A literary tribute to Sarah Lucas, at once an adroit art-historical study and a poetic travelogue.

“Distance is far, nobody said. (Somebody, surely.)” So begins Quinn Latimer's strange, elliptical account of an exhibition and a body of work by Sarah Lucas that the poet and critic has never seen, made and installed in a city she had not yet visited. In the spring of 2012 the renowned English artist's exhibition “NUDs” was mounted in Mexico City at Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli, the famed pyramid-like museum built by the muralist and architect Juan O'Gorman to house Rivera's approximately 50,000 Mesoamerican artifacts and objects. In the summer of 2012 Latimer found herself in Elba, the island of Napoleon's exile, where she embarked on this small, charged book. In four interconnected essays, the writer limns the myriad impressions, ideas, objects, personages, and histories relevant to Lucas's fantastically transparent yet complicated “NUDs,” and their storied making and installation in Mexico. Exploring shame, passivity, palindromes and fertility statuary, as well as notables including Antonin Artaud, Napoleon, Susan Sontag and Mary Wollstonecraft, Describe This Distance is at once an adroit art-historical study and a poetic travelogue, once or twice removed.

A significant contribution to the understanding of the work of artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith, by art historian Romi Crawford, who analyzes how Smith recastsfilm history, in a pivotal period of her career.

Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Cauleen Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film, and makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. The book Breaking Cinema. Experimental Film 2010–2023 adds to the growing scholarship on Cauleen Smith's work, as art historian Romi Crawford elucidates a critical phase of the artist's career and how Smith recasts film history in the context of the artistic and cultural ferment of Chicago's South Side.

Cauleen Smith (born 1967 in Riverside, CA) is an American filmmaker and artist. Her interdisciplinary work expands from histories and practices of experimental film, including structuralism, Third World cinema, and science fiction. Through immersive installations, moving-image works, sculpted objects, and textiles, she engages with non-Western cosmologies, Afro-diasporic histories, Black cultural icons, real and speculative utopias, and, in her words, "the everyday possibilities of the imagination."

A series of preparatory drawings for exhibitions by Michael E. Smith, collected over fifteen years.

Michael E. Smith occasionally creates drawings as organizational notes for his exhibitions: a to-do list may be intertwined with a sketch outlining an idea for a sculpture, and at times, drawings emerge as impromptu phone scribbles. Over the past fifteen years, Michael E. Smith has accumulated a substantial collection of drawings, largely unpublished until now. To complement the exhibition dedicated to the artist in 2024, the Kunst Museum Winterthur is releasing an artist book featuring a comprehensive selection of drawings from this period.

Michael E. Smith (born 1977 in Detroit) makes sculptures out of cast-offs, waste and other residues of our consumer society. He assembles and manipulates this found material in an unusual way. He isolates objects, makes changes to their form and seeks out the limits of their imaginative power. His presentations are characterized by an intense yet sparse choreography of the exhibition space. Accordingly, they manifest themselves as site-responsive artworks exploiting all of the museum's infrastructure. Smith's work seems to avoid any form of sublimation. His predilection for the absurd and for an indefinable tension ensue from a broader critical view of the ecological, economic and social challenges facing our society.

Afterword by Lynn Kost.

A journey through the artist's work and life.

William Anastasi is the author of a prolific body of work. A major figure in conceptualism and in many respects one of its initiators, his trajectory cannot be solely confined to this chapter in the history of contemporary art. The book revisits, through the prism of multiple voices, the various aspects of an approach that unfolded with the use of complementary mediums. Drawing coexists with photography and "new" technologies, alongside objects, paintings, and installations. Within this corpus to be (re)discovered, sounds, images, and language, as well as artifacts, protocols, and processes, convey inquiries related to space and time, representation, and perception. With contributions from Dove Bradshaw, Chiara Costa, Béatrice Gross, Valérie Mavridorakis, Hélène Meisel, Sébastien Pluot, Julia Robinson, Robert Storr, and Erik Verhagen.

