Art

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

Meet Me In The Present: Documents and their Afterlives is an anthology of essays which examines the power of collective action. Spanning twenty-one acts of resistance — from letters exchanged between black power activists to the ethos of protest being brought into the Victoria and Albert Museum — and with an afterword by critic Orit Gat, these essays consider what it means to survive against all odds within a changing society. Drawing from the motives and experiences of those who have protected the right to access shared resources, Meet Me in the Present tells the stories of these diverse defenders. The book calls for public spaces, and for ideas to be made public in a time when ‘the commons’ is increasingly under attack.

Edited by Alex Quicho, Camilla Brown, Hatty Nestor, Laura Fava, Sarah Thacker, and Zachary Soudan
Design by Tom Finn and Jake Tollady

The Mill is the second of three projects to engage the resource industries of Vancouver Island (mining, forestry, and fisheries) through contemporary art and writing. This publication responds to forestry: a mobile industry of logging camps that follow the trees; prices that rise and fall; mills that open and close; communities that boom and bust. In The Mill, artworks are accompanied by a multiplicity of voices, including forestry workers, plant ecologists, and indigenous land stewards. Together, these perspectives chart the cultural and material shifts brought about when trees become commodities.

The Mill is a project that emerged on Vancouver Island to follow a thematic path from the microcosms of the forest floor to the quantifying and processing of lumber and the global distribution of forestry products. Expanded from two exhibitions at the Nanaimo Art Gallery, “Silva Part I: O Horizon” and “Silva Part II: Booming Grounds,” this book examines forgotten or under-acknowledged histories, while considering both local sites and forms of cultural expression that surround international forestry practices.

Contributions by Celestine Aleck, E. Richard Atleo (Umeek), Marian Penner Bancroft, Myrtle Bergren, Al Bersch & Leslie Grant, Peter Culley, Wilmer Gold, Bus Griffiths, Robert Guest, Jason de Haan & Miruna Dragan, Richard Hebda, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Duane Linklater, Liz Magor, George Sawchuk, Carol Sawyer, W. G. Sebald, Kathy Slade, Kate Stefiuk, Kika Thorne, Nancy Turner, Fred Wah, Elias Wakan, Merv Wilkinson, Anne Pask-Wilkinson, Ashes Withyman.

Graphic design: Will Holder.

A curatorial and research project that aims to move beyond insanity as the opposite of sanity, and imagine a space beyond what is understood as sane, i.e. ultrasanity—not a romanticization of madness or mental illness, but an effort to reconsider and challenge the notion of madness and the stigmas labelled on the so-called mad.

This publication unfolds as a collection of words, works, and images that informed, incited, and embodied SAVVY Contemporary's project Ultrasanity. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry, and Resistance, an exhibition and research project on the elasticity of sanity. 

It doesn't materialise simply as a catalogue of the exhibition but as a book retracing the trajectory of a research, as an occasion to extend SAVVY's curatorial proposition into a further choral perspective. With it we aim to deepen some of the reflections that moved and agitated us through two years of researches, conversations, programming, and practicing of Ultrasanity. The cogitations and the confrontations, the movements and the sounds, the trials and the tribulations, that accompanied us through the project and its 4 chapters and iterations are here collected to resonate one to each other, and to open new trajectories and paths.

Contributions by Hortensia Völckers, Kirsten Ha, Alya Sebti, Inka Gressel, Joerg Fingerhut, Ana Gómez-Carillo, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Agudio, Frederick W. Hickling, Debbie-Ann Chambers, Jaswant Guzder, The Brother Moves On, Jota Mombaça, Ghayath Almadhoun, Dora García, Monica Greco, Sajdeep Soomal, Ayesha Hameed, Jaswant Guzder, Johan Lagae, Sofie Boonen, Maarten Liefooghe, Mpho Matsipa, Dorothee Munyaneza.

Sasha Phyars-Burgess’ first monograph, Untitled. Spanning three bodies of work, this 200-plus page monograph includes poems by Ser Alida and Aurora Masum-Javed, a conversation between Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Juliana Huxtable and Carolyn Lazard, and essay by Bill Gaskins. Designed by Studio Lin.

As recipient of the second annual Capricious Photo Award, Sasha is a vital, emerging voice in contemporary photography, engaging the charged line between documentary and fine art. Her work ranges from affecting studies on diaspora, family and place to revolving social phenomenons in which energy, beauty and power meet.

