Art

Scent is Present is an experimental publication exploring the ephemeral notion of olfaction. Through essays, exercises, and artistic contributions, it challenges the limits of language, inviting readers to engage with scent as a non-linear, sensory, and embodied phenomenon. Contributors including olfactory artists, scent designers, and sound artists share their practices and reflections that foreground smell in political and ecological contexts.

The publication stems from a workshop by the same name, carried out in Petrohradská kolektiv in the summer of 2025 by Sleepy Press and Michaela Cagáňová. The workshop accompanied holo-collective’s exhibition ‘AUTOCHORA’ at Jeden Dva Tři Gallery in Prague.

Workshop Participants: Magdalena Škerenčák, Nela Pietrová, Eva Fajčíková, Františka Blažková, Jasmína Horváthová, Karolína Kučerová Dunja, Varya Starodubova, Ondrej Trhoň, sof, Gabriele Sláma, Kristýna Šuleková, Iman, K, Lucy, Maëlle Magnin-Feysot.

Independent Contributors: Romana Klementis, Lila Tesla, Elektra Stampoulou, Maria Ilieva, Lucia Holásková, Michaela Cagáňová

In collaboration with holo-collective and Petrohradská Kolektiv

Designed by Markéta Skalková and Kamila Valešová

Exhibitions by American Artist and CB Evans, conversations with Che Gossett and Dean Spade, and short stories by Lola Olufemi and Orion J Facey.

Pina is a printed, portable exhibition space. We function as a commissioning platform, collaborating with artists to create exhibitions existing solely within the pages of a magazine.

How can alternative organizations and traditional institutions learn from one another? How have exhibition platforms created space for artists to generate learning environments? How have these practices changed assumptions about art institutions and artistic production? How can we think about the economic, ecological, and institutional sustainability of all of these practices?

Living to Learn, edited by Noah Simblist of Virginia Commonwealth University, presents the work of over seventy artists, curators, collectives, and scholars who address contemporary art as a site of learning in the twenty-first century. Building on earlier histories of education as civic service for the common good, it focuses on the last twenty-five years while exploring the future of art education as a practice unfolding both in and beyond school. The book’s case studies reveal how innovations in education have a dynamic relationship with artistic practice, alternative arts organizations, universities, museums, and biennials.

Sinkholes are geological accidents that indicate the emptying of underground aquifers, places where the earth collapses and caves in, yielding to gravity and creating cavities of varying depths. Although they can occur for natural reasons, they are mostly the result of human activity: changes in river courses, intensive exploitation of water resources, mining activity and abandonment of mining sites. Over the last few decades, their number has increased considerably on the Iranian plateau.

This book presents Kimia Kamvari’s exploration of these cavities between 2019 and 2021. It showcases the core of the work, consisting of a careful and methodical series of photographs, accompanied by cartographic sheets and texts that help to understand the artist’s perspective on the phenomenon and stimulate the reader’s own.

Kimia Kamvari (Cologne, 1986) has a degree in painting from the Azad University of Art and Architecture in Tehran and a master’s degree in Art Research and Creation from the UPV-EHU. Since 2015 she has been living and working in Astigarreta, a small town in the interior of Gipuzkoa. His works go from figurative painting to an increasingly conceptual look that explores new formats and materials. Proof of this are his latest exhibitions Apeiron (Dastan Gallery, 2018), Nature Change (Fundación Cristina Enea, 2019), Event Horizon (Dastan Gallery, 2019) Alef (San Telmo Museoa, 2022) and Larruak eta Izurrak (Tabakalera, 2024)

The Horror is an artist publication by Marieke Peeters that explores horror not simply as a genre, but as a narrative strategy—one capable of revealing the deepest anxieties and hidden structures within culture. Published before her residency on Ojika Island (Nagasaki Prefecture, JP), the book lays the conceptual groundwork for her later immersive works.

The first half of the book presents a personal selection of Japanese horror films—particularly within the kaiki eiga tradition (ghost and mystery cinema)—that have deeply influenced Peeters' artistic approach. The second half features images and short descriptions of her past projects, tracing a practice grounded in spatial storytelling, emotional intensity, and participatory encounters.

