable by the cogito." 

In 1664, the Portuguese Bento de Espinosa wrote of his terrifying hallucination of "a scabby black Brazilian." But rather than a vision of "the Other," the dream figure was a frightful glimpse of Bento's own duplicity. Upon adopting the "clean white nickname" of Benedict de Spinoza, the philosopher cut ties with his homeland and its colonial misadventures, repudiating this specter that flees along the lines of migration: "Spinoza is American ... the journey is intensive." And in his wake, a cannibalized cast of conceptual personae are sucked into Goddard's Pernambucan delirium: Franny Deleuze, Dina Levi-Strauss, Chaya Ohloclitorispector, Galli Mathias... 

The rainforest also precipitates a deregulation of the senses in Verdant Inferno, Alberto Rangel's classic 1904 work of Brazilian literature. In Rangel's astonishing tales, this "poet-engineer" sent into the dark interior as a state representative records his encounters in a style that shimmers between objective documentary and visionary limit experience.

Cover of Studies on Squats

Archive Books

Studies on Squats

Yon Natalie Mik

Studies on Squats is an evocative exploration of embodied resistance and political movement that uses the multifaceted posture of the “Asian Squat” as a lens through which broader concepts of migration, illness, and resilience are examined. In Studies on Squats, the body—in its most vulnerable and potent states—becomes a speculative site for reclaiming agency by crafting new forms of protest that draw from ancestral strength, humor and eroticism. This posture, rich with cultural resonance, offers as an entry point to imagine ways in which the body can engage in acts of defiance against systems of oppression. Studies on Squats  invites the audience to consider how dance and choreographic thinking can serve as tools for envisioning alternative futures, where artistry empowers those enduring systemic social injustices to transform their realities. 

Cover of Massive Massive Oil Slick

Ma Bibliothèque

Massive Massive Oil Slick

Sean Ashton

Fiction €17.00

Expect anger. Expect joy, joy interspersed with anger, anger with joy, anger and joy in equal proportions, till joy is eclipsed by anger, or anger by joy. Expect decline. Expect steady and sudden decline, in fortune and wellbeing, a decline in wellbeing in places as far afield as Corby and Inverness, London, Manchester, and Yorkshire. 

Massive Massive Oil Slick is a monologue written in sentences that begin with the verbs expect, suppose, and avoid, delivered in a seminar room of an unnamed institution. The audience is invited to participate in imagined scenarios: predicaments, thought-experiments, moral quandaries. Themes range from profound to mundane, serious to absurd: homelessness, drug trials, social exclusion, traffic, Brazil nuts, carveries, contact with extra-terrestrial life. The result is a prophecy, and the reader the central character through whom multiple futures are posited, dismissed, and revived. 

Cover of A Letter from a Tehran Prison

Bleed Print

A Letter from a Tehran Prison

Wu Qin

Zines €24.00

This story was written by a Chinese activist/writer about her arrest and detention during the waves of resistance in China in late 2022. To evade censorship, she disguised it as a translation—told through the voice of an Iranian Kurdish woman amid the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising happening at the same time. 

After fleeing China, the author reclaimed the story through footnotes—uncovering hidden meanings and restoring its Chinese context. What first read as an Iranian story became, on re-reading, a coded Chinese narrative. Iran stood as both real and metaphorical—a displaced symbol, through which the interconnected struggles in different movements echoed.

The two waves of reading, months apart, became part of the story’s form. This “non-nonfiction” reveals a paradox: in China, truth must appear as fiction or elsewhere to be told—making the fiction more real than reality itself. 

Two years later, the piece was translated “back” into Persian by an Iranian Kurdish activist. And now, it arrives here, in this zine of tripped, layered languages. 

Author: Wu Qin
English Translation: Aaris WOO and Yixi
Farsi Translation: Somayeh Rostampour
Visual & Layout: Maoyi, If A, Hu Jiamin
Interior illustrations: Hu Jiamin
Published by Tofu Stand (Tofulogy 002)

Cover of Afterimages 3: Lis Rhodes Volume 1

LUX, London

Afterimages 3: Lis Rhodes Volume 1

Lis Rhodes

This DVD contains:
Light Reading, 1978, 20 min.
Pictures on Pink Paper, 1982, 35 min.
Cold Draft, 1988, 28 min.

Lis Rhodes has been at the forefront of British experimental filmmaking since the early 1970s. She studied at the North East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. A strong formal aesthetic has been developed in her films, reflecting her involvement with the debates and practice which emerged from the London Filmmakers' Co-operative, where she was Cinema Curator 1975-6. Early 'expanded' works such as Light Music (1975) fused performance and multi-screen projection with an exploration of the visual qualities of sound. Her analysis of broader political and social questions can be traced to her later films, which combine formal rigour with a passionate critique of issues from nuclear power to domestic violence. As an active campaigner for women's rights, Rhodes was a founder member of Circles, the first women's artist film and video (1979) and was an Arts Advisor to the Greater London Council between 1982 and 1985. She lives and works in London and teaches at Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London.

