Artists' Books

The work of Iranian-Belgian artist Mashid Mohadjerin (°1976, Teheran) is an intricate tapestry of personal and collective memory, weaving together photography, text, video, and archival material to explore themes of displacement, resistance, and identity.

Family chronicles merge with momentous political events and are set against the background of a broader history of the MENA-region. Mohadjerin uncovers invisible nuances hidden beneath the extraordinary and the familiar.

In Riding in Silence & The Crying Dervish (2025), Mashid Mohadjerin draws from the depths of her family history, unraveling the echoes of migration, forced departures, and the quiet endurance of those caught between worlds. The book builds on her previous work, Freedom is Not Free (2021), where she explored the role of women in movements of resistance across the MENA region. However, in this latest series, she turns her gaze towards the intersection of masculinity, political ideology, and displacement, examining how historical forces shape personal narratives in ways both visible and unseen.

An extensive catalog dedicated to Jonas' under-explored drawing practice. 

The installation, performance and video works of American artist Joan Jonas (born 1936) are emblematic of the '70s-'80s downtown New York avant-garde. Jonas privileged form over content, generating rigorous pieces with thematic concerns such as time, space and feminine subjectivity. Significant as these works are, other parts of Jonas' diverse and dynamic oeuvre deserve their due attention. This book is the first comprehensive catalog to elucidate an under-examined component of the artist's practice. Fascinated by the tension between motion and transcription, Jonas developed "endless drawings" composed of lines that weave around themselves or through a grid. She also began to draw natural things – plants, animals, minerals – both from her own environment and from fiction.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Drawing Center, this volume examines several decades of Jonas' drawing practice, presented in chronological order. The drawings are accompanied by extensive images from the artist's notable performances and exhibitions.

Foreword by Annie Ratti, Fabio Cavallucci. Text by Marina Warner, Joan Jonas, Anna Daneri, Roberto Pinto, Cristina Natalicchio, Andrea Mattiello.

Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough’s, "The Western" is a speech-act, an oral poem to be told aloud. As Goldsborough writes in his 1080PRESS newsletter (reproduced with the book), “are we willing to salt the field of USAmerica in order to grow sth somewhere else?//” The Western mines the history of the WEST—reimagining its landscape within a gluttony of images. But what happens when the wrongs of the AMERICAN WEST meant to be right-ed, are so large, so intensely evil and vile that the English language itself spaghettifies around it? What new histories will be erected—of Samuel R. Delany, Walter Rodney, and others trampled and run over by the wet tech ravages of future-past, to take us all across the river?

"In THE WESTERN, Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough composes to facilitate decomposition, setting a place for language, reader in tow, to reimagine itself, to become the space and act of reimagination. From out of the dark:

[,,,, a vision ::

the future arrives ::

barefoot & confident /

fondue oozing a triumphant grin"

— Yeukai Zimbwa (The Columbia Review)

It goes like this: lower and lower and lower and... Bring down all these towers! You're sinking into this. I'm alone and we don't care. Am I just passing time?

The fast-growing stinking escaped waste-loving wall-breaching self-cloning other-than-natural no-man’s tree is a 4000-word bilingual English-Arabic photo essay examining the ecological, political and historical significance of ailanthus altissima (tree of heaven) in occupied Palestine. Introduced by the Jewish National Fund during its Jerusalem Forest afforestation projects from the 1960s to 1980s, this tree flourished across various urban fringes, roadside areas and seemingly abandoned land. Known for its pungent odour, which earned it the nicknames ‘tree of hell’ and the ‘stinking tree’, it is now classified by the Israeli Ministry for the Protection of the Environment as an invasive species. 

Drawing on her formative experiences in Palestine and an interest in trees as political agents, Palestinian architect, artist and researcher Areej Ashhab provides a first-hand account of the invasiveness embodied by this unregulated, fast-growing weed-tree. The text is enriched by annotations by Catalan-British trans writer, researcher and community organiser Ailo Ribas, who unpacks the concepts of 'weediness' and explores issues of belonging and resistance within Palestine’s settler colonial context. Accompanied by recent photographs of the tree across Palestine, the publication lays bare the intricate root system and complex ecologies that underlie our geopolitical narratives.

This publication was realised through the support of Sharjah Art Foundation’s annual publishing grant (2023). 

Who is the Oriental Cyborg? asks Aditi Kini in this collection of notes, jokes, and queries into the provenance of a creature designed for labor, 3-D printed in the technoscientific post-colonies, modeled on old automata. Race is a technology, that we know, and technology can be raced — so why inquire into this at all? Perhaps this, the Oriental Cyborg, is a fantasy more than a memory, or an echo more than a form — or just an essayist’s extraction of personal anguish and humor from globalist decay.

