Exhibition catalogue of filmmaker, visual artist, and writer Pedro Neves Marques's solo project "Vampires in Space" at the Portuguese Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022.

"In space it's always night." A family of vampires travels through space, carrying life to a faraway planet. Alone, they recall their past, offering an open-ended narrative about the role of fiction in our lives, with a special care for transgender experiences.

This book includes an interview, film scripts and poetry by Neves Marques, curatorial texts by João Mourão, Luís Silva, alongside visual documentation and other contributions by Manuela Moscoso and Filipa Ramos.

The work of Pedro Neves Marques (born 1984 in Lisbon, Portugal) combines anthropological research, cinema, publishing, poetic and fictional writing. Their hybrid aesthetic, that blends science fiction and documentary realism is influenced by the history of feminist and queer sciences, and projects us into futures that question the control of our bodies, our desires and the world around us beyond the register of dystopia. In doing so, they explore how we might transform our imaginaries of gender, new technologies, ecology and postcolonial issues.

An experiment in listening to frequencies beyond human sensorial range, Silent Whale Letters is a long-distance correspondence intimately attuned to the infravoice of a blue whale, a document held silent in the sound archive, and other so-called "silent" subjects.

As part of an ongoing collaboration between Ella Finer and Vibeke Mascini the letters consider how the silent document shifts the logic of the archive, figuring listening as a practice of preservation.

As the letters attune to the ocean loud with communications across time and space, the authors write about the movement of matter, of energies, wavelengths, currents and how the ocean preserves as it disperses what it carries. How does working with what we cannot see, or even hear within range, shift the parameters of attention? How does the energetic archival space of the ocean agitate and disrupt claims to knowledge, history, and power?

Moving through three years of call and response the book unfolds through "a joint meditation on the transformative potential of a note, a voice, carried from saltwater into the archive" (Rebecca Giggs).

They chart a process that is equally conceptual and intimate, theoretical and deeply personal, moving through discussions of (amniotic) undercurrents, call-and-response mechanisms, energetic wavelengths, oceanic and archival memory, mysterious scales, and the watery acoustic commons. 

Edited by Kate Briggs.
Contributions by Kate Briggs and Emma McCormick Goodhart.

A visionary analysis of what Terry Smith identifies as the "visual arts exhibitionary complex."

In this book, the renowned art historian and writer maps the institutional and quasi-institutional framework for contemporary art that sprawls across the globe. He then delves into a powerful form of curatorial activism rising up in the exhibitionary complex: Open Strike. This is the inaugural volume of the series Thoughts on Curating, edited by Steven Henry Madoff.

The fourth book in the annual series A Series of Open Questions published by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press is informed by themes found in the work of Lorraine O'Grady, including diaspora, Black female subjectivity, racial hybridity, translation, intersectional feminism, institutional critique, Black representation in the art world, archives, music, Conceptualism, and performance art.

The Wattis Institute's annual reader, A Series of Open Questions, provides an edited selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis's year-long "On our mind" research seasons. Each volume includes newly commissioned writing by members of the research season's core reading group, as well as text and visual contributions by a diverse range of other artists and writers. The title of each reader takes the form of a question and becomes, as new books are published, a gradually evolving series of open questions.

Contributions by The Allman Brothers Band, Charles Baudelaire, Selam Bekele, Martin Bernal, Linda Goode Bryant and Rujeko Hockley, Camille Chedda, Gabrielle Civil, Kathleen Collins, Erica Deeman, Jeanne Finley & John Muse, Jacqueline Francis, Edouard Glissant, E. Jane, Bec Imrich, Charles Lee, Darrell M. McNeil, Denise Murrell, Sawako Nakayasu, Lorraine O'Grady, Yétúndé Olagbaju, Hsu Peng & Allison Yasukawa, Lara Putnam, Trina Michelle Robinson, Legacy Russell, David Scott, Peter Simensky, Carrie Mae Weems, Judith Wilson, Alisha Wormsley.

Sibyl's Mouths is the most recent in a series of publications by Pure Fiction, a writing and performance group with shifting members active since 2011.

From February 12 to March 6, 2022, Pure Fiction presented an exhibition and performance program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne titled "Shifting Theater: Sibyl's Mouths". The starting point was a collective reading of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, in which the narrator discovers a collection of scribbled oak leaves scattered in a cave outside Naples. Alleged prophecies of the Cumean Sibyl, the textual fragments inscribed on the leaves foretell the story of an epidemic that ravages the globe in the 2100's—a period where solitude, intimacy, and the perception of time is radically renegotiated.
Through a multiplicity of textual genres and writerly approaches, contributors examine the questions and forms that emerge from prophecy: the role of the voice in text, writing and performance; fragmentary heterogeneous narratives.