Edited by Erik Verhagen.
Texts by Dove Bradshaw, Chiara Costa, Béatrice Gross, Valérie Mavridorakis, Hélène Meisel, Sébastien Pluot, Julia Robinson, Robert Storr, Erik Verhagen.

The first comprehensive monograph devoted to artist Bea Schlingelhoff.

Conceived on the occasion of Bea Schlingelhoff's solo exhibition No River to Cross at Kunstverein München, this publication extends far beyond this to survey fifteen years of her artistic practice through imagery, ephemera, and various texts. Additionally, the publication brings together five newly commissioned pieces of writing, penned by Catherine Chevalier, Gloria Hasnay, Christina Irrgang, Helene Moll, and Sadie Plant, each focusing on a specific body of Schlingelhoff's work. Each book is one of a kind and bound in different endpapers from the private collection of the artist's father.

Edited by Gloria Hasnay.
Texts by Catherine Chevalier, Gloria Hasnay, Christina Irrgang, Helene Moll, Sadie Plant.

A fully-fledged artistic project expanded with writings, poems, and aphorisms by the artist alongside various interviews.

Traveling in the Dark is an exhibition and a publication by the world-renowned film director, poet, writer, music composer, literary critic, and art theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha. The book is a fully fledged artistic project conceived by Trinh from the script and visuals of her film What about China? and expanded with her writings, poems, and aphorisms as well as various interviews that investigate "a relationship to infinity," "memory of the mirror," and the "in-between." The book offers an experience with many possible entries, words, voices, thoughts, images, and pauses. As a visual, poetic, and philosophical experience, Traveling in the Darkinvites us to rethink and experience "reality" differently from an approach mainly based on knowledge and re-presentation that we already possess or that is imposed on us. In other words: How can we learn to see our world without a priori seeing and knowing? In a time when the "all-seen" and "all-told" invade and control our daily lives, our private spheres and urban spaces, where are the areas of invisibility and shadows that leave us autonomy to see and to think, to say and to represent, to remember and to imagine? Traveling in the Dark engages the visitor and reader in an open montage of visual, sonic, and poetic textures, whose resonances, vibrations, recollections, exchanges, brushes, reflections, and passages undermine any pretense of fixed identity, historical truth, or prescribed territory.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, in 2022-2023.

Born in Vietnam in 1952, Trinh T. Minh-ha is an artist, writer, music composer, filmmaker, and literary theorist, teaching as Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in the departments of Gender & Women's Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco.

Reference trilingual monograph / a conceptual art's discourse around Hélio Oiticica's parangolés.

The tension generated between euro-centric and peripheral conceptualisms is put into question, in order to insert the work of Oiticica in the international Neo-Avantgarde logic, where life transits into art, and art into life. The research carried out by Delmari Romero Keith and Marc Pottier validates the idea that vindicates art's power as a social denunciation vehicle and a poetic-politic complaint. This proposal re-dimensions Oiticica's work and positions it beyond conceptual and performative trends. Parangolés rekindle the postmodern allegorical impulse that activates fragments which manifest structures of cancelled imaginary. They are manifestations of atavistic referents, ancestral rituals, and residual memory—appropriated from the Brazilian favelas and the carnival—and links between the rhythms of the body and those of nature. Performative action, which covers the sensorial aspects of a human being—a radical elaboration of Neoconcretism connected to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology.

Hélio Oiticica's Parangolés are a manifestation of canons different to the euro-centric ones. In them, we find the crossing between the cult and the vernacular, a strategy of artistic renovation. They incorporate a multi-disciplinary proposal—dance, movement, contortions, music, rhythm, poetry and, above all, exuberant colors—to stage the displacement of a fluid and hybrid identity that harasses, agitates, and protests against social inequalities. Hélio Oiticica's Parangolé devours autochthonous customs and mainstream aesthetic influences. This genre hybridization, this anthropophagic awakening, revealed the centripetal force of the movement that, in the end, meant a criticism of the time's statu quo.

Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) was a Brazilian artist and theorist, sculptor, painter, performer, filmmaker and writer. Founder of the Tropicália movement in the late 1960s, he is known for his participation in the neo-concretism movement, for his innovative use of color, and for what he called "environmental art," which included the Parangolés and the Penetrables.

