Acting like an academic endpoint, cuneiform everything.

Conlan Eliseu is a vampire and an out-of-vogue fashion stylist who takes a job as an advisor at the Gatlin Finishing School, a three-year vocational program for talented teens in a theatre town. Human teen Doeke Schreyer wants to be a star and isn’t afraid of hard work. He just can’t seem to get it. Will his corporeal charms help him exceed the curse on his name, inherited from his adoptive parents?

Confidences / Production deals with the process of keeping the past alive, whether as image or restaging. It is the fourth instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which uses the figure of the vampire as shorthand for cultural movement. Following Confidences / Baseline, Confidences / Majority, and Confidences / Oracle, this new episode contains excerpts or elements from scripts by the artist, as well as documents and reflections on the tradition and transmission of theatre. 

Ivan Cheng (b. 1991, Sydney) produces films, objects, paintings and publications as anchors for the staging of complex and precarious spectacles. His background as a performer and musician form the basis for his using performance as a critical medium and questioning publics and accessibility. He holds an MFA in Critical Studies from Sandberg Instituut. His performances, works and writings have been recently presented at Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; galerie Édouard Montassut, Paris; Villa Imperiale, Pesaro; OCTO, Marseille; Volksbühne Roter Salon, Berlin; gta Exhibitions, Zurich; and Mind Eater Festival, Oslo. In 2017 he initiated the project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam.

Confidences / Production is published in collaboration with Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Naarm/Melbourne, in conjunction with the presentation of the project, Ivan Cheng: NP in September 2024.

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.

Dispersed Events brings together for the first time Nick Mauss’ essays from the last fifteen years. Shimmering with the urgency of a new generation of queer thinkers, Mauss’ writing refracts contemporary art through histories of decorative art, film, theater, and dance.

An artist renowned for critically and poetically reconfiguring inherited genealogies and hierarchies of visual culture and art history, Mauss engages writing as a space for relentlessly activating counter-histories, repositioning the voice of the artist and the readers along the way. Whether he considers the practice of artist Lorraine O’Grady, the radical fashion of Susan Cianciolo, the anarcho-vaudevillian theater of Reza Abdoh, or the potential for textiles to disclose a different way of thinking, Mauss insists on the intense power of forms and feelings in their actual rather than enforced prehistories. Reevaluating experiments in fashion, dance, and the decorative arts on the same plane as painting, sculpture and cinema, he locates art as taking shape in the middle of conversations—“between art history and any afternoon.”

“Among what might initially appear, following Mauss, ‘a wildly inscrutable web of lineages,’ the reader quickly perceives unexpected, unheralded, conjunctions: affiliations, alignments, and affinities. . . . It generates a conviction that, in the best sense, is partisan. Singular, independent, illuminating.” — from the foreword by Lynne Cooke

Can critical thinking spring from both a fortune cookie and Jacques Lacan’s most obscure seminar footnote? Estelle Hoy says yes. In saké blue, overpriced cheesecakes are the starting point for an essay on art writing; shoplifting in Berlin opens to a reflection on the economies of activist practices; fiction allows us to discuss the legacy of institutional critique, queer mélanges, or quiet melancholy. To her, the story of art becomes more nuanced in light of lyrics by Arthur Russell, the posthumous sorrow of Sylvia Plath, or a poem by Yvonne Rainer.

saké blue gathers critical essays, art reviews, and poetic fiction. Written in dialogue with the work of Martine Syms, Marlene Dumas, Hervé Guibert, or Camille Henrot, these texts combine the subjective and analytic, addressing power relations and the force of affect. Hoy spares nothing—and no one, exposing cultural clichés and urgent political issues through fast-paced acerbity. She advocates the work of women artists, mocks stereotypes, questions myths, and champions desire, sadness, and boredom. Simultaneously beautiful, lyrical, and cutthroat, her writing echoes to the reader like l’esprit d’escalier—we think of the perfect reply just a little too late.