Taking on the form of historical analysis / lyrical essay / documentary poem / experimental buzzword / positionality statement, this chapbook and its titular character might still be an elusive mystery even after reading.

“’What is a ghost but a person removed from corporeality?’ This is one among layers of questions Aditi Kini poses in Oriental Cyborg, a lyrical excavation into survival in the era of techno racial capitalism, and its “deleting touch” that so easily voids—reduces to faceless services—the exploited individuals performing various acts of techno-labor. A grieved searching drives this hybrid essay, which feels urgent and necessary as threats from AI grab headlines. This work compels us to see our culture’s love affair with technological progress as a means for continued colonization and domination. It also reminds us, and celebrates, that those erased don’t stay silent forever. We privileged may not be able to hear them yet, but those who are listening know. They roar.” — Allison Cobb

“In the mirror of Aditi Kini’s Oriental Cyborg, I become the monster—a hopeless automaton, an intelligence stripped of roar. With titanium-threaded theory, Kini radiantly stitches together the ideal Asian working machine. Get your own Oriental cyborg today: super dazzling and sexy, historically embroidered, an oracular truth who never tires, never complains, forever mute, what perfection!” — Lily Hoàng

Aditi Kini is an undisciplined writer. They’ve done both NYC and the MFA (at UC San Diego). They were a finalist/alternate for the 2020-22 Jerome Award for Literature. They edit Lumpenpockets, “a nonquarterly sick rag.” Read their words in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Rumpus, Denver Quarterly, The New York Times, and elsewhere. They’re at work on multiple projects, all at once. They are blessed with two dogs, Lucy the Happy and Charly Kong, who make life worth living.

Weaving Language I: Lexicon is the first book in the Weaving Language series, which examines the poetics of weaving traditions through historical research as well as contemporary practices. Attempting to dismantle and rebuild commonplace understandings of the history of writing, Weaving Language focuses on fiber-based forms as a longstanding but often overlooked medium for record-keeping, storytelling, and poetry.

In Weaving Language I: Lexicon, weaving processes are mapped onto English grammar to suggest a method for reading woven works. Offering visual vocabularies as both discrete concrete poems as well as a collection of translatable terms, this book invites readers, writers, and weavers to participate by considering weaving as a system that can be decoded. Textile forms are broken into the basic building blocks of language, presented as a visual/textual lexicon.

Weaving Language I: Lexicon was initially self-published by Capone in 2012 and in 2015 re-issued in an edition of five as an artists’ book, which was awarded the Frances Mason Harris ’26 Prize from Brown University.

Essay Press’s edition makes this important work available for the first time in a trade edition. The edition has also been newly edited and significantly expanded into a multivocal work that represents the contributions of a small collective of artists including Martha Tuttle, Allison Parrish, Sarah Zapata, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Amaranth Borsuk, and Imani Elizabeth Jackson, thanks to funding from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Ford Family Foundation. The book also includes an afterword by Kit Schluter and diagrams by Anni Albers (with permissions from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation).

Plans are underway to similarly expand and reissue the two additional books in the series both previously published in limited editions currently out of print: Weaving Language II: Language is Image, Paper, Code, & Cloth (information as material, York, UK, 2018) and Weaving Language III: Writing in Threads (Center of Craft, Asheville, NC, 2017). The Weaving Language project has been accompanied by numerous gallery shows, including “Material Memory,” a show running from October 7 through November 9, 2022, at Nationale in Portland, Oregon, to accompany the release of the Essay Press edition of Weaving Language I.

Artists’ books from the Weaving Language series are held by the collections of the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, NY; the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY; the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays at the John Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, RI; and at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL.

What does an oracle look like? gathers essays and drawings made by Perri MacKenzie between 2020 and 2024, themed loosely around pottery painting and vocal expression. The drawings, rendered in splashy India ink and collage, range from expressive sketches to theatrical still lives and experimental bandes dessinées. The book presents for the first time the essay Cathedral. Part memoir, part literary/sonic investigation, it meditates on the vocal texture of a Hollywood actor.

Designed by Ilke Gers.

as the non-world falls away is set of fragmented poetic compositions, created through iPhone scans of the artists notebook that have then been worked over digitally, testing the boundaries between image and text in a palimpsestic manner

WITHOUT THE E is a series of pamphlets responding to a presence or an absence felt in contemporary digital culture.