Rory Pilgrim presents their first catalogue, bringing together their multifaceted practice as a filmmaker, composer, and more. Sharing work produced since 2008, this lovingly made book designed by Modern Activity includes sketchbooks, scores, song lyrics, and poetry. It is published on the occasion of the exhibitions Where The Tide Takes Us, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, and Radio Ballads, Serpentine Gallery, London.

Rory Pilgrim (born 1988 in Bristol) works in a wide range of media including songwriting, composing music, film, music video, text, drawing and live performances. Centred on emancipatory concerns, Pilgrim aims to challenge the nature of how we come together, speak, listen and strive for social change through sharing and voicing personal experience. Strongly influenced by the origins of activist, feminist and socially engaged art, Pilgrim works with others through a different methods of dialogue, collaboration and workshops. In an age of increasing technological interaction, Rory Pilgrim's work creates connections between activism, spirituality, music and how we form community locally and globally from both beyond and behind our screens.

Edited by Rory Pilgrim, Jule Hillgärtner, Nele Kaczmarek, Zsa-Zsa Eyck, Matthew Appleton.

Texts by Jerry Brady, Jule Hillgärtner, Nele Kaczmarek, Human Poney, Louwrien Wijers.

New perspectives on the process of translation from the works of more than thirty international artists.

"[…] what I consider to be one of the most important arts of the future: the art of translation."
—Édouard Glissant

With The Poetry of Translation, Kunst Meran Merano Arte investigates the compelling phenomenon of translation. Over seventy works by over thirty artists shed light on the process of translation from novel perspectives

Inspired by the living multilingual environment of South Tyrol and its eventful history of interethnic cohabitation, Kunst Meran Merano Arte offers the ideal context for a research on translation and questions surrounding identity, multiculturalism, and diversity. The essays and visuals included in the book address translation in its complexity: on the one hand, as a source of inclusion, international understanding, creativity, genius and poetry, while on the other as a cause of misunderstanding and exclusion. It is understood here as a creative process through which something new is always created.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Kunst Meran Merano Arte in 2021-2022, with Amelia Etlinger, Anna Esposito, Annika Kahrs, Anri Sala, Augusto De Campos, Babi Badalov, Ben Vautier, Carla Accardi, Cerith Wyn Evans, Christine Sun Kim & Thomas Mader, Elisabetta Gut, Ettore Favini, Franco Marini, Franz Pichler, Freundeskreis, Jorel Heid & Alexandra Griess, Heinz Gappmayr, Irma Blank, Johann Georg Hettinger, Jorinde Voigt, Kader Attia, Katja Aufleger, Ketty La Rocca, Kinkaleri, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lawrence Weiner, Leander Schwazer, Lena Iglisonis, Lenora De Barros, Lucia Marcucci, Maria Stockner, Marilla Battilana, Michele Galluzzo & Franziska Weitgruber, Mirella Bentivoglio, Otto Neurath, Siggi Hofer, Slavs and Tatars, Tomaso Binga.

Over the last four decades, American artist and filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh has forged a distinctive moving image practice in the ruins of originality and authority. monWith contributions from Erika Balsom, Elena Gorfinkel, Tendai Mutambu, John David Rhodes and Shola von Rheinold, Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines explores how she has extended and contested the paradigm of experimental cinema.

Since the early 1980s, Peggy Ahwesh (born 1954 in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania) has produced one of the most heterogeneous bodies of work in the field of experimental film and video. A true bricoleur, her tools include narrative and documentary styles, improvised performance and scripted dialogue, synch-sound film, found footage, digital animation, and crude Pixelvision video. The work is primarily an investigation cultural identity and the role of the subject, in various genres. Ahwesh work with subversively amateur forms, and also a discourse that yielded traditionally female-gendered themes like home and family, relationships, and confessions, which she appropriated as scenarios. Her practice insists on political and social topicality, handled with theoretical and formal rigor, with a nod to popular culture forms. She draws the audience into the world and traditions of avant-garde film and video, where, as she has remarked, "there's nothing to prove and no money to make," only the pleasures of the text.