During her time on Ojika Island as part of the Artist in Island program, Marieke Peeters engaged with the island's tradition of ghost stories—particularly the legend of Shiomi, a mysterious outsider who sacrificed himself for the island. This tale became the foundation for The Forgotten Sacrifice, a site-specific haunted house experience staged in Konishitei, a local akiya (abandoned home). Collaborating with local participants and Studio The Future, Peeters transformed the space into an obake yashiki (Japanese-style haunted attraction), inviting visitors to reimagine Ojika Island's history through the lens of horror—revealing how fear can also create connection, memory, and reflection.

This essay explores the little-known history of the witch hunts in South Limburg and situates them within broader processes of misogyny, social unrest, early capitalism, and changing ideas about nature and knowledge. Drawing on local histories and thinkers such as Silvia Federici, it connects early modern persecutions to contemporary forms of marginalization. At the same time, it explores the fascination with magic, folklore, and alternative forms of knowledge.

The Complex Answer presents the reader with a selection of texts—from 2010 to 2021—that introduce an exercise in how a practice of art and exhibition making has been influenced by philosophical thinking.

One form of thinking oriented towards the production of an epistemological space where art is not illustrating ideas but enacting thinking and activating experience as an epistemological force that slowly erodes and, eventually, erases the culture-nature divide.
All the texts have been published before and yet—for the sake of creating a dramaturgy and stressing the thesis—they have been reedited and partly rewritten. The texts aim to enforce the idea that art is an intelligence that is influenced by ideas and the emergence of new notions but also thinking through experience. An experience that is aesthetic and epistemological in equal terms.

What does it mean to publish today? In the face of a changing media landscape, institutional upheavals, and discursive shifts in the legal, artistic, and political fields, concepts of ownership, authorship, work, accessibility, and publicity are being renegotiated. The field of publishing not only stands at the intersection of these developments but is also introducing new ruptures. How the traditional publishing framework has been cast adrift, and which opportunities are surfacing in its stead, is discussed here by artists, publishers, and scholars through the examination of recent publishing concepts emerging from the experimental literature and art scene, where publishing is often part of an encompassing artistic practice. The number and diversity of projects among the artists, writers, and publishers concerned with these matters show that it is time to move the question of publishing from the margin to the center of aesthetic and academic discourse.

Texts by Texts by Hannes Bajohr, Paul Benzon, K. Antranik Cassem, Bernhard Cella, Annette Gilbert, Hanna Kuusela, Antoine Lefebvre, Matt Longabucco, Alessandro Ludovico, Lucas W. Melkane, Anne Mœglin-Delcroix, Aurélie Noury, Valentina Parisi, Michalis Pichler, Anna-Sophie Springer, Alexander Starre, Nick Thurston, Rachel Valinsky, Eva Weinmayr, Vadim Zakharov.

Pedagogies of the Art-Proximate reflects on the changing landscape of contemporary art’s relationship to formal education, through tracing a history of theories, practices and protests across the twentieth century. In a context of educational funding crises, cuts, and changes, and within a wider frame of shifting understandings of how we know things and who or what we learn from, what can learning mean and in what ways can it happen?

Going beyond a simple chronology of art schools, this book considers the many ways in which art and education meet: how museums learn from those they invite in, how art objects become pedagogical tools, and what happens when a school is an artwork (or vice versa). The book proposes art-proximate practices as a new term for an increasingly blurry realm of practices that include socially engaged art, relational art, and activist art, as well as ‘non art’ forms. Weaving together auto-ethnographic, art historical and educational studies, Pedagogies of the Art-Proximate is about what art puts us in the way of learning – and why that might be politically, socially, and critically urgent today.

This issue of OEI proposes the first large-scale synthesis of Lettrist photography as a precise “system” – going through the Lettrist movement’s engagement with photography from the 1950s up until 2013. It reproduces around 430 photographic works and documents, and also includes English translations of texts by and interviews with Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaître and Frédérique Devaux.

