Books

day pulls down the sky is the title of Okpokwasili’s first (and simultaneously released) LP initiated by Danspace Project’s executive director and chief curator Judy Hussie-Taylor who brought the idea of a recording to Okwui during one of their meetings about Danspace’s Platform 2020 and research institute. These songs were written by Okwui between 2012 and 2018, some specifically for her interdisciplinary performances. Four of the songs were first performed by Okwui at Danspace Project, including “sam’s song” on the occasion of Sam Miller’s memorial on September 15, 2018.

The Interjection Calendar is an on and offline project, devised and hosted by Montez Press. Each month an artist or writer is commissioned to produce a new piece of work for release on our website. The PDF can be downloaded for free and there are 12 releases per year. At the end of the year the collection is published, demonstrating a diverse range of collaborations and experimental works, mapping the year in contemporary art writing, with equal space held for the emerging and the established. The Calendar reflects the current importance of online content media, pushing the relationship between image and text in this domain. 

Contributors: Kerry Campbell is a freelance curator and producer. She currently works as the Public Programmes Curator for Bloc Projects gallery (Sheffield) and is the founder and curator of TMT Projects - a contemporary arts platform based in Luton Town. 

vei darling is a first generation Liberian-American multidisciplinary artist and activist, who grew up in the D(M)V. vei moved to New York City when she was 17, and began an intense path of spiritual reconfiguration. vei positions herself within social justice and humanitarianism, whilst being infused with magick and spirituality. Her ultimate desire is to subvert the current paradigm in lieu of one that respects and reflects life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Caspar Heinemann is a writer, artist and poet. Their interests include critical occultism, gay biosemiotics and countercultural mythologies. Some of the time they teach and read things at institutions, a lot of the time they cook potatoes in different shapes and listen to Alan Watts lectures. They were born in London, UK, roughly 2.5 months after the release of Green Day’s seminal album Dookie. 

Douglas Kearney has published six books, most recently, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). His work has been exhibited at the American Jazz Museum, Temple Contemporary, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and The Visitor’s Welcome Center (Los Angeles). He studied at Howard University, Cave Canem, and California Institute of the Arts. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family just west of Minneapolis and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Douglaskearney.com 

Cara Levine - with: Khadija Tarver, Christine Wong Yap, Eliza Myrie, Greg Boyle, Rodney Lu- cas, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Ashley Stull Meyers, Sidony O’neal, Kambui Olujimi Jadelynn Stahl, Amanda Eicher, Jessica Angima, Faye Gleisser, Quenton Baker, Sam Aranke, Jade Thacker, Ekaette Ekong, Christopher Johnson, Marvin K White, Kemi Adeyemi, Constance Hockaday, Kate Johnson, Bayete Ross-Smith, Leila Weefur, Kirat Randhawa, Angela Hennessy, Elizabeth Dorbad, Prophet Walker, Shamell Bell, Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle and Ann Lewis. Cara Levine lives in Los Angeles, CA and is an artist exploring the intersections of the physical, metaphysical, traumatic and illusionary through sculpture, video and socially engaged practice. 

Daisy Parris was born in Kent, 1993, and graduated from Goldsmiths in 2014. She currently lives and works in South London. Daisy Parris’ work raises questions about identity politics as well as the limits of what it means to be human. By using various formats such as portraiture, roomscapes and text, Parris focuses on identity struggles as well as the worry, guilt, numbness and the violent encounters of everyday existence. 

Porpentine Charity Heartscape is a writer, game designer, and dead swamp milf in Oakland. Her work includes xeno-femme sci /fantasy, cursed video games, and globe-spanning sentient slime molds. She has exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, EMP Museum, and the National Gallery of Denmark, and has been commissioned by Vice and Rhizome. 

James Lawrence Slattery is an artist, critic and academic living and working in London. They hold an undergraduate degree in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London and a masters in Film Aesthetics from St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. 

Gjergji Shkurti is a New York based author. His writing explores architecture as fiction and incorporates a filmic imagination. The writing stems from a yearning to push history forward. 