A weaving draft is a kind of notation for planning and sharing woven textil structures. The threading, along the top, shows how the warp is threaded through the heddles and frames; the treadling, along the right-hand side, show the order in which the treadles of the loom are to be pressed; and the tie-up, in the upper right-hand corner, shows how each treadle interacts with the loom’ frames. The drawdown, in the lower left, shows whether the warp or weft will be on top at any particular intersection of threads—thereby providing a “preview” of the completed textile. Often a draft diagram will indicate the intended color of the warp and weft threads, and the drawdown will show the completed textile’s color patterns. In “Drafts,” Allison uses letters instead of colors, melding digital weaving with writing.

WITHOUT THE E is a series of pamphlets responding to a presence or an absence felt in contemporary digital culture.

The theme was built around the idiom “VOSTOK”, the title given by Stéphanie Pécourt to her cycle dedicated to performative semantics, in which carte-blanches signed by guest curators at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles are deployed. Buried beneath several kilometers of ice, Lake Vostok acts as an invitation that both fascinates and refuses us. This sub-glacial lake on the edge of Antarctica, the largest identified, becomes the mirror-object of our desires and fears for the abyssal depths. The title of the program, Now I am a Lake, is taken from Sylvia Plath's poem Mirror (1961).

This booklet includes the scripts and texts of the performances, translated exclusively into French for the occasion, as well as images from the videos presented at the eponymous event. The compilation focuses on Sylvia Plath's poem Mirror, and includes an introductory text by curator Pauline Hatzigeorgiou. 

edited by SB34
graphic design by Raphaëlle Serres / Solid Éditons

Contributions by Signe Frederiksen, Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, Margaux Schwarz, Hagar Tenenbaum, Sylvia Plath & Eleanor Ivory Weber

The Weight of the Concrete explores the legacy of the Turinese artist and publisher Ezio Gribaudo (1929–2022), examining his multifaceted oeuvre at the confluence of image and language. This publication, named after Il Peso del Concreto (1968)—a seminal work that featured Gribaudo’s early graphic creations alongside an anthology of concrete poetry edited by the poet Adriano Spatola (1941–88)—places Gribaudo’s work in conversation with approximately forty artists and poets from different generations, all of whom similarly engage with explorations of text, form, and visual expression.

Reflecting the editorial premise of Il Peso del Concreto, The Weight of the Concrete revisits the influential anthology, including archive material that documents its production, and reimagines it, pairing Gribaudo’s graphic work with a new selection of historical and contemporary concrete and experimental poetry.

At the heart of the volume is Gribaudo’s emblematic Logogrifi series, developed from the 1960s onward. The Logogrifi reveal his deep engagement with the art of bookmaking and fascination with industrial printing processes, relief matrices, typefaces, and language games.

In this new edition, the editors take the opportunity to revisit Gribaudo’s pioneering work, examining previously overlooked dimensions—gendered, geographical, and technological—and exploring contemporary associations beyond the original context. The book also includes essays that elucidate the poetic and political interplay between image, language, and materiality.

This publication is released following Ezio Gribaudo – The Weight of the Concrete, an exhibition held at the Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria (2023–24), and at the Museion—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy (2024).

Edited by Tom Engels and Lilou Vidal
Published by Axis Axis and Grazer Kunstverein

Contributions by Anni Albers, Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Irma Blank, Al Cartio, Paula Claire, CAConrad, Natalie Czech, Betty Danon, Constance DeJong, Mirtha Dermisache, Johanna Drucker, Bryana Fritz, Ilse Garnier, Liliane Giraudon, Susan Howe, Alison Knowles, Katalin Ladik, Liliane Lijn, Hanne Lippard, Sara Magenheimer, Françoise Mairey, Nadia Marcus, Giulia Niccolai, Alice Notley, Ewa Partum, sadé powell, N. H. Pritchard, Cia Rinne, Neide Dias de Sá, Giovanna Sandri, Mary Ellen Solt, Alice Theobald, Colleen Thibaudeau, Patrizia Vicinelli, Pascal Vonlanthen, Hannah Weiner, and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt

Essays by Alex Balgiu, Tom Engels, Nadia Marcus, Luca Lo Pinto, Mónica de la Torre, and Lilou Vidal

This publication coincides with Curtis Cuffie's New York City, an exhibition presenting Curtis Cuffie's work as captured in photographs by Katy Abel, Tom Warren, and Cuffie himself. Unlike the exhibition, this book exclusively features Cuffie's photographs. It is the eighth entry in a series of compact volumes featuring visual contributions,  correspondence,  responses, and conversations accompanying the Grazer Kunstverein exhibition program.