The second annual jury panel was helmed by Capricious Founder and Publisher Sophie Mörner and Associate Publisher Anika Sabin alongside Lauren Cornell, Katherine Hubbard, JOFF, Matt Keegan, Guadalupe Rosales, Ka-Man Tse, and Lyndsy Welgos.

wild wild Wild West / Haunting of the Seahorse by Jonathan Lyndon Chase, part of a new book series of experimental narratives. This release of non-linear storytelling illustrates black queer bodies moving through fluid states of love, grief, and desire within the canons of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Like a love letter, Jonathan employs multi-sensory entanglements, a blending of the abstract and physical, to draw out complex histories of blackness, meditations on mental health, and queer futurity.

Jonathan Lyndon Chase is an interdisciplinary artist principally working in modes of painting, video and sculpture depicting queer black love and community amid the backdrop of urban and domestic spaces. This is their second book with Capricious Publishing—a debut book Quiet Storm was released in conjunction with Company Gallery in 2018. Chase was born in 1989 in Philadelphia, PA where they currently live and work.

RANDY is a 300-plus page full color anthology of RANDY zines spanning 2010-2013. Initiated by artist A.K. Burns and publisher Sophie Mörner, RANDY was a fearless celebration of queer/feminist arts.

Contains over 100 interviews, conversations and projects including work by:
niv Acosta, Jess Arndt, Meriem Bennani, Sadie Benning, Elizabeth Bethea, Ramdasha Bikceem, Cass Bird, Dana Bishop-Root, Pauline Boudry, boychild, Kathe Burkhart, Nao Bustamante, Jibz Cameron, Silvia Casalino, Christelle de Castro, Leidy Churchman, Jon Davies, Hayden Dunham, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Nicole Eisenman, Edie Fake, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Shannon Funchess, Mariah Garnett, Luke Gilford, Julia Gillard, Jules Gimbrone, Reina Gossett, Goodyn Green, Gordon Hall, Harmony Hammond, Onya Hogan-Finlay, Emily Hope, Katherine Hubbard, Amber Ibarreche, Mariana Juliano, Stanya Kahn, Sarah Forbes Keough, Pozsi B Kolor, Adam Krause, Lisa Lenarz, Katerina Llanes, Amos Mac, Lee Maida, India Salvor Menuez, Lessa Millet, MPA, Ulrike Müller, Sheila Pepe, Litia Perta, Cassie Peterson, Isaac Preiss, R.H Quaytman, Jen Rosenblit, Colin Self, Mel Shimkovitz, Amy Sillman, Tuesday Smillie, Jazmin Venus Soto, Matthew Stone, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Lanka Tattersall, Wu Tsang, Scott Valentine, Leilah Weinraub, Hanna Wilde, Martha Wilson, Io Tillett Wright, Geo Wyeth, Yes! Association/Föreningen Ja!

From theory-inspired poetry to technocratic desires concealed behind razorblades; from anarchy to mass-entertainment; from the collapse of binary distinctions of scale to post-human architecture; from the vibratory power of sound and vision to crowds, to the rejection of natural essentialism, materialist universality, and the haunted houses of the Anthropocene, all can be found in Deep Scroll. Edited by the artist Anne de Vries in collaboration with an AI text generator, this book offers an offline domain in which a network of artistic gestures and theoretical contributions are collected for your scrolling needs. 

Comprising a range of scrolling pathways that serve as hyperlinks and references to past art projects, sketches, research, and documentation, this book overflows with texts and collages that generate ambiguous algorithms that fleetingly capture the focus of our configurations. All content smoothly flows, driving an accelerated state of correlation to the point of its collapse. Deep Scroll is designed to be reactive; it may induce an epiphany, or to leave the reader at the nadir of a cognitive abyss.

DEEP SCROLL is an artist publication produced in collaboration with AISSystem and Onomatopee. This limited edition contains contributions by Ariella Azoulay, Alain Badiou, Iain Hamilton Grant, Amelia Groom, Nicholas Korody, AI text generators, and many others.

Throughout the 1970s, filmmaker Barbara Hammer toured the United States, Africa, and Europe, making film after film about women and the lesbian experience, both of which had seldom been seen by a woman, for women on screen before. She made a slew of now-legendary experimental films, including Sis­ters! (1973), Dyketactics (1974), Multiple Orgasm (1976), Sappho {1978), and Double Strength {1978), more or less inventing lesbian cinema at a time when such material had largely been relegated to the pornographic imagination of male artists and filmmakers. During this prolific period, Hammer photographed her travels, her lovers, moments of community and kinship between her collaborators on set, private and public performances, friends, strangers. Through these photographs, Hammer explodes traditional notions of female sexuality by showing it for what it is: complex, messy, abstract, human.