The first phase was to call photography into question. Through scratches and tears, the surface of the image was worked on, transformed within itself. This is the chiselling stage. Then we propose Lettrist photography, which transforms the old object into a letter or sign, redefining it as a simple particle in a system of elements that has become the alphabet of a new script. Hypergraphic photography goes even further, using any sign or graphic design to create a poly-writing system resulting in billions of characters, existing, artificial or new. Going even further, in 1956 our movement introduced infinitesimal photography, creating works composed of elements that exist only insofar as they allow us to imagine other elements, non-existent or possible. Each element must make us think of other elements. Infinitesimal photography is made up of billions of pieces of virtual data! Then, in 1960, the Lettrist movement unveiled a new dimension: supertemporal photography. With supertemporal photography, I offer a framework within which each viewer can act in his or her own way. Far superior to today’s happenings it has no time limit. The image is forever open to new amateurs who erase or continue what has already been done on the photograph by previous amateurs. It’s a work that has been going on for centuries! This is our creation in photography. […] We amuse ourselves at the level at which things are done, and we see them twenty years ahead of time. To say that Lettrist photography doesn’t exist is to say that no photograph exists …
—Isidore Isou, 1973

Photography on Edge – 25 visual dossiers compiled and introduced by Geoffrey Batchen + ”Wanting more” – on and from the work of Australian artist Justine Varga + translations of a selection of Geoffrey Batchen’s essays into Swedish

”The published history of photography has long been motivated by a number of key principles: innovation and originality, authorship and nationality, chronology and medium specificity, technical excellence and aesthetic achievement. The folios [in OEI #102–103] offer an alternative way to regard this history. They comprise a series of repetitious fragments drawn more or less arbitrarily from across various photographic practices and genres. In every case, these folios present a photography on edge: tense, nervous, unsure of itself—at least when compared to the self-certainty we encounter in most histories of this medium.

A photography on edge is a photography that escapes the usual definitions. […] One thing is for sure: if they are to be included in future histories of photography, then we will need to set aside our prejudices and presumptions and learn to say what we see, and not just see what we already know how to say.”

— Geoffrey Batchen in Photography on Edge

A collection of notes, pictures, social media posts, about the legendary “Piss Goblin” who is / was (?) active in the Berghain bathrooms. This edition – handmade by Cutt Press – beautifully + playfully embodies its subject, as orange plasticky sheets are interspersed in between the text pages, and marble paper half-covers shimmer, in an evocation of golden torrents . . .

Give Piss a Chance. A Williing Suspension of Consequences was first published in the context of the For Real exhibition at DAADGalerie, Berlin, in 2025.

The fourth volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against, acting for better work conditions in the visual arts and against all forms of discrimination, on the topics of accessibility in the arts and ableism.

Wages For Wages Against has been doing pioneering work for the fair remuneration of artists in Switzerland since 2017. It is committed to social and economic justice for all artists. This volume brings together texts by artists who create spaces—fields of possibility. Texts that seek to amplify moments of struggle and negotiation. Texts that speak of interdependence, trauma and adaptations. Texts driven by a desire and a sense of urgency to address the accessibility of spaces where art is created and experienced.

Wages For Wages Against (WFWA, wfwa.ch) is a a militant collective and a campaign for the fair remuneration of artists in Switzerland, better work conditions, and an alternative economy of the arts.

Edited by Wages For Wages Against.
Contributions by Michaëla Danjé, Quiplash, Park MacArthur, Lari Medawar & Ostensible, Sabrina Röthlisberger Belkacem.

First Meeting is the first monograph on Argentinian artist Santiago de Paoli. Covering de Paoli’s oeuvre from his early, experimental projects to his most recent explorations, the book delves into his innovative approach of painting on unconventional materials, from plaster to bread, felt to canvas, aluminum to wool, and socks to fur. It features newly commissioned essays by Fernanda Brenner, and Mariano Mayer, as well as a conversation between Christian Rattemeyer and the artist.

What is highly unlikely but not impossible?  is informed by themes found in the work of Hiwa K, such as statehood, war, migration, belonging, the effects of neoliberalism and colonialism, home as a concept, language, and the myth of the individual artist. The compendium ranges freely across mediums, drawing together experimental poetry, science fiction, photography, memoir, academic essays, art historical texts, and more. Contributions include a short story by Benjamin Labatut, an excerpt from a lecture by Achille Mbembe, and drawings by Hajra Waheed. Like previous editions in the series, this book brings together a range of voices and mediums to consider some of the most pressing issues of our time.