Curtis Cuffie (1955-2002) was an artist based in New York City's East Village. Originally from Hartsville, South Carolina, he moved to Brooklyn at the age of fifteen and eventually settled in Manhattan, first near Bryant Park and later around the Bowery where he lived unhoused for long stretches of his life. Cuffie was integral to a dynamic circle of artists and intellectuals, marking his place within New York's Black avant-garde. 

This publication coincides with the exhibition Until Due Time, Everything Is Else by Pan Daijing. It is the sixth entry in a series of compact volumes featuring visual contributions, correspondence, responses, and conversations accompanying the Grazer Kunstverein exhibition program.

The images within this book are exerpts from a video created by Pan Daijing. This publication is intended to act as a sixth screen, aligning with a five-channel video installation on display in Until Due Time, Everything Is Else at Grazer Kunstverein.

Editor: Tom Engels
Image: Pan Daijing
Graphic Design: Julie Peeters

An edifying immersion into Vicuña’s creative wellspring as well as her decolonization and ecofeminist ideals.

Beautifully designed, with a special reverence for her humanitarian heart, Dreaming Water is the most thorough monograph dedicated to the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña to date. Vicuña coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s as a new category for her works composed of debris and structures that disappear in the landscape, and which also include her quipus (“knot” in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space.

Dreaming Water brings together over 200 works—including paintings, drawings, screenprints, collages, textiles, videos, photographs, installations, poetry, artist books and performances—created throughout the artist’s remarkable career. It also features several stimulating texts—a lengthy epistolary piece by curator and editor Miguel A. López as well as new essays by anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli, curator Catherine de Zegher and art historian José de Nordenflycht. Vicuña herself contributes two texts, reflecting on her drawings from the “Palabrarmas” project and the activism of the group Artists for Democracy, which she cofounded in 1974. A rousing conversation between Vicuña, anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena and curator Camila Marambio also figures in the book, blending the artist’s voice with those who are experts in fields pertinent to her practice.

Inspired initially by Jerome Rothenberg’s translation Flower World Variations, which Cecilia Vicuña first encountered in 1985, Deer Book brings together nearly forty years of the artist’s poetry, “poethical” translations, and drawings related to cosmologies and mythologies surrounding the deer, and sacrificial dance in cultures around the world.

Woven like one of her quipu installations, Vicuña’s texts—which include original compositions in Spanish as well as English translations by Daniel Borzutzky—become meditations on translation, not just of the sacred nature of this animal but on how our understandings of ceremony and ritual are transformed, by this ongoing process. Taken as inspiration rather than conundrum, the impossibility of translation opens up poetic possibilities for Vicuña as she continues her lifelong exploration into the nature of communication across eras and distant lands, languages and shared symbols within Indigenous spiritualities.

Published on the occasion of  '[…] kept in private. Making it public.' an installation by Lieven Lahaye, as part of the 9th Artishok Biennial, curated by Brigit Arop and Margit Säde.  "It’s one thing to assemble a collection and display it in your private space, something else entirely to reveal what has been kept in private. Making it public. I'm standing in front of my bookshelf, looking up the meaning of 'private'. Private is still a complex word but its extraordinary historical revaluation is for the most part long completed."

Designed by: Ott Metusala

Slant is a mail art project and a publishing house. It invites artists, designers, writers and poets to express themselves through a common theme every two weeks. it has poetry as its beacon of reflection, keeping in mind that sometimes we must tell the truth slant in order to see our reality depicted.

First edition, approx. 240pp. 4-colors riso printed.
20 x 25,5cm, 200 copies. Coptic hand-made binding.
Softcover printed wraps. French and English texts.

Prepositions enacts a distinction between what language says and what it does. A catalogue of exercises, interviews, essays and creative explorations, this workbook-compendium invites the reader to investigate how we practise empathy, understanding, and contact, by learning and teaching all at once. Building on the archive of Montez Press Radio show Tongue and Cheek, and featuring work from a stellar cast of previous participants in the broader project, Prepositions asks us what active and embodied participation really means, not just in teaching, but across a whole life.