Barbara Hammer is an experimental filmmaker whose work has pioneered feminist and lesbian cinema for five decades. She has had film retrospectives at the Jeu de Palme (Paris), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), National Gallery of Art (Washington, Dq, Kunsthall (Oslo, Norway), Toronto Film Festival, and Pink Life Queer Festival (Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey). Her work was included in the 1985, 1989, and 1993 Whitney Biennials and is included in the perma­nent collections of the Australian Center for the Moving Image, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre Georges Pompidou, and elsewhere. She is the author of Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and life (Feminist Press 2009). An exhibition of her notebooks was presented at Company Gallery in Fall 2014. A fol­low-up exhibition at Company, Truant: Photographs, 1970 – 1979, featuring unseen photographs from the 1970s, opened in October 2017.

First launched in 2012, and published by mfc michèle didier (micheledidier.com), == is a small-run arts publication, edited by Matt Keegan. ==#2, 2015, is designed by Su Barber and published in an edition of 500 by Capricious Publishing. Barber and Keegan worked together on North Drive Press (northdrivepress.com) between 2005-2010, and this publication shares a variety of traits with NDP.

==#2 is a non-thematic arts publication contained in a box with a 96-page bound volume featuring artist-to-artist interviews, texts, and transcriptions. Six loose multiples are also included.

Contributors include: Sam Anderson, Uri Aran, Fia Backström, Darren Bader, Judith Barry, Stefania Bortolami, Daniel Bozhkov, Milano Chow, Anna Craycroft, Lucky DeBellevue, Cristina Delgado, Haytham El-Wardany, Jake Ewert, Vincent Fecteau, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Harrell Fletcher, Rachel Foullon, Aurélien Froment, Kenny Greenberg, Calla Henkel, Leslie Hewitt, Jaya Howey, Adelita Husni-Bey, Iman Issa, Ruba Katrib, Jill Magid, Jo Nigoghossian, Aaron Peck, Max Pitegoff, David Placek, Olivia Plender, Lisa Robertson, Andrew Russeth, Amy Sillman, Diane Simpson, Greg Parma Smith, Jessica Stockholder, Martine Syms, and Anicka Yi.

Se Te Subió El Santo is a collection of self – portraits taken by the artist directly after she awoke every morning while away on a week-long residency in Iowa City, IA at the Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Spring 2016. This daily practice confronts notions of the artist’s interests in rendering a full self implicit of gender, race, sexuality, and spirituality while challenging and collapsing the intersections of each identity as well.

The title of the work is taken from Ana Mendieta, the Iowa Years: A critical study, 1969 through 1977 where Julia Ann Herzberg writes in the dissertation:

Ana and Raquelin Mendieta’s vocabulary contained many Afro-Cuban idiomatic expressions. For example, they would often respond to a friend who was acting in an unruly or hyperactive manner by asking” “Se te subió el santo? (“Are you in a trance?”) In the Afro-Cuban context, the expression “subirse el santo” is used in religious ceremony when the orisha/saint takes possession of the believer.

The monograph also includes an essay by author Akwaeke Emezi.

First edition, 94 page, black and white, leather bound hardcover with white foil embossment 

TIONA NEKKIA MCCLODDEN is an interdisciplinary research-based conceptual artist, filmmaker and curator whose work explores, and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Themes explored in McClodden’s films and works have been re-memory and more recently narrative biomythography.

The first book of Melanie Bonajo’s new series, Matrix Botanica.

Non-Human Persons explores our relationship with Nature photography, animals and the Internet. It is a 140+ page, softcover, full-color, magazine-style artist book designed by Experimental Jetset.

Can we send funny animal pictures to space for aliens to discover the Earth’s ecosystem? Our enormous access to animal pictures on the Internet tramples our awareness that only humans possess self awareness, language, culture, land and customs. But when does a lion stop being a lion? How are typical Nature photography categories designed by the hands of science replaced by the images of amateurs who document the disappearing surroundings of wildlife by ever expanding urbanization? As a result, do we need complete revised scientific categories for these images?

For 10 years, Melanie Bonajo has collected thousands of animal pictures online, this book is her exploration of these questions.