Comprehensive monograph of the Californian artist and political activist.

This book covers Suzanne Lacy's whole career, presenting a selection of her major projects: from the pioneering Prostitution Notes (1974), an artwork that combines conceptual and performance art with social commitment focused on the theme of prostitution exploitation in some areas of Los Angeles, to Crystal Quilt(1985-1987), probably Lacy's most famous work, a huge performance which involved 430 women over 60 seated at tables arranged in the pattern of a large quilt created by Miriam Shapiro, mingling their memories with sociological analyses of society's failure to exploit the potential of old age, to Storing Rape(2012), a discussion among important media personalities, activists and politicians in the attempt to find a different way of describing sexual violence.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition (Suzanne Lacy's first major European exhibition) at Museo Pecci Milano, in 2014-2015.
 
Suzanne Lacy (born 1945 in Wasco, USA, lives and works in Los Angeles) is a visual artist whose prolific career includes performances, video and photographic installation, critical writing and public practices in communities. She is best known as one of the Los Angeles performance artists who began active in the Seventies and shaped and emergent art of social engagement. Her work ranges from intimate, graphic body explorations to large-scale public performances involving literally hundreds of performers and thousands of audience members. She has published over 70 texts of critical commentary, and has exhibited in The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The New Museum and P.S. 1 in New York, and The Bilbao Museum in Spain.

The radical feminist practice of the Italian art historian, art critic, poet, and feminist Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) and its potential relationship to both historical and contemporary art practices offers the contextual framework for the publication Deculturalize.

Lonzi's recurring demand for deculturizzazione, echoed in the book's title, is based on her proclamation that women's inclusion in society must be understood as a constant colonization. Their ensuing "impotence, lack of history, lack of culture" and "insignificance" can thus only be abolished through the establishment of an "unexpected" (female) subjectivation. Rather than continuing to be the object of historical-social power dynamics, women must become the subject of their own life practices through their continuous withdrawal from (patriarchal) norms.

The book's authors explore if and to what degree Lonzi's radical feminist approach is based on art terms and concepts, or historical or contemporary art practices. The motivation was the exhibition Doing Deculturalization, presented at Museion, Bolzano, in 2019, and the related desire to address the (historically ambivalent) relationship between (Italian) female art and the formation of feminist theory.

Essays by Sabeth Buchmann, Laura Iamurri, Marco Scotini and Elvira Vannini, and Giovanna Zapperi focus on this by analyzing works by women artists whose practices are related to Lonzi's deculturizzazione concept. The contributions by artists Claire Fontaine, Ariane Müller, Margherita Morgantin (in conversation with Lia Cigarini) and Suzanne Santoro (in conversation with Ilse Lafer) present specific reflections on Lonzi's feminist legacy, which is always related to the individual artist's own artistic-feminist practice. Juxtaposed with these are philosophical and analytical concepts developed by Marc Rölli and Annarosa Buttarelli, who reconstruct Lonzi's theory of deculturizzazione based on its historical reference points and update it for the present.

With texts by Sabeth Buchmann, Annarosa Buttarelli, Claire Fontaine, Laura Iamurri, Ilse Lafer, Margherita Morgantin & Lia Cigarini, Ariane Müller, Letizia Ragaglia, Marc Rölli, Suzanne Santoro & Ilse Lafer, Marco Scotini & Elvira Vannini, Giovanna Zapperi.

Trilingual edition (English / German / Italian)

"1 Million Roses for Angela Davis" traces Davis' immense influence and legacy as activist and scholar on contemporary artists today, while simultaneously teasing out the contradictions her presence and agenda posed to the GDR's interpretation and application of Marxism.

"A Million Roses for Angela Davis" was the motto of a 1970–72 solidarity campaign in East Germany in support of US philosopher, Communist, and Black Power revolutionary Angela Davis, who at the time was being held on terrorism charges in California.