Cover of I Speak Radio

Archive Books

I Speak Radio

Anna Bromley, Achim Lengerer and 1 more

Essays €16.00

Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Anne Bromley's collaborative radio practice.

Since 2010, Anna Bromley has been inviting artists, activists and cultural researchers into the radio studio to explore language and voice together, in the context of sound, politics and everyday life. What began as an artists' radio research format has developed over the years into a series of exhibition pieces focusing on radio and its visible and invisible transmission bodies.
Publishing a selection of her radiophonic essays here for the first time, I Speak Radio reflects Bromley's collaborative radio practice. The publication also provides insight into the corresponding exhibition formats of these projects, including cooperations with a large number of artists, activists, radio makers and theorists. An index of images and texts on Bromley's other artistic works is inserted into the book.
I Speak Radio opens with Bromley's eponymous multimedia essay on the feminist appropriation of early radio technology in the 1920s. A Voice Exists in Voicing, the series of radio essays and sonic portraits with which Bromley opened the Manifesta Radio in Prishtina in the summer of 2022, comprises the core of the book. The accompanying visual element to this section is a series of drawings by Michael Fesca. Contextualizing texts by Catherine Nichols and Hedwig Fijen provide an introduction to A Voice Exists in Voicing. Finally, Bromley talks to media activist Diana McCarty about the politics of persistent radio voices and considers critical perspectives on radio as a medium within art exhibitions.

The reader series Scriptings: Political Scenarios publishes carefully selected scripts and texts by artists that refer neither to academic forms nor to purely literary forms of writing, but rather embed "text" as a fully integral part of contemporary political and visual art practice.

Contributions by Anna Bromley, Diana McCarty, Hedwig Fijen, Catherine Nichols, Tetsuo Kogawa, Alla Mitrofanova, JD Zazie.

Cover of Cyberfeminism Index

Inventory Press

Cyberfeminism Index

Mindy Seu

Design €40.00

Hackers, scholars, artists and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology.

When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.

The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor and researcher Mindy Seu (who began the project during a fellowship at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society, later presenting it at the New Museum), it includes more than 1,000 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.

Contributors include: Skawennati, Charlotte Web, Melanie Hoff, Constanza Pina, Melissa Aguilar, Cornelia Sollfrank, Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Mary Maggic, Neema Githere, Helen Hester, Annie Goh, VNS Matrix, Klau Chinche / Klau Kinky and Irina Aristarkhova.

Cover of My Homies

Birthday, Felony & Fuss

My Homies

Arnaud Eubelen

Published on occasion of Arnaud Eubelen’s solo exhibition My Homies, curated by Jeanne Mouffe presented by Medusa. Enveloped with a poem by Romain Beaudot, the publication, intended to complement the exhibition, traces Arnaud’s footsteps to the conception of his trash-to-treasure practice. 

Cover of The Ultraviolet Catastrophe

Zero Books

The Ultraviolet Catastrophe

Susan Finlay

Fiction €18.00

Legal-high addict, gaming enthusiast, and principal shareholder of AstroLabs™, Lex Rameses, has recently discovered—and purchased—Proserpina: a planet with a near-identical ecosystem to Earth’s. Yet, although his humanistic, hipster pretensions mean that many people admire him, there is still one thing standing in the way of his space-colonization program: as of yet, there is no way to travel to Proserpina safely.

Enter a cast of mad scientists, Astro–Marxists, a neurorobotic AI hivemind, an extinction anxiety addict, the victims of an interrelated crypto-currency gaming scam, and a seemingly endless succession of ravers and gamers in search of the ultimate hallucinogenic, carcinogenic, neü-space-age high…

The Ultraviolet Catastrophe is raucous, hilarious, irreverent, and wildly smart, taking aim at techno-salvation fantasies, startup culture, and the eternal humiliation of having a body under the ridiculous conditions of late capitalism. Finlay's new novel is as unexpected and unique as all of her work. Read it now.
—
Elvia Wilk, author of Oval and Death by Landscape 

Cover of Shop Signs in Kharkiv and Other Writings

Rab-Rab Press

Shop Signs in Kharkiv and Other Writings

Maik Yohansen, Eugene Ostashevsky

The second volume of the sdvig series, dedicated to translingual avant-garde writing, brings together the writings of the Ukrainian modernist poet Maik Yohansen from the 1920s and 1930s, translated into English.

Maik Yohansen was a witty and innovative modernist writer in 1920s Ukraine. This small selection of his work includes How to Write Short Stories, a whimsical guide to the art of short-story writing, informed by Formalist and Marxist criticism the author can't help lampooning. It also includes Shop Signs in Kharkiv, a short and irreverent essay on language politics in Soviet Ukraine a decade after the fall of the Russian Empire. And it includes an autobiography and a selection of Yohansen's masterful poetry in the original and translation.
Everything that Yohansen did—whether fiction, or cultural criticism, or linguistics, or screenwriting, or even autobiographical sketches—he did as a poet, listening to and playing with language. He dedicated his life to achieving equality for Ukrainian as a medium for world literature. In 1937 Maik Yohansen was shot on trumped-up terrorism charges in the mass purge of authors whom Ukrainians now call "the Executed Renaissance."
Translated by poet Eugene Ostashevsky, Yohansen's writings are introduced by Galina Babak, scholar of Ukrainian Formalism.