This book accompanies the 2020 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize exhibition, Nicole Eisenman: Sturm und Drang. The exhibition ran from February 27 through November 15, 2020, at The Contemporary Austin’s downtown venue, the Jones Center on Congress Avenue, with an outdoor sculpture at the museum’s fourteen-acre sculpture park at Laguna Gloria. A related exhibition of Eisenman’s work with a selection of drawings by Bay Area artist Keith Boadwee, Nicole Eisenman and Keith Boadwee, is on view at The FLAG Art Foundation in New York December 12, 2020, through March 13, 2021. 

NICOLE EISENMAN was selected for the prize by an independent advisory committee comprising renowned curators and art historians from across the United States. The artist’s practice blends influences from Western art history and traditional figurative art with elements of punk, feminist activism, queer identity, humor, and emotional rawness to create profoundly unique works. Eisenman emerged in the early 1990s in New York City as a painter, and her creative output for nearly three decades centered on painting. More recently, however, the artist’s three-dimensional objects have overturned expectations of her work and of figurative sculpture. This publication reflects on the sculptural impulses within Eisenman’s work, considering the recent shift in her practice as both a new focus and always-present undercurrent brought to the surface.

Co-published with The Contemporary Austin and The FLAG Art Foundation

Essay by Heather Pesanti
Essay by Stephanie Roach and Jonathan Rider
Essay by Nicole Eisenman
Text by Litia Perta
Essay by Alhena Katsof
Conversation with Nicole Eisenman and Keith Boadwee

Introverse Arrangements is centred on the work of German artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt who, despite only recently garnering attention for her work, is most known for a period of geometric and poetic typewriter drawings produced between the 1970s and 1990 while employed as an administrator for the German Democratic Republic.

It is the first title from Unbidden Tongues, a series edited by Isabelle Sully that focuses on previously produced yet relatively uncirculated work by cultural practitioners busy with questions surrounding civility and civic life—particularly so in relation to language.

This publication comprises four essays and one conversation with contemporary artists and curators discussing their experience of becoming mothers as professionals in the arts, its reality and effects. While their reflections represent a similar strata of art worker in terms of background, class, and career trajectory, the impact of instruments of patriarchy on rendering maternity invisible that they describe is recognizable and insidious.

Contributions by Mai Abu ElDahab, Basma Alsharif, Lara Khaldi, Mary Jirmanus Saba, and Mirene Arsanios with Nikki Columbus.

Edited by Mai Abu ElDahab
Published by Mophradat and Archive Books
Text design layout by Valerie Arif
Arabic and English

Approaching the comic medium as a supercollider for achieving maximum abstraction, in Chronosis artist Keith Tilford and philosopher Reza Negarestani create a graphically stunning and conceptually explosive universe in which the worlds of pop culture, modern art, philosophy, science fiction, and theoretical physics crash into one another.

Taking place after the catastrophic advent of the birth of time, Chronosis narrates the story of a sprawling multiverse at the center of which monazzeins, the monks of an esoteric time-cult, attempt to build bridges between the many fragmented tribes and histories of multiple possible worlds. Across a series of dizzying overlapping stories we glimpse worlds where time flows backward, where the universe can be recreated every five minutes, or where rigid facts are washed away by the tides of an infinite ocean of possibility.

A unique fusion of comics culture and philosophical cogitation, this conceptually and visually mind-expanding tale takes the reader on a dizzying rollercoaster ride through time, space, and thought.

This volume contains the entire Chronosis series in full color, along with additional background materials including early sketches, script notes, and alternative covers.

The question of the voice and its prominent role in our postindustrial society.

The (non)human voice has always been part of modern art, notably within performance art, sound art, and conceptual art. However, Master of Voice temporary master program at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, mutated from this history, examining the voice as a unique “discipline.” The graduate program's focus was on the (non)human voice as a means to an end or an end in itself within artistic practice. A special orientation of the curriculum, co-developed with a team of artists with a longstanding interest in the (non)human voice, is the voice in relation to technology and gender. This book captures a two-year-long period of research—of thinking, talking, sharing, learning, making, acting, and creating by students and teachers, artists, and other practitioners—to find possible answers and approaches to the question of the voice and its prominent role in our postindustrial society.

Contributions by Tyler Coburn, Angelo Custódio, Thom Driver, Paul Elliman, Amelia Groom, Miyuki Inoue, Danae Io, Jamila Johnson-Small, Bin Koh, Snejanka Mihaylova, Maria Montesi, MPA, Natasha Papadopoulou, Duncan Robertson, Marnie Slater, Cécile Tafanelli, Mavi Veloso, Geo Wyeth, Eva Šusová.

Graphic design: Juliette Lizotte.