The large-scale movement firmly anchored the "heroine of the other America" within the cultural memory of a now-vanished social utopia, which after her acquittal welcomed her as a state guest. For her part, Davis had hoped for an internationalist movement promoting a socialist, feminist, and non-racist democracy—the antithesis of her experiences of violence and oppression as a Black woman in the United States. This moment of hope provides the historical starting point for the exhibition at the Albertinum in Dresden. The group show features archival materials, historical portraits of Davis by state painters of the GDR, new commissions, and other works by an array of contemporary artists focusing on the issues that the now emeritus professor campaigned for at the time, which are still pressing today. It aspires to initiate discussion on the background, flaws, and unfulfilled potential of the unusual relationship between Davis and the GDR.

The contributions in this accompanying reader unfold how Davis's iconic image came to be inscribed within a global history of resistance, and introduce all of the participating artists with short texts.    

"And if we believe that revolutions are possible, then we have to be able to imagine different modes of being, different ways of existing in society, different social relations. In this sense art is crucial. Art is at the forefront of social change. Art often allows us to grasp what we cannot yet understand." —Angela Davis

Works by Yael Bartana, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sophie Calle, Contemporary And, Sadie Barnette, CHTO DELAT?, Melvin Edwards, Ângela Ferreira, Bernhard Franke, Coco Fusco, Ellen Gallagher, Claudia Martínez Garay, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Arthur Jafa, Steffani Jemison & Justin Hicks (Mikrokosmos), Iris Kensmil, Hassan Khan, Kapwani Kiwanga, Raja Lubinetzki & Petra Schramm, Julie Mehretu, Heinz-Detlef Moosdorf, Senga Nengudi, Ahmet Öğüt, Slavs and Tatars, Julia Phillips, Alex Martinis Roe, Elske Rosenfeld, Anri Sala, Willi Sitte, Cauleen Smith, Nancy Spero, Gabriele Stötzer, Strawalde (Jürgen Böttcher), Nasan Tur, Lewis Watts, Carrie Mae Weems, Christoph Wetzel, Charles White, Heinz Wodzicka. 

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, from October 10, 2020 to January 24, 2021.

Gabriel Abrantes has been making a career in cinema; with numerous international exhibitions, he's been keeping prolific, with video installations, drawing, painting, and now also VR. This book, published by maat and Mousse, attests exactly this. A book that is predominantly visual and clearly structured, efficient in transposing a certain formal and conceptual attitude that runs through Abrantes's work into the book's aesthetic approach, expressing humour and irony visually within a relatively classical framework.

"The juxtaposition of references to art and cultural history with personal and socio-political commentary is a guiding thread throughout Programmed Melancholy." writes Emily Butler, in one of the essays included in this book (other texts are an interview with the artist and short essay by Rosa Lleó). Butler continues: "His works engage with our emotions, with a range of personal feelings, often humorous, potentially rousing ethical and political beliefs. Unstable, multi-faced, polysexual, his characters waver between expressing personal emotions and wider social, environmental and political concerns."

The first of a two-volume publication dedicated to the artist's novel, this theoretical essay aims to elucidate the pressing questions posed by the emergence of this new artistic medium with a number of key case studies and interviews.

Why do artists write novels? What impact does the artist's novel have on the visual arts? How should such a novel be experienced? In recent years, there has been a proliferation of visual artists who create novels as part of their broader art practice. They do so in order to address artistic issues by means of novelistic devices, favoring a sort of art predicated on process and subjectivity, introducing notions such as fiction, narrative, and imagination. In this sense, it is possible to see the novel as a new medium in the visual arts; yet very little is known about it. This two-volume publication is the first to explore in depth the subject of the artist's novel.

Part 1, A New Medium, is a theoretical examination that looks critically at the different ways contemporary artists employ the artist's novel, focusing mainly on four key case studies: Benjamin Seror's Mime Radio, Cally Spooner's Collapsing in Parts, Mai-Thu Perret's The Crystal Frontier, and Goldin+Senneby's Headless. It seeks to situate the artist's novel within the broader context of the visual arts in the hopes of sparking a much-needed discussion about a practice that has long been ignored by critical strands in art discourse. It includes valuable resources, such as the only existing bibliography of artists' novels.