This book will change your body—and your mind. Prepositions is a set of bite-sized propositions for being and thinking otherwise. Put it under your tongue and see what happens.
— Leah Pires

This compendium of witty exercises, moving personal reflections, curious propositions, and carefully selected graphics invites readers to explore what it means to inhabit a book. It is the product of many hands, a polyphonic choir, filled with immense care and a deep sense of friendship. As one feels its weight, moves around it, folds its pages, breaths with it, or reads it out aloud, one begins to wonder: what does the book need to be completed?
Prepositions—inscribed in the tradition of works as disparate as Robert Filliou’s Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts and CAConrad’s poetry rituals—is an exercise of radical pedagogy and readership. Everyone who enters this book becomes part of its contents.
— Alice Centamore

This publication is the fourth volume in a series that documents Tarek Atoui's project Waters' Witness. Created in collaboration with French photographer and Atoui's long-term collaborator, Alexandre Guirkinger, it is intended as a visual embodiment of the work's development for Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, from the research and recording in Sydney's Port Botany, La Perouse and Frenchmans Bay, to the installation as sculptural and sonic composition in the Museum's Macgregor Gallery.

Waters' Witness is an exhibition that combines elements of artist and composer Tarek Atoui's ongoing project dedicated to capturing the sounds of harbour cities, from Athens to Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Beirut, Porto, Istanbul and now Sydney. The project encompasses an installation, performances, an archive of sounds and publications, that continually evolve as each new harbour is added.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia publication Tarek Atoui: Waters' Witness is the fourth volume in an international series of photographic books that form part of the Waters' Witness project. Produced in partnership with Atoui's long-term collaborator, French photographer Alexandre Guirkinger, the publication captures and articulates the Sydney components of this dynamic contemporary artwork.

Texts by Suzanne Cotter, Tarek Atoui, Anna Davis.

An exploration of the soundscape of coastal cities by the French-Lebanese artist.

Tarek Atoui's exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Waters' Witness, is based on the artist's ongoing project I/E, initiated in 2015, in which Atoui documents the human, ecological, historical and industrial realities of coastal cities such as Athens, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Beirut or Porto by means of sound recordings.
As an accompaniment and an extension of the exhibition, Mudam is publishing Waters' Witness #02, the third volume in a series initiated by the Serralves Museum dedicated to this ambitious and collaborative project, which seeks to explore the different ways in which sound can be experienced.

This publication includes an interview between Tarek Atoui and his long-time collaborator, artist and musician Éric La Casa; a visual contribution by photographer Alexandre Guirkinger; a rich iconography including views of the exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg and an introduction by curators Sarah Beaumont and Joel Valabrega.

Notebook from the South African artist featuring fountain pen's drawings and writings with inserted typescripts.

William Kentridge is at the same time painter, sculptor, engraver, decorator, theater and film director, actor, poem-performer… In that way, he is a “total artist”, next of kin to Jan Fabre, but whose is mainly concern by apartheid, post-colonialism, general history and the drain of time.

Stop Here, written and drawn with a fountain pen, is published at editions jannink in the collection “L'Art en écrit”. The tree is the main figure of this book. Here we find the main codes which belong to the artist—palimpsest and repetition—through which we are plunged in a metaphoric reflexion. It creates an analogy between book and tree, which is represented as the mother-source of creation before being transformed in a gibbet. Kentridge pursues his meanders where he evokes at the same time the smell of bakelite, vermouth risotto, a cemetery in the Congo, Sibyl, Cranach, the Winterreise, as well as his father, lawyer of Nelson Mandela.

This book brings together a selection of photographs by artist Mekhitar Garabedian, documenting the warehouse of his late father’s company, Melantex, which exported second-hand clothing from Belgium to the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The images inspired a one-year sculptural intervention by Garabedian, commissioned by the Antwerp Public Art Collection.

Import—Export, Friperie tells a compelling personal and collective story of how displacement can be turned into economic livelihood while creating connections between old and new homes, languages, and textiles.

The photographs are accompanied by an in-depth conversation between Garabedian and curator Samuel Saelemakers about the relationship between photography and sculpture, public representation, and diasporic thinking.

Published by Art-O-rama, FRAEME, this book is not exactly a notebook, nor is it a portfolio, an archive, or a memoir. H. is the first volume of HaYoung. This monograph takes the form of a narrative puzzle, a journey through translations: from one language to another, from one medium to another and from one space to another. H. is the beginning of a pattern, a silence, non-binary code, an ego trip, a reflection on identity, a punchline, a love story, or even a hot potato.

In 152 pages, arranged by designer Chloé Delchini, HaYoung's drawings are superposed and become rhizomatic narrators evolving over the course of the nine chapters. In their work, in life as in this book, HaYoung's voice persists in the margins around Western structures. The artist's writing proliferates within this rigid system of grids, adapting to it, attempting to communicate, creating misunderstandings, and deconstructing it.

With contributions from Aude Christel Mgba, Nelle Gevers, Sarah Netter, Anne Vimeux and Théo Casciani. H. is a book of a voice that constantly updates itself.