“Estelle Hoy practises philosophy as an unsettled but deeply committed query into existing together. She reads, she looks, she writes, to find out something essential about the future and living for it.”
—Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

“Estelle Hoy's prose slap and bite, saké blue is a sharp pleasure to read.”
—Calla Henkel, author of Scrap

“Hoy’s renditions of all-too familiar scenes are made more visceral than life with sparkling prose and a sly attention to life’s many shifting values that feels more than appropriate for anyone truly interested in art.”
—Natasha Stagg, author of Artless

Edited by Antonia Carrara
With an introduction by Lisa Robertson

Les Voies du Paradis rassemble ce qui subsiste d’une œuvre perdue : les seules notes de bas de page d’un texte manquant, laissées par un chercheur après son décès et éditées par Peter Cornell. Ces notes et leurs illustrations forment un ensemble incomplet, qui se donne ici à lire à travers ses manques. Un fil – d’Ariane ? – se tisse entre les diagrammes, les figures de spirales et de labyrinthes – de Cesare Ripa à Ernst Josephson et Robert Smithson, des Templiers aux spirites et aux surréalistes – qui parcourent le texte et se font écho, comme les éléments d’une énigme ou des figures ésotériques. Le « Paradis » dont il est question ici, c’est le rêve de la connaissance absolue, la saisie de l’ordre caché des choses, à laquelle aspirent autant poètes et artistes que mystiques et scientifiques…

Paru en Suède en 1987, Les Voies du Paradis y a acquis la réputation d’un livre culte. Peter Cornell y propose une perspective inédite sur les liens entre art, littérature, spiritualité et occultisme, dans un texte à mi-chemin de l’essai et de la fiction, de l’érudition et de la mystification. La volonté de savoir y est mise en scène comme une quête prise au piège de l’irrationnel ; les notes s’assemblent par logique associative, programme éclectique qui tente encore de retrouver un centre perdu – comme les algorithmes auxquels est confiée aujourd’hui la tâche fantasmée de mettre en ordre les connaissances humaines.

Welcome to the world, Eraser! We are proudly annoucing the release of Angharad Williams’ book, which concludes a two-year process of writing and has existed in the form of an exhibition, a performance, and a book. Eraser is as much about the categorical boundaries of our consensual reality—between self and other, human and non-human, waking and dreaming consciousness—as it is about an urge to overcome them. The book’s main protagonist undergoes multiple transformations via psychic and physical transferences with elementary forces—involving a trout and a magpie, among other things—that unsettle the idea of the “stable” self.

Eraser proposes a perspective in which the categorical distinctions between individual self, others, and non-human life slowly begin to dissolve. Other worlds of consciousness—of animals, plants, and organic matter—here embody a form of social organization free from the hierarchies of tradition and liberal progress.

This publication is copublished with the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Angharad Williams, born 1984 in Ynys Môn, Wales, lives and works in Berlin.

An artist's book by New York-based author and artist Sam Pulitzer (born 1984), The Premise of a Better Life combines photographs with ethical and existential questions addressed to the viewer, in an allegory of the contemporary condition. These photographs of everyday things, ambiguous details, nondescript landscapes and cityscapes were mostly taken in New York, although the city appears as the pale reflection of a model city.

Each picture is accompanied by a question: "Can you afford yourself?" "Are you waiting for a moment that just won't come?" "If you knew then what you know now, would it make a difference?" "Do you trust happiness?" The montages offer a complex, personal, at times satirical image of the present age.

An original essay by Pulitzer unfolds the project's philosophical and political issues, notably discussing a key reference for the project, Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope.

This new edition of Faux Pas, the acclaimed collection of writings by Amy Sillman, comes as an expanded edition, with the addition of new essays, including recent texts on Paul Cézanne, Carolee Schneemann, Elizabeth Murray and Louise Fishman. The previously unpublished text from a lecture on drawing complements Sillman's views on color and shape. New drawings from 2020-22 include a selection of works on paper that were part of the artist's installation at the 59th International Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, in 2022.

Since the 1970s, Sillman, a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene, has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.

Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, reevaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing in depth the role and meanings of color and shape. Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas gathers a significant selection of Sillman's essays, reviews and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of them made specially for the book.