Chanel Vegas is an artist who works in London. She writes poetry, makes paintings, and regularly performs as part of her work. Chanel graduated from Goldsmiths in 2017 and was the first student to be the recipient of the university’s Artist Award. 

Punch Viratmalee currently lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand. Viratmalee graduated Chulalongkorn University in 2015 with a BA in Communication Design. She previously worked at a commercial gallery in Bangkok and is now working as a curatorial assistant for the first Thailand Biennale. She also writes. 

The White Pube is the collaborative identity of Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente under which they write criticism an occasionally curate. The White Pube is based at thewhitepube. com and on Twitter and Instagram as @thewhitepube.

‘Masturbation in between the crimes against you will become a deciding matter in the kangaroo court. Philosophical questions will be answered without inquiry.’ 

If you have ever wondered how a cross between a funding application gone wrong and a tabloid column about the art world would read, this is it. Mellor presents a unique combination of novel and image, creating a polymorphous narrator who moves between personifications. Perhaps the most hazardous of these is Tippy Rampage, who is satisfyingly livid with the state of, well, everything. 

In a series of paintings, female police officers from British television shows such as Happy Valley and The Bill are positioned in an array of apocalyptic settings: freezing, burning, and backdropped by flooding. The accompanying text chronicles an acute feeling of being watched, what it feels like to watch whoever is watching you, or, as Mellor writes, how it feels to be kettled in your own flat, by your own paintings. 

Fragmented accounts map the protagonist’s shifting relationship to crime, gender, class and sexuality from multiple perspectives: as a child in Gamesley in the ‘70s, a lesbian performer in sex clubs in the mid ‘90s, an artist with and without gallery representation, and as a lecturer within an academic institution. These changes of position mix the language of a rally cry with an acerbic satire of the authorial voice and everyone they encounter. 

Published by Montez Press, Sirens is the first novel by Dawn Mellor and includes the complete set of the Sirens paintings. 

Dawn Mellor (b.1970) is an artist based in London, who has been exhibiting internationally since the 1990s. Solo exhibitions and special projects include Sixty Years at Tate Britain; London, Vile Affections at Studio Voltaire; London, Dawn Mellor at The Migros Museum; Zurich, Sirens at Team Gallery; New York, Madame X and The Party Tricks at Victoria Miro; London, Michael Jackson On The Wall at The National Portrait Gallery; London (touring), What Happened to Helen? Focal Point Gallery; Southend and Malerei, Böse at Kunstverein; Hamburg.

The eleventh issue of Pfeil Magazine looks into the multitude of meanings behind the word love: a positive affection and strong physical feeling which can be addressed to a friend, family, food, God, an object, or to an amorous partner or partners. Furthermore, it questions the expectations which go along with love, whether that love is returned or unanswered. Relationship patterns and role distributions are surveyed, vulnerabilities are assessed, but besides that the Love issue is also about a pregnant male seahorse, an infatuation with a smiling rock, sports and much more. 

Contributors: Adrian Williams, Anneli Schütz, CAConrad, Ceyenne Doroshow, Cyd Nova, Dan Kwon, Emily Pope, Eva Illouz, FORT, Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann, Gina Fischli, Hanna Fiegenbaum, Hans-Christian Dany, Keenan Jay, Maria Jakobsen, Mette Sterre, Monika Baer, Nick Oberthaler, Lindsay Lawson, Stine Sampers, Suné Woods, Theodore Barrow, Thomas Laprade, Vanessa Place and Vincent Ramos.

The material in Poisonous Oysters was generated during a live production reading group held in Newcastle University’s Fine Art Department on 26.01.18. Passages from the texts listed below were read aloud by the participants and interpreted by speech recognition software over and over, creating a poly-vocal feedback loop with the machine. The output is rewritten here as a score, flattening the time of the event and aligning the different versions of the texts to reveal the sound mutations between them.