Contributions by Omar El Akkad, Havin Al-Sîndy, Yto Barrada, Dionne Brand, Deena Chalabi, Nidhal Chamekh, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ursula K. Le Guin, Raven Chacon and Candice Hopkins, Brian Karl, Hiwa K, Benjamin Labatut, Quinn Latimer, Henri Lefebvre, Mazyar Lotfalian, Peter L. Manuel, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Gabriel Orozco, Jacques Rancière, Man Ray, Rijin Sahakian, Solmaz Sharif, Tiffany Sia, Julietta Singh, Rayyane Tabet, Anton Vidokle, Hajra Waheed

toi, moi, la pluie is a sequence of cards that can be assembled into three-dimensional configurations. The cards present two sides of the same moment: rain falling outdoors, and an art exhibition taking place indoors.

With humour and a sense of casual abandon, Sara Graça reduces the exhibition space to a dry place offering shelter from the rain. Despite a moment of intense intimacy—a passionate kiss—the space is largely inhabited by figures who do not seem to know one another, or to get along. The same kiss takes place outdoors; lovers, after all, do not care about the weather. Drawn in a caricatural style, recalling Ad Reinhardt’s How to Look series, these characters speak English, French, and Portuguese. We cannot tell whether they are visiting or staying; we do not know where they are.

The cards are accompanied by a small cut-out horse that can also be assembled and added. A memory of a past life, a lingering presence, a sense of “other”, the horse becomes the final piece of the puzzle. It acts as an exclamation point to these otherwise trivial human exchanges—cutting across inside and outside, shelter and rain, intimacy, cohabitation, and distance.

The publication is disguised as a book, revealing its playful nature only once opened, and inviting the reader to assemble, rearrange, and make choices of their own.

Sara Graça (Lisbon, 1993) lives in London and works in interdisciplinary ways, mainly using sculpture, drawing, photography and video. Her practice often questions ideas of value, authenticity and impermanence.

All copies are numbered & signed.

Suzanne and Louise tells the story of two sisters, one widowed, the other never married, recluses in a hôtel particulier in Paris’s 15th arrondissement. Suzanne, the older one, controls the finances. Louise, a former Carmelite, serves as her humble, tyrannical maid.

The author, who is also their great nephew, is one of the few who visits them. Mixing his writing with his photos, Hervé Guibert crafted a unique “photo novel,” reissued here for the first time with a full English translation by Christine Pichini, a new introduction by artist and writer Moyra Davey, and an account of the book’s origins by Thomas Simmonet.

Aesthetical Relations is a constellation of essays on art, fashion, cancer, comedy, Los Angeles, and your mom. Martinez whips elements of fiction and stand up material into bits and pieces addressing such concerns as: how many times you may kiss an art-world acquaintance, the theoretical stakes of sexting, and why German performance art is like French clowning. Aesthetical Relations is titled after Martinez’s ongoing conceptual comedy talk show of the same name. This new revised and expanded third edition includes new essays written from 2020-2025. 

Christina Catherine Martinez (Mexican American, b. Bellflower, CA) lives and works between Los Angeles, Mexico City, and New England. She was named both a Comedian You Should Know by Vulture and a Comic to Watch by TimeOutLA, and is a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her varied approaches to art criticism, published in platforms such as The Los Angeles Times, Aperture, Frieze, Artforum, Bookforum, e-flux criticism, DOCUMENT Journal, Dirt.fyi and Texte Zur Kunst.

Gathering 13 amazing essays by artist and writer Dena Yago, co-founder of K-HOLE, That Figures retraces more than a decade of reflections on the creative industry—digging into topics such as Sporespace, Billie Eilish, LARPing, corporate cafeterias, ketamine, precarity, poetry, and the internet’s lures and failures. Yago exposes the contradictions of living amidst the sugarcoated deals of the attention economy, and further proposes a new lexicon to address the numbing and disorienting effects of late stage capitalism. Absorbing but refusing to metabolize the language of commercial culture, she opens a space where critical thinking can still happen.

That Figures also features a selection of artworks by Yago, in which the combination of conceptual legacies with pop cultural elements creates new poetical arrangements.