Maik Yohansen (1895–1937) was an Ukrainian modernist writer, poet, playwright, translator, critic and linguist. He was one of the founders of the literary union VAPLITE (Vilna Akademia Proletarskoi Literatury).

Cover of Thievery and Songs

Salzburger Kunstverein

Thievery and Songs

Gernot Wieland

Publication accompanying the exhibition Gernot Wieland (08.02.-05.07.2020). 

One can summarize Gernot Wieland and his work as an intertwining of the man, the artist, and the artwork. With Gernot, we experience in his artwork and in his presence more of a quiet, constant fascination with what is around him and what has affected or influenced or indeed shaped him sinde his childhood. These impressions - whether quirky memories or indeed tragic experiences and the non-stop grappliing with what has happened - arise in his artwork or in his conversation, whether directly or not. Alongside self-analysis and presentation through his artwork is an analysis of societal norms and indeed repressed aspects of society as it expresses itself, even violently, in hegemonic structures - in the classroom and upon children, for example. From his sketches or film narratives we catch a powerful glimpse upon a concentration of trauma, repression, and guilt placed upon his generation, an Austrian condition manifesting itself in obscene and absurd ways.

Cover of Elika Hedayat

Éditions Empire

Elika Hedayat

Elika Hedayat

Monograph €30.00

First monograph of the Franco-Iranian artist.

This monographic catalogue looks back over the first 15 years of work by Iranian artist Elika Hedayat through more than 110 reproductions. Two of these are on a 1:1 scale, and a detailed set offers a comparison of the dimensions of the works in relation to each other.

Françoise Docquiert introduces the issues at stake in her practice with an essay, complemented by an interview with Joana P.R. Neves.

"Elika is a Parisian-Iranian artist. This cultural blend  is  slightly  ironic  though  very  significant, as it nourishes her artistic work and practice. Inspired by her childhood, her life, and the violence in her native country, she makes films, videos, and drawings always filled with beauty, scathing humour and cruelty." - Annette Messager

Born 1979 in Tehran, Elika Hedayat lives and works between Paris and Tehran. Arriving in France in 2004, she was admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in Annette Messager's studio, from wich she graduated with the Jury's congratulations in 2008.

For her works, Elika Hedyat often uses testimonies and experimental documentaries stage in a dreamlike and imaginary universe. Her stories are contemporary and her characters are real. All of her works revisits historical references, transferring them to the field of personnal experience, mainly using the various possibilities of her repertoire as a narrative document and memory retrieval tool. Reality, memory and imagination come together in a personal story under different forms : drawing, video, documentary, painting and performance. 

Text by Françoise Docquiert.
Interview with Elika Hedayat by Joana P. R. Neves.

Cover of The Mouth That Eats Itself: Geography & the Problem of Space

becoming press

The Mouth That Eats Itself: Geography & the Problem of Space

Carl Olsson

Philosophy €16.00

The fate of our freedom is among the most important topics for philosophy. All animals have to set themselves apart from their surroundings. Whenever they fail to break free from space, they are not only unfree but effectively become nothing. In our case, we emancipate ourselves with our hands and feet and membranes; but uniquely also through our representations of ourselves in the world, which is to say, through geography.

The Mouth That Eats Itself (2026) follows geographical thought from its inception to its descent into fang-toothed self-contradiction. In the course of identifying how and when geography makes us free, a terrible trap is set: a portrait that devours its unwary creator by raising the well-worn conflict between freedom and necessity to a transcendental level. The katabasis of geography’s logic is not a matter of idle inconsistency but an information hazard directly related to the fate of animals that lose their contours and disappear.

To reach this conclusion, Carl Olsson draws a diagonal line between ideas and images, from careful exegesis of Kant’s first Critique to countless vivid examples involving praying mantises, chameleons, geometry and owl-eyed butterflies. The ambient payoff is undeniable: you learn as much about the world as you do about yourself, and Olsson’s stunning vocabulary and precise choice of words never ceases to entertain.

Carl Olsson is a geographer and writer interested in how geographical thought impacts the human body. His work tells stories about geographers and other animals that get lost in space, extracting philosophical implications from scenarios that span the mundane and the otherworldly.

Cover of When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader

Duke University Press

When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader

Susan Stryker, McKenzie Wark

Essays €27.00

Susan Stryker is a foundational figure in trans studies. When Monsters Speak showcases the development of Stryker’s writing from the 1990s to the present. It combines canonical pieces, such as “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” with her hard to find earlier work published in zines and newsletters. Brought together, they ground Stryker’s thought in 1990s San Francisco and its innovative queer, trans, and S/M cultures. The volume includes an introduction by editor McKenzie Wark, who highlights Stryker’s connections to developments in queer theory, media studies, and autotheory while foregrounding Stryker’s innovative writing style and scholarly methods. When Monsters Speak is an authoritative and essential collection by one of the most important and influential intellectuals of our time.