The mouth is consulted, not only as a mouthpiece or as a cavernous instrument for vocalization but as an essential part of the digestive tract. Processes in the gut, such as assimilation, excretion, and regurgitation involve multiple temporal directionalities, and may function as metaphorical gateways to intuitive truths.

Contributions by Rosa Aiello, Gerry Bibby, Coleman Collins, Ayanna Dozier, Annie Ernaux, Amelia Groom, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Ellen Yeon Kim, Bitsy Knox, Dan Kwon, Erika Landström, Enad Marouf, Katrin Mayer, Aislinn McNamara, Kamila & Jasmina Metwaly, Luzie Meyer, Vera Palme, Theresa Patzschke, Georgia Sagri, Mahsa Saloor, Elif Saydam, Mark von Schlegell, Simon Speiser, Elaine Tam, C.S. Tolan, Mikhail Wassmer, Anna Zacharoff.

Art critical essays focusing on artworks that, in various ways, convey a sense of unheroic "trouble."

Stories of the undead of contemporary painting, the mediation of pain, photography courting stupidity, sculpture and architecture courting animism, populism in avant-garde art, fear of avant-garde territorialism, ambivalent networking, displaced abstractions and misplaced weather systems.

The essays assembled in this volume were all written over the past twenty years—a period in which Ina Blom pursued art critical writing alongside more academic work and when the boundaries between the two genres grew at times deliberately blurred. Dispersed as they were across a variety of publications with limited accessibility—out-of-print anthologies and artist's books, hard-to-find art catalogues, journals, and magazines protected by paywalls—Houses To Die In and Other Essays on Art at last brings them together, and not just for practical reasons. If the texts collected here have one thing in common, it is in a certain pull they display toward artistic projects that are not redemptive or exemplary, but which instead convey a sense of trouble: trouble actively sought by the artists or keenly felt by Blom. A distinctly unheroic trouble.

Born in Oslo in 1961, Ina Blom is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary art and is also active as an art critic.

In this compelling rethinking of curatorial practice, renowned museum director, curator, and writer Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung proposes that Pidgin languages and pidginization as a mode of being and doing offer a decolonialized reinvention of communicative practices—a space in which the boundaries between disciplines of knowledge collapse and sociopolitical, economic, ethical, and spiritual concepts and questions are renegotiated.

Written as a series of powerful anecdotes, the book grounds its provocative ideas in personal, cultural, and political histories of challenge and improvisation, and argues, as Ndikung writes, that "pidginized curating is a curating that combines works, ideas, practices, and languages in resistance to canonical conventions, cultural stasis, ossified practices, dead rhythms, and singular forms."

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (born 1977 in Yaoundé, Cameroon, lives and works in Berlin) is an independent art curator, art critic, author and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin and editor-in-chief of SAVVY Journal for critical texts on contemporary African art. He was associate professor at Muthesius University Kiel, and is currently guest professor in curatorial studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He was curator-at-large for documenta 14, and was a guest curator of the 2018 Dak'Art Biennale in Senegal. As part of the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019.

What comes after end-of-world narratives: visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.

There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end—of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it. In this book, drawing on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed—Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist—as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, T. J. Demos poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives. He argues that it's as vital to defeat fatalistic nihilism as it is to defeat the false solutions of green capitalism and algorithmic governance.

How might we decolonize the future, and cultivate an emancipated chronopolitics in relation to an undetermined not-yet? If we are to avoid climate emergency's cooptation by technofixes, and the defuturing of multitudes by xenophobic eco-fascism, Demos argues, we must cultivate visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.

A collection of Dan Graham's interviews and conversations with a wide array of individuals from various backgrounds and disciplines.

Dan Graham was a contrarian. His art confronted viewers with a multiplicity of possible perceptions and intersubjective experiences. Some Rockin' was his last project and—through conversations with friends, artists, architects, curators, and former assistants—articulates his sensitivity to context, media, and people. The interviews address rock music and urbanism, humor and astrology, history and the hybrid form. Mediating historical and social experience was a major concern of his. "The Museum in Evolution," an essay he finished just before his death, and published here, highlights that nothing is final in becoming. Rather, it allows for: Some Rockin'.