Faux Pas aims at revealing the coherence and originality of Sillman's reflection, as she addresses the possibilities of art today, favoring excess over good taste, wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols, with as much critical sense as humor.

Based in New York City, Amy Sillman (born 1955) is an artist whose work consistently combines the visceral with the intellectual. She began to study painting in the 1970s at the School of Visual Arts and she received her MFA from Bard College in 1995. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial in 2014 and the Venice Biennale in 2022; her writing has appeared in Bookforum and Artforum, among other publications. She is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York.

The uprising was staged by the minority, and a downfall is remembered by the majority.

Gilgamesh “Gil” Gupta is a theatre maker and self-defined “avant-gardist.” As a young vampire, Gil’s alienation from time, body, and identity only increases with the murder of his sire, Patrice. Seasons pass in spite of this, and Gil endeavours to circumvent inter-species edicts to foster a meaningful audience. Recognition becomes a vocation.

Confidences / Majority is a novel that presents entertainment as critical gospel. Seething a trail of cultural debris, Majority is the second instalment in Ivan Cheng’s Confidences series, which deploys a version of the vampire and performance as sites for transformation and maintenance.

Ivan Cheng (b. 1991, Sydney) produces films, objects, paintings and publications as anchors for the staging of complex and precarious spectacles. His background as a performer and musician form the basis for his using performance as a critical medium and questioning publics and accessibility. He holds an MFA in Critical Studies from Sandberg Instituut; his work has recently been presented at Voiture14 (Marseille), La Maison Pop (Montreuil), Les Urbaines (Lausanne), Volksbühne Roter Salon (Berlin), Oude Kerk (Amsterdam), Belvedere21 (Vienna), MuHKA (Antwerp), Carriageworks (Sydney), Federation Square (Melbourne). In 2017 he initiated the project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam.

Confidences / Majority is published simultaneous to Cheng’s solo presentation Milieu at Édouard Montassut, Paris.

Poet, editor, filmmaker, actor, child star in Mussolini’s Italy, founder of The Dead Language Press and of the Paris Filmmakers Cooperative, Piero Heliczer (1937–1993) was an essential yet secret agent of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture. In the course of his nomadic existence in Rome, New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Préaux-du-Perche, where he spent the last few years of his life, he met and worked with a constellation of avant-garde writers, forged friendships with figures from the Beat Generation and the British Poetry Revival as well as the New York art scene. At the crossroads of many underground experiences, Heliczer’s name appears in books dedicated to the artists and poets he collaborated with during his lifetime—names by the likes of Gregory Corso, Barbara Rubin, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Ira Cohen, or The Velvet Underground, a band he participated in creating with his friend Angus MacLise.

This myth obscures the fact that Piero Heliczer was first and foremost a poet. Today, this part of his work is overlooked; it is all the more difficult to encounter because Heliczer himself never collected it. So it was scattered, or lost, in the course of his wanderings. Heliczer favored the circulation of his works rather than their archiving: he was committed to the production of mobile forms—flyers, broadsides, and other ephemera—disseminated his verses in magazines, and preferred public readings and performances to the finished form of the book.

The present volume gathers a significant number of Heliczer’s poetic works through facsimile reproduction of his contributions to more than thirty periodicals—mostly stemming from poets’ presses or universities—published between 1958 and 1979. This collection isn’t “complete”—but it makes available again poems that, in some cases, never circulated after their initial publication. 

Un recueil de poèmes de Piero Heliczer (1937–1993), auteur, éditeur et cinéaste, figure de l’underground et de la contre-culture, proche de Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, et Jack Smith. Sa poésie, héritière de la Beat Generation, restitue en métaphores et images saisissantes des expériences et des visions personnelles, tout en s’appuyant sur des formes héritées de la tradition anglaise et des partis-pris typographiques originaux. Ce recueil rassemble des facsimilés des publications originales de poèmes de Heliczer – périodiques d’artistes, revues miméographiées, petits magazines… – accompagnées de leurs traductions en français, ainsi que de plusieurs documents, parmi lesquels une reproduction intégrale d’une publication rare de 1961, Wednesday Paper, et, en insert, un facsimilé d’un placard de 1975, The Handsome Policeman.