Interviews with Benjamin Seror, Cally Spooner, Mai-Thu Perret, Goldin+Senneby, Francis McKee, Vivian Ziherl, Natasha Soobramanien, Clive Phillpot, Alex Cecchetti, Łukasz Gorczyca, Jan Jasiński.

In I saw the world collapse and it was only a word, published on the occasion of his concert in December 2019 at Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Hassan Khan articulates the communal yet individualized feelings of sadness and trouble before they coalesce into larger structures and institutions through a libretto for five vocalists, showing us the fleeting moments of the world as it is collapsing rather than only the dust of its collapse. The work is characterized by layered fragments that gesture toward a tonality and unity that nearly coalesce, but that dissipate as soon as they emerge. The collapsing word could be anything: the death of a family member; a defeated revolution; a heartbreak. It means something different from one place, one individual, to the next while still existing so broadly that it defines a more communal experience felt across the globe. A collapse from what? Rather than a doomsday message, it intimates that perhaps the world isn't really collapsing at all. Instead, Khan poses collapse as an ever-present underlying condition, challenging much contemporary intellectualizing that positions the current moment as somehow peculiar or extraordinary. 

"1) Blame your partner for every disaster that has even occurred: G. 
2) Oscillate in confusion between these two pitches using a glissando to come and go at a narcotic speed: A♭ C♭. 
3) Argue with your best friend while looking at them using this progression: G – B – D – E♯. 
4) Demand an apology using the progression: E – C – A♭♭ – F. 
5) Beg for forgiveness by using the two highest pitches you can reach. 
6) Ask a question by humming this progression: E♭♭ – D♭ – Ax – A♯. 
7) Lose interest in everything using this progression: F – A – C – C♯."

Hassan Khan (born 1975 in London, lives and works in Cairo) works with image, sound, text, space and situation.

Fatamorgana is both a political parody and a speculative comedy, in which historical and contemporary personalities narrate post–World War II global history and geopolitics, through a web of references and direct citations. The undercurrent is one of sense, illusion, and truth. Hanan — a Muslim cousin of James Joyce's Molly Bloom — finds herself, not sure how, in Beirut's Hall of Fame waxwork museum after its closing hours.

Like Homer's most virtuous Penelope, this woman waits for her husband; she appears to have set a date with him, but he has not arrived—where can he be? While waiting, she begins interacting with the wax figures in the museum's empty rooms, and the figures respond in turn. Blending and clashing sixteen differing languages, as well as a variety of fiction and nonfiction sources, Fatamorgana is a multidimensional space, a kind of experiment with truth, or a type of fiction that sets up a platform for the collision of multiple fragments, elements, stories, facts.

The publication is the final chapter in a longtime endeavor. Fatamorgana is a multiform project realized between 2016 and 2019, comprising a theatrical work, two films, two publications, and a sound installation. The current book is dedicated to the graphic translation of the text at the heart of the project, alongside a variety of related materials, including project notes and contributions from various authors, while providing online access to photographic, video, and sound materials, along with technical specifications for all of the project's component elements.

Second volume of a publication dedicated to the artist's novel, this metafiction follows a detective investigating the conditions of production of a novel within an artistic framework.
Why do artists write novels? What impact does the artist's novel have on the visual arts? How should such a novel be experienced? In recent years, there has been a proliferation of visual artists who create novels as part of their broader art practice. They do so in order to address artistic issues by means of novelistic devices, favoring a sort of art predicated on process and subjectivity, introducing notions such as fiction, narrative, and imagination. In this sense, it is possible to see the novel as a new medium in the visual arts; yet very little is known about it. This two-volume publication is the first to explore in depth the subject of the artist's novel.

The Fantasy of the Novel, is a research project in the form of a novel; it examines the process of creating an artist's novel derived from five episodic performances and an exhibition. The creative process was affected by the circumstances of production, including intersubjective relationships usually invisible to audiences. The protagonist assumes the role of a detective who tries to understand the conditions under which an artist decides to write, and how this writing is possible within an artistic setting.