Precarious Life, Judith Butler
The Waves, Virginia Woolf
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, Vilém Flusser
Body Pressure, Bruce Nauman
Testo Junkie, Beatriz Preciado
The Politics of Translation, Gayatri Spivak 
Creating trance and hypnosis scripts, Gemma Bailey 
Untitled document, John Latham

Alex Farrar’s book Wimper (the Dutch term for eyelash, or a potential misspelling of the English for ‘whimper’) presently held by the reader is an extension of an exhibition, which may be experienced in its own right, after the space has been vacated. It operates on the limits of material evidence by reprising a series of earlier prints entitled Behavioural Residues (second sweep), featuring barely perceptible images of single eyelashes spread throughout the texts and pages. Apart from their significance as intimate materials discarded by the body over time, such as hair or skin, they submit to the almost nothing of an aesthetics of disappearance, while lingering in a dialectics of misunderstanding that commits to a lack of closure.

Texts by Nicolas de Oliveira and Nicola Oxley, and David Price. Graphic design by studio Hendriksen, risograph printed by Alex Farrar in studio Hendriksen, Amsterdam, with the cover offset printed by ZwaanLenoirSchuring and bound by AGIA (The Netherlands) in a print run of 300 copies.

Companion reader for Under Current, an exhibition and film by Alice dos Reis. With 'Blue Carbon' by Holly Childs, 'Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water' by Astrida Neimanis, 'King Tide' by Sophia Al-Maria, 'Notes on a Dotted Red Wave' by Danea Io, 'Smart Oceans, Alien Times: Octopi Engineering' by Bogna M. Konior, 'To a Current's Ear' by Alice dos Reis and more. Bilingual edition (Spanish-English).

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making.

The experiment of the one hundred word constraint, each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long, amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground.

What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? 

The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.

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

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

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

The words collected in the book form a constellation of texts in which the theme of walking becomes a mode of being, a poetic disposition, to redefine one’s relationship with space-time. With words by Kathy E. Ferguson, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Carlo Ginzburg, Fernand Deligny, John Ruskin, Susan Leigh Star & Geoffrey C. Bowke, Usrula K. Le Guin, Arthur Rimbaud, Jack Eliott Cardno, Costanza Candeloro, Axelle Stiefel, Giulia Essyad, Gianmaria Andreetta, Arnaud Wohlhauser.

The Happy Hypocrite – Silver Bandage gathers together new kinds of writing about ‘vibes’, those often unspoken energies of desire and aversion that move between people, palpable but traceless, hard to prove. The messages sent by your gut that you can’t always interpret, beyond an urge. What is intangible – vibes, feelings and reflexive responses like blushes, fidgets, slumps in posture, fluctuations in voice – is now targeted by invasive technologies of affective measurement. How can writing resist this regime of quantification? 

With an introduction by Maria Fusco, contributions and new work by CAConrad, Mel Y. Chen, Adam Gallagher, Alexandrina Hemsley, Rebecca Jagoe, Jessa Mockridge, Natasha Papadopoulou, Naomi Pearce, Parsa Sanjana Sajid, Patrick Staff, Daniella Valz Gen, and Hypatia Vourloumis. This issue’s archive is dedicated to Katerina Gogou. 

Erica Scourti is an artist and writer, born in Athens and now based mostly in London, whose work explores biographical writing and bodily inscription in the performance of subjectivity. Her writing has been published in Spells, Ignota (2018) and Fiction as Method, Sternberg (2017), among others.

A fourteen-track vinyl LP featuring poems of American poets Susan Howe (b. 1937) and Nathaniel Mackey (b. 1947) as produced by visual artist Shannon Ebner. Juxtaposing historic and recent material from 1991 until 2018, the work brought together here examines the two writer’s lifelong preoccupation with subjects adrift in narratives of dispossession both real and imagined. Liner notes contain excerpts of original interviews as well as reproductions of the poets’ published materials.

According to Ebner, “STRAY: A GRAPHIC TONE is the full-length version of what I started in 2016 when I began seeking exchanges with these two poets. I was drawn to their works for their experiments with poetic form – for their politics of poetic form, to be exact – for their poems’ stray figures and stray errant marks.”