This volume both gathers and expands on the results of the research project “Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions” held at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, and proposes to draft a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of art institutions. It undertakes a transdisciplinary history, at the nexus of art history, science studies, and philosophy, exploring the role the exhibition played in the construction of the conceptual categories of modernity, and outlines a historiographical model that grasps the exhibition as both an aesthetic and epistemic site.

Contributions by Etienne Chambaud, Elitza Dulguerova, Anselm Franke, Tristan Garcia, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Yuk Hui, Pierre Huyghe, Sami Khatib, Jeremy Lecomte, Stéphane Lojkine, Rafael Mandressi, Vincent Normand, Peter Osborne, Filipa Ramos, Juliane Rebentisch, João Ribas, Pamela Rosenkranz, Anna-Sophie Springer, Lucy Steeds, Olivier Surel, Etienne Turpin, Kim West, Charles Wolfe.

Isabelle Graw reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus.

By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships." 
— Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Isabelle Graw has written the Elective Affinities for the twenty-first century, as a feminist novel and a dysfunctional family portrait set in the contemporary art world."
— Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder ofTexte zur Kunst in Berlin.

Alternative forms of curatorial and institutional work suitable to our novel conditions, when the relationship between physical and online work must be revised.

In our current era of global pandemic and violent political upheaval, the question must be asked: What is our future and whose voices will announce it? These can only be situated voices, each with its own body and space, formed through dialogue within their own communities and in reaction and resistance to dominant discourses. Museum director, curator, and writer Zdenka Badovinac argues that these situated voices of people, artworks, and exhibitions, rooted in the local, can bring incisive, productive change. The call of these voices, in rethinking art, curation, and institutions, is the subject of this powerful essay.

Zdenka Badovinac is a curator, writer and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. She served as Director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana (1993-2020). In her work, Badovinac highlights the difficult processes of redefining history alongside different avant-garde traditions within contemporary art.

A contemplation on the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy.

This book aims to introduce the history of statistical analysis and a knowledge of sociogenesis—a system of racism amenable to scientific explanation—into machine learning research as an act of impairing the racial ordering of the world. While machine learning—computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning—provides useful insight into racism and racist behavior, a gap is present in the relationship between machine learning, the racial history of scientific explanation, and the Black lived experience. Ramon Amaro explores how the history of data and statistical analysis provide a clear (and often sudden) grasp of the complex relationship between race and machine learning. Amaro juxtaposes a practical analysis of machine learning with a theory of Black alienation in order to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice. In doing so, Amaro offers a continuous contemplation on the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy.

Ramon Amaro is Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South at University College London. His writing, research and practice emerge at the intersections of Black Study, psychopathology, digital culture, and the critique of computation reason.

Wonderflux brings together a group of longtime contributors with graphic artists to collaborate on illustrated essays and develop a new pictorial language around some of the emergent consistencies and overarching issues that defined the first decade of e-flux journal.

In Wonderflux you will find yourself in front of disappearing mirrors held up to curators, critics, and artists; sailing through counterfactual universes; face-to-face with cold-blooded killers, faceless men, weary but buoyant prophets; all the while imbued with stubborn thriving and stubborn refusal to be moved or monetized, and once in a while having earnest conversations with robot(s and) workers.

The authors included here have shaped the varied concerns and urgencies of e-flux journal since 2008. As a theory-driven art journal made up entirely of hypertext and digital images and embraced by academic circles, we sometimes wonder about the artistic and sensual use of text and image. Does the thinking of some of our favorite authors also speak to a place beyond floods of automatic links and references and rectangular photographic portals? To a broader and more applied artistic domain like the imaginative sensibility of illustration, where entire worlds arise from the simple and deliberate placement of lines on paper?

Contributions by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Raqs Media Collective & Freddy Carrasco, Liam Gillick, Elizabeth A. Povinelli & Clara Bessijelle Johansson, Martha Rosler & Josh Neufeld, Reza Negarastani & Keith Tilford, Hu Fang & Mojo Wang, Keller Easterling & Meijia Xu.

A crossdisciplinary inquiry into the practices and forms of assembly making, through multiple times and geographies.

Assemblies are ancestral, transcultural ways of coming together as a community. Over the past decades, multiple social movements have reappropriated these forms of collective organisation as a prominent component of political struggle, to defend radical visions of democracy. At the same time, governments across the globe have sought to reframe public deliberation as a response to the failures of representative democracy.

How can we analyze this double movement, and could assemblies of equals once again offer possibilities to reimagine and renew the ways politics is practiced? To address these questions, we need to move beyond simply asking what assemblies can do, and instead examine how they are made. This means departing from the shores of a speculative, deliberative ideal and restoring attention to both their diversity of forms, and their capacities to perform, deform, and transform.