"Bonheur d’exister" est une bande-dessinée présentant cinq histoires d’auto-fiction. Au travers de ces récits balançants entre écriture de journal intime et prose littéraire, Sébastien explore les questions de dépression contemporaine, des pressions mélangées des réseaux sociaux, d’incohérence de l’amour filiale, et plus largement des questions autour de sa psychanalyse.

“a slight cast down at the edges of the lips brings together work from the last decade of Katherine Hubbard’s prolific practice, which intertwines analogue photography, writing, and live performance. Reproductions of exhibited prints, a selection of new photographs, and images created from within her performances are gathered here, along with four of the artist’s original written works. This publication marks the first occasion for Hubbard’s photographs and writings-for-performance to exist on the same scale, that of the book.”
— co-editor, Corrine Fitzpatrick

The book is accompanied by a poster with a full-scale detail reproduction of Katherine Hubbard's rip stop weave artwork, printed on glossy tissue paper.

Additional contributions by Zoe Leonard, Mónica de la Torre, Elisabeth Sherman, and Lynne Tillman. Edited by Corrine Fitzpatrick and Lara Mimosa Montes.

In this dazzlingly original reassessment of women’s stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin—the celebrated author of Flâneuse—explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies?  

Encompassing a rich genealogy of work across the literary and artistic landscape, Elkin makes daring links between disparate points of reference—among them Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography, Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Vanessa Bell’s portraits, Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann’s body art, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s trilingual masterpiece DICTEE—and steps into the tradition of cultural criticism established by Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous, and Maggie Nelson.  

An erudite, potent examination of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political, the ambiguous and the opaque, Art Monsters is a radical intervention that forces us to consider how the idea of the art monster might transform the way we imagine—and enact—our lives.

Destined to become a new classic . . . Elkin shatters the truisms that have evolved around feminist thought.
—Chris Kraus

The Tenant is a monographic critical essay by Marie Canet. It is the first text to directly address the connections between McKenzie’s work, pornography, and special effects. The title refers to the way the artist moves through different periods and aesthetic spaces, appropriating their codes in order to construct new visual fictions. The book is infused with post-#MeToo feminist thinking, alternative uses of biography, reflections on the art world, and contemporary debates surrounding appropriation, embodiment, and the status of the artwork.

McKenzie and Canet worked with each other for over eight years, on projects like Atelier E.B: Passer-by catalogue, published on the occasion of the Fondation Galeries Lafayette exhibition, or the book Pervert or Detective, a conversation between Lucy McKenzie and artist Reba Maybury. This collaboration now culminated in an exhibition and a book: Plastic Newspaper (presented at CRAC Sète in March 2026) and Lucy McKenzie, The Tenant.

Texts by Marie Canet and Lucy McKenzie
Translations: Catherine Petit & Paul Buck (Marie Canet), Juliette Desorgues (Lucy McKenzie)

Published in connection with the exhibition Lucy McKenzie, Plastic Newspaper, at Crac Occitanie, Centre régional d‘art contemporain Occitanie/Pyrénées-Méditerranée à Sète, 21.03.-06.09.26

The Tenant is a monographic critical essay by Marie Canet. It is the first text to directly address the connections between McKenzie’s work, pornography, and special effects. The title refers to the way the artist moves through different periods and aesthetic spaces, appropriating their codes in order to construct new visual fictions. The book is infused with post-#MeToo feminist thinking, alternative uses of biography, reflections on the art world, and contemporary debates surrounding appropriation, embodiment, and the status of the artwork.

McKenzie and Canet worked with each other for over eight years, on projects like Atelier E.B: Passer-by catalogue, published on the occasion of the Fondation Galeries Lafayette exhibition, or the book Pervert or Detective, a conversation between Lucy McKenzie and artist Reba Maybury. This collaboration now culminated in an exhibition and a book: Plastic Newspaper (presented at CRAC Sète in March 2026) and Lucy McKenzie, The Tenant.

Texts by Marie Canet and Lucy McKenzie
Translations: Catherine Petit & Paul Buck (Marie Canet), Juliette Desorgues (Lucy McKenzie)

Published in connection with the exhibition Lucy McKenzie, Plastic Newspaper, at Crac Occitanie, Centre régional d‘art contemporain Occitanie/Pyrénées-Méditerranée à Sète, 21.03.-06.09.26