Traduction des poèmes: Rachel Valinsky
Publié avec l’aide du CNAP

This is the first monograph on the internationally acclaimed French Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa (born 1985). Love, hatred, war, technology, social unrest, bodies and words in crisis: this is the material of which Beloufa’s work is made. His films, sculptures and multimedia installations audaciously explore how art can address today’s issues, challenging contemporary representations of social relationships, power games, and political and economic structures. An artist favoring collaborations over authorship, and responsive strategies over predetermined intentions, Beloufa has invented his own work methods, and a particular approach to the studio.

The catalog presents the artist’s projects over the past 12 years, including recent experiments with online platforms and NFTs; it takes as its starting point Beloufa’s solo show, Digital Mourning, at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, and offers a non-conformist take on the genre of the monograph, thanks to Olivier Lebrun’s playful and inventive book design.
 
Beloufa’s work has been exhibited at the ICA, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. He took part in the Venice Biennale in 2013 and 2019. His work is present in public and private collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; and Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf & Berlin.
He is represented by François Ghebaly (Los Angeles / New York), Mendes Wood DM (Sao Paulo / Brussels / New York), kamel mennour (Paris / London), and Zero… (Milan).

A new version of After 8 Books' first publication and bestseller: Evelyn’s adventures as a transgender masseuse in Amsterdam, back when she was a young artist, supporting herself by working in a massage salon. The texts are witty, sharp and thoughtful, reflecting a very specific community of friends and coworkers and its counterpart, the male clientele. The drawings illustrating those texts are dreamlike watercolors, perfect companions to Unintended Experience’s diaristic journey.

Au départ, une simple anecdote: un gabion de chasse typique des marais normands se détache de son ancrage pour dériver dans l’Océan Atlantique, avec des chasseurs incapables de nager à son bord. Théo Robine-Langlois transpose cette histoire à une échelle interstellaire: le Gabion, vaisseau spatial chasseur d’astéroïdes conçu pour être attaché à la Terre, dérive dans l’espace. À la suite d’Anton, on traverse les différentes communautés qui peuplent le bâtiment, monde en soi où se côtoient et s’affrontent des mœurs, des modèles de société, et surtout des formes de langage. Anton, lui, tente d’échapper à celui qui prétend régir le vaisseau, en récoltant des photocopies éparpillées dans ses méandres, jusqu’à son mystérieux cœur...

Empruntant au roman d’apprentissage autant qu’à la science-fiction, Le Gabion est aussi une chanson de geste: une odyssée symbolique où la langue et la figure de l’auteur sont traités de manière expérimentale, comme faisant partie du récit lui-même. Les langues que parlent les personnages contaminent le livre, qui se construit comme un montage où poésie, philosophie, histoire littéraire, hip hop et échanges SMS se rejoignent. En parcourant le Gabion, les lecteur.trice.s rencontrent différents rapports au langage, qui se concrétisent à la fin du livre par l’élection d’un maire de banlieue parisienne.

Le Gabion poursuit le travail entamé par Théo Robine-Langlois dans son premier livre, [...], où le subterfuge typographique des points de suspension entre crochets signifiait à la fois l’existence de trous dans la langue, d’échappatoires dans l’imaginaire, et de nuages dans le ciel. Dans Le Gabion, on peut se cacher dans un paragraphe, lire entre les lignes d’un manuel de photocopieuse, se battre avec des missiles-poèmes, rencontrer des enfants sanguinaires et des sororités féministes. On traverse également plusieurs siècles de poésie française, des troubadours à Henri Chopin ou Hélène Bessette.

Texte en Français

Yesterday as they smoked, a cigarette butt leaked and burned
their delicately stitched summertime pyjamas. A round hole
on their torso reminded the holes drilled in the wall the day
before to ventilate their room.

Trompette gathers three short texts by Soto Labor, along with their beautiful drawings, that tell about magnificient animals who observe and eat the world. 
Bilingual, French & English.