Operating on the peripheries of a pathological discourse, Treatment penetrates the interstices of modern queer consciousness to medicate a multiheaded body of work. With no cure in sight, the text moves from violence, cowboys, iconography, illness and image to the death of Yves Klein and a fear of dentistry. Bridget’s reflections pose a dissection of novelistic cliché that attends to the repressed remnants of a queer romance. Played out in an interpersonal run of vignettes or “treatments,” rather than any death of the novel Treatmentpropositions a mischievous and travestying performance anchored in putrefaction. A serious play with the decay of forms, Treatment is a rendered reading of our ability to talk through the process of degradation and an ironized analysis of the desire to write it down. 

In Bridget’s “mouth-theatre” sit Allan and Allen—two precarious, spectral characters set against an eerie backdrop of clinical isolation. Framed by a nameless narrator, these mirrored figures undergo forty text-treatments across four artificially generated days that survey their feelings of angst, adulation and disorientation against the slow tick of a clock. A mash-up of love story, pornography, art criticism, literary appropriation, and essayistic meditation, Treatment pushes an anatomical body to its limits in a parodic portrayal of a mouth on the hunt for a tongue and its teeth. 

In this book, the 1923 manifesto “Active Art” by Latvian philosopher Andrejs Kurcijs triggers a series of responses by writers, artists and curators on the notion of activism, past and present: art for political purposes, art for its own purpose or art with no purpose. 

All the texts collected in this volume aim at considering the active part of writing according to the definition given by Kurcijs. It is true of the book design by Laure Giletti and Gregory Dapra too. Contributors include curator Rebeka Põldsam, artists Evita Vasiļjeva and Eva Barto, writers Bella Marrin and Robert Glück, and poet Laura Boullic. It also includes the reprint of an essay from 1987 by James Baldwin, commissioned by the African Center in New York, and an in-depth conversation between the editors of the books and philosopher Ainārs Kamoliņš.

Centré sur la mise en jeu du corps filmé et du corps filmant dans leurs pratiques cinématographiques respectives, la Conversation de Laure Cottin Stefanelli et Peter Snowdon a commencé par une présentation croisée de leurs films à Bozar en discussion avec Septembre Tiberghien et s'est cloturée par une exposition intitulée INNER SENSE - Bodies At Work, à la galerie de l'ERG de décembre 2018 à janvier 2019. 

Jolly Rogers is a collection of Peter Wächtler's latest short texts, written in preparation of his two solo exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall and Kunsthalle Zürich (both 2019), and combined with a nearly complete collection of the artist's drawings and prints from recent years. 

The texts operate like vignettes to a larger story, and the images as unreliable illustrations to the narrative. However, the larger story never really is revealed. Each individual text, each single work, articulates itself by means of an intense focus. It is as if we were suspended in a continual zooming motion, as if the artist and author wanted to tell and show it all. But alas, such is life under the microscope: always larger-than-life, but at the wrong scale at a time driven by individual interests, self-optimization, and egos that stage themselves simultaneously as victims and disruptors. 

Peter Wächtler works in a variety of media: bronze, ceramics, drawings and video. But in many ways “stories” could be described as his main artistic material. His works often evoke a narration, with animals or human figures in animated states. They are made in ways that use and adapt elements of fiction and folklore, relating to specific traditions and common tales, and materialize the ways of telling a story as much as the story itself. 

Born 1979 in Hannover, Peter Wächtler lives and works in Brussels and Berlin.

Stemming from a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, this monographic catalogue offers a range of perspectives on urgent issues around gender, sexuality and labour in the digital age.

This book orbits “Second Sex War”, a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen addressing political and ethical questions arising from the use of digital bodies in contemporary visual culture and the means of production and distribution for these commodities. Realising that the same avatars are used across the pornographic, gaming and cultural industries, she investigates the working conditions and relationships that structure these fields. Through numerous essays and conversations, Second Sex War, the book, emphasises her collaborations with various practitioners (animators, musicians, writers) and the way they have inflected her practice. Media theorist Helen Hester (author of the Xenofeminist manifesto) reflects on the limitations of the porn industry and the use of female avatars. Artists collective Radclyffe Hall talks to photographer Phyllis Christopher about early lesbian erotica magazine in the 1980s. Linda Stupart compiles quotes by Sara Ahmed, Kathy Acker and Ursula K. Le Guin to consider what is radical sex today.  Artist Hannah Black's contribution, which opens the publication, reads like a manifesto for artists being crushed under the weight of current political circumstances. 