Bringing together accounts written by those who practice assemblies, and contributions from artists, activists, historians, philosophers, and social scientists, as well as three architectural experiments that attempt to imagine models for a future assembly, the book proposes a critical inquiry into the potential of assemblies to shape political subjects. From assemblies in Indigenous territories of Brazil to those of the Yellow Vests in France, from medieval communes to street parliaments in Africa, from citizens' assemblies set up by public authorities to practices forged from emancipatory traditions, What Makes An Assembly? examines the tensions that exist in all assemblies between the need for form and the danger of formalization; between the scripts, rituals, and architectural settings from which they derive, and their capacity to erupt and emerge anew.

Contributions by Ayreen Anastas, Andreas Angelidakis, Hans Asenbaum, Frédérique Aït-Touati, Richard Banégas, Sandra Benites, Jean Godefroy Bidima, Patrick Boucheron, Florence Brisset-Foucault, Manuel Callahan, François Cooren, Armando Cutolo, Pascale Dufour, Ben Eersels, Tallulah Frappier, Rene Gabri, Delphine Gardey, Alana Gerecke, Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation, Laurent Jeanpierre, Pablo Lafuente, Laura Levin, Stacey Liou, Catherine Malabou, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Florian Malzacher, Piersandra Di Matteo, Markus Miessen, raumlabor, Philippe Urfalino, Yellow Vests, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Ana Terra Yawalapiti.

The third volume of the Wattis Institute's annual reader is informed by themes found in the work of Cecilia Vicuña, including ecofeminism, indigenous forms of knowledge, poetry and politics, dissolution and extinction, exile, dematerialization, regeneration, and environmental responsibility.

The Wattis Institute's annual reader, A Series of Open Questions, provides an edited selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis's year-long "On our mind" research seasons. Each volume includes newly commissioned writing by members of the research season's core reading group, as well as text and visual contributions by a diverse range of other artists and writers. The title of each reader takes the form of a question and becomes, as new books are published, a gradually evolving series of open questions.

Contributions by Gloria Anzaldua, Elvira Espejo Ajca, Erika Balsom, María Berrios, Marisol de la Cadena, Lynne Cooke, Miho Dohi, Ricki Dwyer, Silvia Federici, Tonya Foster, Phillip Greenlief, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Brian Karl, Dionne Lee, Zoe Leonard, Rosemary Mayer, Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira, Denise Newman, Thao Nguyen Phan, Frances Richard, Dylan Robinson, Abel Rodriguez, Oscar Santillan, Alessandra Troncone, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Ignacio Valero, Cathrine Veikos, Cecilia Vicuña, Diego Villalobos, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, Carla Zaccagnini.

Based on questions raised by the work of filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, the second volume of the Wattis Institute's annual reader includes new writing and art by Ranu Mukherjee, Kathy Zarur, Shylah Hamilton, Astria Suparak, and Tamara Suarez Porras, as well as written and visual contributions by Trinh T. Minh-ha, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Sky Hopinka,Christina Sharpe, Christine Wang, Camille Rankine, Dionne Brand, Renee Gladman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Steffani Jemison, among others.

What does the promise of "speaking nearby" rather than "speaking about" look like today? What are the politics of hospitality? What are the problematics of "postfeminism," and how do we challenge the West as the authoritative subject of feminist knowledge? What are the ways that language can be a site of rupture? How do we generate mistrust in the "well-written," and how can poetry be a radical act of refusal? How can we be subjects that believe in land and not borders? What influence has technology and digital space had on the "making and unmaking of identity"? How do we navigate a cyclical eruption of decolonizations?

The Wattis Institute's annual reader, A Series of Open Questions, provides an edited selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis's year-long "On our mind" research seasons. Each volume includes newly commissioned writing by members of the research season's core reading group, as well as text and visual contributions by a diverse range of other artists and writers. The title of each reader takes the form of a question and becomes, as new books are published, a gradually evolving series of open questions.

A hybrid monograph/artist book of Nathalie Du Pasquier's work.