Trois courts textes de Soto Labor, accompagnés de ses dessins, où des animaux magnifiques observent et mangent le monde. 
Bilingue français/anglais.

The Presage Pamphlet Series welcomes new, shorter and more portable text formats, printed in-house (it’s cheap & chic!).

Essays on art-making, abstraction, humor, not-knowing, awkwardness and more, from one of New York’s most influential and popular painters and teachers

Since the 1970s, Amy Sillman—a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene—has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.

Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, reevaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing in depth the role and meanings of color and shape. Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas is the first book to gather a significant selection of Sillman’s essays, reviews and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of them made specially for the book.

Faux Pas aims at revealing the coherence and originality of Sillman’s reflection, as she addresses the possibilities of art today, favoring excess over good taste, wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols, with as much critical sense as humor. As Jason Farago notes in the New York Times, "Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let’s say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in Faux Pas ... her writings display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings."

Based in New York City, Amy Sillman (born 1955) is an artist whose work consistently combines the visceral with the intellectual. She began to study painting in the 1970s at the School of Visual Arts and she received her MFA from Bard College in 1995. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial in 2014; her writing has appeared in Bookforum and Artforum, among other publications. She is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York.

Pisti, 80 rue de Belleville is Estelle Hoy’s latest novel.

Elke is a young academic with a troubled past that keeps spilling onto her present. Just as she is about to leave town for a writing retreat, she meets Pisti, a charismatic, hard-boiled but luscious Hungarian left activist, who runs an anarchist collective in Paris. Over one night in a Belleville apartment, old friends and new lovers discuss–and act–polyamory, politics, and the art of conversation.

A wry exploration of the seductive allure of tropes and cliché in the art world and politics, Pisti is also an experiment in writing, shamelessly flirting with namedropping and appropriation. The character of Pisti was appropriated from Chris Kraus’ novel Torpor.

Pisti and it's blasphemy against the left and art world is not apostasy, but rather a stepping away from a teleological view of politics and instead, a radical reimagining of the role of incompatibilities, partial identities, cliché and perhaps ultimately, the unresolvedness of hypocrisy.   Which is to say, not taking things too seriously, in order to take them seriously. - Estelle Hoy

This light, pocketbook format publication by After 8 Books gathers works by French artist Julie Beaufils, and three short stories commissioned for the occasion, dealing altogether with social tensions and emotional explosions.
The ink drawings by Julie Beaufils that form the core of the book, follow a logic of editing, accumulation and narrative incompleteness: the figures come from memories of films or TV series, as sediments of mass culture, or sometimes from personal observations and experiences crystallized in images. Shapes and figures develop as an ambivalent collection, informed by the weight and the vibration of lines and strokes.

This book aims at triggering the interpretation of these works, and at making their “reading” more complex, more playful too. Graphic designer Scott Ponik composed a visual story close to a manga, part abstraction, part emotion. The narrative and affective potential of the drawings is further activated by their free association with three short stories by Michael Van den Abeele, Buck Ellison, and Reba Maybury. Van den Abeele tells about the inner thoughts of a donor at the sperm bank; Buck Ellison’s story follows a few hours in the life of some girls in the San Francisco area, dealing with the cruelty and the naïvety of their relationships; while Reba Maybury proposes an erotic analysis of the connection between desire and capitalism.

Fade the Lure is a collection of poems and photographs created between 2014 and 2017, during Dena Yago’s experience working and living alongside emotional support dogs in Los Angeles. In Yago’s words, poetry is sometimes “a form of communication created out of the desire to avoid, and an inability to engage in other forms of direct communication” with animals or humans. Fade the Lure explores the possibility for the poem to account for relationships that materialize and live beyond words, while being embedded in a consumerist society’s confined structures.

Dena Yago (born 1988, lives & works in NYC) is an artist, a writer and a poet. She was one of the founding members of K-HOLE, a trend forecasting group active from 2010 to 2016. Recent publications include Ambergris (Bodega) and Esprit Reprise (Pork Salad Press). Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and at Bodega in New York.