Edited by Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Robert Leckie.

Texts by Robert Leckie, Hannah Black, Helen Hester, Phyllis Christopher & Radclyffe Hall, Linda Stupart, Josefine Wikström. Entretiens with Helena Vilalta, James B Stringer, Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) by Sidsel Meineche Hansen.

In this book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception." Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's far-reaching analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward. (The texts in this book are in French only.)

Translated from English by Aline Wiame (original title: The Minor Gesture, Duke University Press, 2016).

Marking a return for Laura Mulvey to questions of film theory and feminism, as well as a reconsideration of new and old film technologies, this urgent and compelling collection of essays is essential reading for anyone interested in the power and pleasures of moving images.

Its title, Afterimages, alludes to the dislocation of time that runs through many of the films and works it discusses as well as to the way we view them. Beginning with a section on the theme of woman as spectacle, a shift in focus leads to films from across the globe, directed by women and about women, all adopting radical cinematic strategies. Mulvey goes on to consider moving image works made for art galleries, arguing that the aesthetics of cinema have persisted into this environment.

Structured in three main parts, Afterimages also features an appendix of ten frequently asked questions on her classic feminist essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in which Mulvey addresses questions of spectatorship, autonomy, and identity that are crucial to our era today. 

Published Jan, 2020. 

The first part of a larger novel in several episodes: a text about the perception of time and how some places mark people's minds.

Inspired by the Petrified Forest in Arizona and its ability to change over time from an organic to a mineral state, the story was concieved by the musician and artist Félicia Atkisnon over the past five years, while its on-going writing has been the starting point of many of Atkinson's music lyrics and recent records and exhibitions.

A part of the book takes place in the middle of the desert in an indistinct future. Two men are having a discussion by a fire in a modernist house. The music they are listening to is not emitted by a device but by themselves, it's a new kind of technology. They look at the embers of the fire and it reminds them of a painting by Jeronemus Bosch. They suddenly wonder if those embers could be a republic of some kind.
A Forest Petrifies is a novel about the perception of time and how some places mark people's minds.

Félicia Atkinson (born 1981 in Paris, lives and works in Brussels) is graduated with Honors from l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and studied also anthropology and contemporary dance. She is a sound and visual artist, an experimental musician and the co-publisher of the independent imprint Shelter Press. Her paintings, drawings, sculptures and musical compositions are mostly abstract. Her work takes its sources from the American tradition of painting (Morris Louis, Cy Twombly, Richard Tuttle) and from avant-gardes figures who worked on chance and randomness (Fluxus, John Cage, La Monte Young...) as much as feminist figures in music and art.

A compilation of texts, poems and stories whose title is borrowed from the safe words used in BDSM practices.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Puberté 2”, Ravisius Textor, Nevers, from October 5 to November 16, 2019. Kevin Desbouis is a French artist and author.

This book assembles the scripts of two solo performances levitations (2017) and New Skin (2018). Hannah De Meyer's work connects with the eco-feminist tradition and investigates the connections between femininity, ecology and decolonization. She merges text and movement into a quirky, hybrid theater language. Levitations is an enchanting trip along the peaks and valleys of De Meyers imagination. The recent new skin is an overwhelming feminist and ecological statement.

Real-Time Realist is a serial publication of J-LTF PRESS. This issue of Real-Time Realist explores Ecstasy, Joy, Serenity, and Love, The Yellow Wheel, with contributions from invited artists distilling the aforementioned emotions.

Originally published in 1973, The New Woman's Survival Catalog is a seminal survey of the second-wave feminist effort across the US. Edited by Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie in just five months, The New Woman's Survival Catalog makes a nod to Stewart Brand's influential Whole Earth Catalog, mapping a vast network of feminist alternative cultural activity in the 1970s.