Published on the occasion of Nathalie Du Pasquier's solo show at MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, this book navigates the space between an exhibition catalogue and the artist book with juxtapositions of photographs of Nathalie Du Pasquier' works, installation views of the show at MACRO, and extracts from texts by various writers and figures fundamental for her practice. These come together to create an extension of the exhibition itself, in a form that channels the spirit of the show: the pages become exhibition spaces embracing associations and combinations allowing for a deeper understanding and exploration of Du Pasquier's work, and her imagination at large. It is a glimpse into the possibilities offered by her oeuvre, which can be approached, interpreted, and experienced from countless perspectives. It is the very vastness and variety of her work, and her inspirations, that make the exploration of her work—and as a result this publication—non-exhaustive. This publication is part of an ongoing study of her work and documents her exhibition at MACRO, "Campo di Marte," Du Pasquier's biggest show to date which brought together over one-hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and cabins, from the early 1980s to present day.

A famous designer and co-founder of the Memphis group in Milan in 1981, Nathalie Du Pasquier (born 1957 in Bordeaux, France, lives in Milan, Italy) accompanied the (post)modern adventure around designer Ettore Sottsass, with the creation of objects, fabrics, carpets, and furniture.

Edited by Luca Lo Pinto.

Valerie Solanas's rarely published, legendary play, Up Your Ass, explodes social and sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces them through her signature irreverence and wit, incisiveness and camp.

The play, whose full title is Up Your Ass Or From the Cradle to the Boat Or The Big Suck Or Up from the Slime, marches out a cast of screwy stereotypes: the unknowing john, the frothy career girl, the boring male narcissist, two catty drag queens, the sex-depraved housewife, and a pair of racialized pickup artists, among others. At the center is protagonist Bongi Perez—a thinly veiled Solanas—a sardonic, gender-bending hustler who escorts us through the back alleys of her street life. The fictionalized predecessor to SCUM Manifesto, the play shares the same grand, subversive, implicative language, equally spitting and winking, embracing the margins, the scum, and selling a trick along the way.

Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) is an American radical feminist intellectual, known for her SCUM Manifesto—a pamphlet with which she declares the power of women and imagines a political future through the margin—, and for having tried to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin.
With a contribution by Paul B. Preciado.
Graphic design: Roxanne Maillet.

A story that explores how power is enacted on and through the body—the physical, the social, and the political.

Alienation and dire frustration mount as an unnamed woman—a mother—struggles to survive in the face of state repression, neighborhood surveillance, extreme weather, and familial control. Told through one side of an epistolary exchange, the novel's letters are bookended by dense ramblings by the mother's son, who struggles to speak and write and spends most of his days in lockdown rearranging his "vessels," hysterically laughing, drooling, writhing, withdrawing—a state that will ultimately consume his mother as well. This is a story that explores how power is enacted on and through the body—the physical, the social, and the political. Custody of the Eyes (Los Vigilantes) reconfirms the essential, constitutive nature of language and expression in power and freedom.

Diamela Eltit (born 1947 in Santiago, Chile) is a Chilean writer and teacher.

Edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin.
Graphic design: Roxanne Maillet.
Published in May 2022

An examination of the relationship between coloniality, raciality, and global capital through a black feminist poethical framework, inspired by Octavia E. Butler's sci-fi novel Kindred (first volume in the On the Antipolitical series).

Unpayable Debt examines the relationship between coloniality, raciality, and global capital through a black feminist poethical framework. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler's 1979 sci-fi novel Kindred, in which an African American writer is transported back in time to the antebellum South to save her owner-ancestor, Unpayable Debt relates the notion of value to coloniality—both economic and ethical. Focusing on the philosophy behind value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes capital as the juridical architecture and ethical grammar of the world. Here, raciality—a symbol of coloniality—justifies deployments of total violence to enable expropriation and land extraction.
First volume in the On the Antipolitical series, edited by Ana Teixeira Pinto, devoted to the historical study of the depoliticization process, situating it within the neocolonialcontinuum that animates the digital frontier as the new locus of settler becoming.
 
Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva's academic writings and artistic practice address the ethical questions of the global present and target the metaphysical and ontoepistemological dimensions of modern thought. Currently, she is a Professor and Director of The Social Justice Institute (the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice) at the University of British Columbia.

Edited by Ana Teixeira Pinto.

Produced on the occasion of Leslie Thornton's major solo exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center as well as a recent solo exhibition at Kunstverein Nurnberg, this richly illustrated volume is the first monograph on this important artist and filmmaker, offering essential, foundational scholarship on Thornton's influential work in film and video.

Since the mid-1970s, American avant-garde filmmaker and artist Leslie Thornton (born 1951) has produced an influential body of work in film and video. Thornton's early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma vérité traditions fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general. Her work consistently interrogates modes of representation and the violence of looking, pushing beyond critiques of the gaze to consider biases in perception, or the way voice and sound can undermine an otherwise dominant visual narrative.