David Maroto (born 1976, lives and works in Rotterdam) is a Spanish visual artist, researcher, writer, and curator. He is the co-curator of The Book Lovers, a research project on the artist's novel, together with Joanna Zielińska.

Published 2020

First comprehensive monograph on Marion Baruch's work. This edition presents a broad span of Baruch's oeuvre, from the 1960s to her recent textile production. It includes three essays—by Fanni Fetzer, Martin Herbert, and Noah Stolz—as well as polyphonic focus texts by curators, friends, and art historians from the artist's circle, all providing compelling insights into her works and methods.

The first monograph on Christiane Blattmann takes its title from her solo show Un-Break My Walls at Kunsthalle Münster in 2019. Blattmann intricately interweaves, intermeshes, combines, compounds, merges, and processes in her work not only materials but also structures, things, stories, characters. The volume includes extensive illustrations of exhibitions, projects, and works, and a great number of black-and-white images capture the artist’s studio practice. The interactions of materials, along with theoretical and literary references, serve as important points of departure, and the emblematic outcomes involve text and texture as material structure and patterned surface; vivid condensation and entanglement; and invitations to exploration and reflection. The book compiles different elements designed on a series of shifting layers. Texts by Merle Radtke and Chloe Stead and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark provide insight into Blattmann’s art, complemented by a piece of fiction by Huw Lemmey.

Texts by Merle Radtke, Huw Lemmey, and Chloe Stead, and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark

The reprint of Pati Hill's 1979 book, composed of images and texts by Hill through which she intended to contextualize and explain her working methodology to Jill Kornblee, her New York gallerist.

Published on occasion of Pati Hill's first posthumous solo exhibition at Kunstverein München in 2020.

Pati Hill (1921, Ashland, Kentucky – 2014, Sens, France) left behind an artistic output spanning roughly 60 years and encompassing various disciplines. Untrained as an artist, she began to use the photocopier as an artistic tool in the early 1970s and continued to do so until her death, leaving behind an extensive oeuvre that explores the relationship between image and text. In addition to this comprehensive body of xerographic work, she published four novels, a memoir, several short stories, artists books, and poetry. Drawing also became an essential part of her practice.

By using the copier—a machine that was stereotypically linked to secretarial work and thus to feminized labor—to trace everyday objects such as a comb, a carefully folded pair of men's trousers, or a child's toy, Hill developed an artistic practice that programmatically translated invisible domestic labor into a visual and public language. Through her use of this reproductive apparatus, she created a model of artistic production that critically opposes the convention of individual expression as well as the supposed neutrality of technologically produced images.

In 1987, artist and poet Madeline Gins (1941–2014) and her partner, painter Arakawa (1936–2010), formed the Architectural Body Research Foundation (later to become the Reversible Destiny Foundation)—an architectural office pursuing the radical conviction that architecture would provide humanity with the necessary tools and training to overcome death. Their wide variety of theories investigated how a person might interact with their environment, and how that environment might condition and enhance the body to increase its capabilities—through a constant undoing and unsettling of subject formation. Taking the work and writings of Madeline Gins and Arakawa as a broad provocation, The Floor Is Uneven. Does It Slope? aims to swallow and masticate the duo’s thought into a new sort of pulp: a collective fan fiction work. Less a book about Gins and Arakawa than a book after them, it tries to seed their work to various fans—writers and makers indebted to the duo’s thinking or suspected to be enthralled by it. 

Contributors speak about Gins and Arakawa through the language of their own practice, through academia, poetry, essays, photography, experimental writing, and fiction—thinking about what Gins and Arakawa might mean to their individual fields. 

Texts by Henry Andersen, Lila Athanasiadou, Ben Thorp Brown, Lucas Crawford, Bryana Fritz, Laura Herman, Daisuke Kosugi, Joyelle McSweeney, Simone C. Niquille, Andros Zins-Browne.