This publication tells of the journey of a photographic research of the origins of cumbia music along the lower Magdalena river in Colombia.

The Magdalena river marks the birthplace and distribution system for cumbia music, which in its beginnings, dating back to the colonial era, was a prohibited ritual dance and one of the ways in which the indigenous and African populations interacted. Musically, it is made up of a combination of African rhythms, indigenous instruments, and Spanish lyrics. Since the 1950s cumbia has spread beyond Colombia to the working-class neighbourhoods in Latin America, adapting and picking up local specifics at each place. 
The Magdalena river also stands for one of many rivers in the world that acted as distribution channels. It speaks of water cultures, which, located along rivers, have absorbed very different influences from the interior of the countries and the world – making them multifaceted and thoroughly mixed. This becomes evident in the music as well. 

The publication includes photographs, recordings of conversations with cumbia musicians, and short texts about the journey.

Mirjam Wirz (born 1973) is a photographer and artist based in Zurich.

A drama in three acts on the main theme of zombies: the most recent novel by the artists' collective.

Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte is a screenplay that cannot be a film; it is a film that can only be on paper. If the property of a film producer, Bernadette Corporation claims Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte would be left derelict, abandoned to vagabonds and squatters. It is intended as a narrative of messy revenge, ruined by the screenplay form. With Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte, Bernadette Corporation asks: How many amateur screenplay writers are there in existence compared to how many amateur novelists? What is the difference between a zombie and an insane cannibal?

Bernadette Corporation is an anonymous artists' group with changing members. From 1995 to 1997, it worked under the guise of an underground fashion label. In 1999 it self-published a magazine, Made in USA, and began producing videos, most notably Get Rid of Yourself (2003). In 2005 Bernadette Corporation authored the much-acclaimed collective novel Reena Spaulings, published by Semiotext(e) and hailed as "[a] sprawling work of crypto-impressionistic fiction that purposefully elides individual authorship for a sort of rarefied mechanical groupthink."

The book contextualizes the Creativity Exercises—an amateur art course led by neo-avant-garde artists Miklós Erdély and Dóra Maurer in Budapest from 1975 to 1977—within the postwar intellectual networks that connected artists, architects, educators, sociologists and other socially engaged professionals, fostering the exchange of ideas and concepts and making connections between different fields of knowledge.

How do people learn, what do they know, and how does it influence their personality, their behavior and their position in society? These questions were the focus of the research project and exhibition series entitled “Creativity Exercises” between 2014 and 2016, which displayed historical and contemporary art projects experimenting with alternative forms of learning, spanning three exhibition stations: Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, tranzit.hu in Budapest, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

The first part of the publication consists of historical texts translated into English for the first time, including the exercise descriptions that functioned as the curriculum for the Creativity Exercises, studies written on the methods employed in the Creativity Exercises course, and parallel models for progressive pedagogies and art education. In the second part of the book, newly commissioned essays offer historical and transnational context for the “case study” of the Creativity Exercises course. The impact that such “creativity exercises” had on aesthetic, educational and institutional concepts, and the impulses for participation, co-creation, knowledge production and exchange that they continue to give—even beyond the realm of art—are the central themes of the book.

Texts by Ferenc Mérei & Tamás St. Auby, László Beke, Ildikó Enyedi, Miklós Erdély, Éva Forgács, Janna Graham, Dóra Hegyi, Sándor Hornyik, Zsolt K. Horváth, Emese Kürti, Zsuzsa László, Dóra Maurer, Marion von Osten, Axel Wieder.

In collaboration with cross-disciplinary artist Bianca Casady of music duo CocoRosie, 2013 brought the release of a new print magazine entitled Girls Against God (GAG). A boldly feminist exploration and multi-generational endeavor, GAG deploys the arts to illuminate the oppressive, obsolete nature of traditional, male-defined religions and other patriarchal institutions—“We must resist and reinvent,” Casady declares.

Created in partnership with artist Anne Sherwood Pundyk, GAG’s now out-of-print debut issue is a lushly colorful tabloid-sized print publication, showcasing provocative, original artwork alongside comprehensive interviews and essays with an international cadre of artists.

Issue #1—Antony / Gabby Bess / Melanie Bonajo / Vaginal Davis / Yasmine Hadan / Emely Neu / Kembra Pfahler / Marguerite Stern / Alexyss K. Tylor / Johanna Constantine / Mary Hanlon / Julie Higonnet / Molly O’Brien / Chloe Olewitz / Alice O’Malley / Kara L. Rooney / Jean Marc Ruellan

An oracular Surrealism: the debut presentation of Leonora Carrington's recently discovered tarot deck.

The British-born artist Leonora Carrington is one of the more fascinating figures to emerge from the Surrealist movement. As both a writer and painter, she was championed early by André Breton and joined the exiled Surrealists in New York, before settling in Mexico in 1943. The magical themes of Carrington's otherworldly paintings are well known, but the recent discovery of a suite of tarot designs she created for the Major Arcana was a revelation for scholars and fans of Carrington alike.

Drawing inspiration from the Tarot of Marseille and the popular Waite-Smith deck, Carrington brings her own approach and style to this timeless subject, creating a series of iconic images. Executed on thick board, brightly colored and squarish in format, Carrington's Major Arcana shines with gold and silver leaf, exploring tarot themes through what Gabriel Weisz Carrington describes as a "surrealist object." This tantalizing discovery, made by the curator Tere Arcq and scholar Susan Aberth, has placed greater emphasis upon the role of the tarot in Carrington's creative life and has led to fresh research in this area.

The Tarot of Leonora Carrington is the first book dedicated to this important aspect of the artist's work. It includes a full-size facsimile of her newly discovered Major Arcana; an introduction from her son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington; and a richly illustrated essay from Tere Arcq and Susan Aberth that offers new insights—exploring the significance of tarot imagery within Carrington's wider work, her many inspirations and mysterious occult sources.

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was born in Lancashire, England. In 1936, she saw Max Ernst's work at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, and met the artist the following year. They became a couple almost immediately. When the outbreak of World War II separated them, Carrington fled to Spain, then Lisbon, where she married Renato Leduc, a Mexican diplomat, and escaped to Mexico, where she became close with Remedios Varo and other expat Surrealists.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Reynaldo Rivera took personal photos of the Los Angeles that he lived in and knew: a world of cheap rent, house parties, subversive fashion, underground bands, and a handful of Latino gay and transvestite bars: Mugi’s, The Silverlake Lounge, and La Plaza. Most of these bars are long closed and many of the performers have died. But in Rivera’s photographs, these men and women live on in a silvery landscape of makeshift old-style cinematic glamour, a fabulous flight from unacceptable reality. 

As a teenager, Rivera took refuge in used bookstores and thrift stores, where he discovered old  photo books of Mexican film stars and the work of Lisette Model, Brassai, and Bresson. Inspired, he bought a camera and began  photographing people at his hotel. In 1981 he moved to Echo Park and began taking photos for the LA Weekly. 

This book is an ensemble of almost 200 images selected by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler spanning more than two decades in Los Angeles and Mexico. The  book also includes Luis Bauz’s story, “Tatiana,” about one of the  subjects of these photographs; a critical essay on Rivera’s work by Chris Kraus; and a novella-length conversation between Rivera and his  friend and contemporary Vaginal Davis about their lives, work, fantasies, and collective histories.

Edited by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler
With Luis Bauz, Vaginal Davis and Chris Kraus

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (1923-2014) is an Ivorian artist, poet, “re-searcher”, creator and inventor of the Bété syllabary. In 1989, he was thrust to the front of the international artistic scene during the Magiciens de la terre exhibition (May 18 – August 14, 1989, Centre Georges Pompidou, Grande Halle de La Villette, Paris). Introduced alongside a hundred other artists from all over the world, he would subsequently become world famous for his drawings on maps enhanced with colored pencil.

But in May of that year, Bruly Bouabré still cherished quite a different dream: that of becoming a writer. As he was getting ready to fly to Paris, leaving African soil for the first time, the poet was commissioned by his friends Odile and Georges Courrèges (then director of the French Cultural Center of Abidjan) to write the story of his trip. This is how, a few weeks after his return, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré would submit his “report” of 325 handwritten pages produced in “33 days”, in which he gleefully recounts his journey – at times punctuated by insignificant events  – while questioning the place of Man in Western society.

Until now, this tale of “a blind man in Paris,” as he first was to call it, had remained unpublished. The text – of pleasing findings and enchanting language – is that of an observer seeking to understand a changing world, with his own culture as a starting point. Imbued with such freedom and desire for identification and documentation, which characterize the work of this encyclopedic creator, the book is a very unique testimony to a milestone in the history of contemporary art.

Initiated by Odile and Georges Courrèges, who provided publishers with a copy of the manuscript entrusted to them by the artist, the project for this publication was also made possible thanks to André Magnin, who provided the original manuscript.

Foreword by Jean-Hubert Martin