Rory Pilgrim presents their first catalogue, bringing together their multifaceted practice as a filmmaker, composer, and more. Sharing work produced since 2008, this lovingly made book designed by Modern Activity includes sketchbooks, scores, song lyrics, and poetry. It is published on the occasion of the exhibitions Where The Tide Takes Us, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, and Radio Ballads, Serpentine Gallery, London.

Rory Pilgrim (born 1988 in Bristol) works in a wide range of media including songwriting, composing music, film, music video, text, drawing and live performances. Centred on emancipatory concerns, Pilgrim aims to challenge the nature of how we come together, speak, listen and strive for social change through sharing and voicing personal experience. Strongly influenced by the origins of activist, feminist and socially engaged art, Pilgrim works with others through a different methods of dialogue, collaboration and workshops. In an age of increasing technological interaction, Rory Pilgrim's work creates connections between activism, spirituality, music and how we form community locally and globally from both beyond and behind our screens.

Edited by Rory Pilgrim, Jule Hillgärtner, Nele Kaczmarek, Zsa-Zsa Eyck, Matthew Appleton.

Texts by Jerry Brady, Jule Hillgärtner, Nele Kaczmarek, Human Poney, Louwrien Wijers.

Publication devoted to the only statement the Belgian artist has ever published about his own work.

Those familiar with Guy Mees know that he used the enigmatic title Lost Space to describe two major bodies of work, distinct in origin and form, and separated by a gap of more than twenty years: the geometric objects and panels covered in lace created in the 1960s, and the works he started producing in the 1980s featuring colour paper cutouts pinned to walls. This publication is dedicated to a lesser-known chapter in this story: the writing process of a short text entitled, likewise,The Lost Space. An ambiguous manifesto for Mees' work, the text went through a number of revisions, with Mees contributing suggestions, but never authoring it himself. This book reproduces eight extant versions of the text for the first time, in facsimile and typographic transcription as Richard Hamilton did with the Large Glass notes of Marcel Duchamp.

Published on the occasion of Guy Mees at MU.ZEE, Ostende, in 2019.

Limited edition of 350 copies.
 
Guy Mees (1935-2003) is a Belgian artist whose oeuvre encompasses photographs, videos, sculptures, and fragile works on paper that combine formal rigor with delicacy and a conceptual approach. A leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde, Mees left behind an outstanding body of work that transgresses geometric abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and applied arts.

Edited by Lilou Vidal.
Graphic design: Joris Kritis.

Nº 49 / October 2022

In her work, Lisa Vlaemminck explores the boundaries of painting, creating an exciting, vibrating and disorienting universe. In her images, she questions very classical phenomena in painting, such as the landscape and the still life, by freezing them behind semi-transparent layers of paint. We catch a glimpse that feels familiar, but soon find that nothing is what it seems. Vlaemminck’s work oscillates between the microscopic and the interstellar, as well as the amorphous spaces in between. Image, material, shape, texture and form mutate into compositional playgrounds floating in a newly created universe where different laws and rules apply.

The book “Screensaver Error” is conceived as a symmetrical, folded stack of sheets with images of Lisa’s paintings and collages.
At the heart of the book is the sixty-metre long, worm-shaped textile sculpture, which runs like a stream through the book for many pages.
Dominique De Groen wrote an electrically charged shimmering poem tailored to the work. The introductory text was written by Simon Delobel.

In KIOSK, Lisa Vlaemminck presents a series of new paintings and a sixty-metre long textile sculpture that will occupy the various exhibition spaces. For the design of the fabric, Lisa worked patterns that form a long colour gradient.

At the end of the exhibition, the sculpture, Meat A Morph Hose, will be cut into 35 separate, new sculptures that will be offered as artworks at € 350 each. Each work is a part of the colour gradient and has a unique print. The proceeds will finance the book. Details: Printed cotton, latex spaghetti filling, the ends are closed with climbing rope
40 cm diameter x 130cmA signed copy of the book will also be delivered together with the work.
The sculptures can be collected from KIOSK at the book-launch: Sat. 26 November

The artist is reprented by gallery rodolphe janssen

With texts by Phillip Van den Bossche, Filarowska and a conversation between Eva Wittocx and the artist (NL/EN)

Nº 48 / October 2022

sawing a plank is like going for a walk by Kato Six (b. 1986) is published on the occasion of Kato’s solo exhibition at M Leuven this autumn. This book encapsulates 10 years of her quest as an artist.

The work of Kato Six (b. 1986) balances between abstract and figurative art. She works on different themes which she develops into series or ensembles. Architecture, design, domesticity and utensils all act as important references. Starting there, she uses recognisable and everyday materials such as MDF, stone, plastic or textiles.
Kato wants to question certain affinities and let the viewer look at familiar objects or images from a different perspective. As a viewer, you feel connected to the object or image but the actual meaning or function no longer applies.

Some of my works refer to the domestic, especially the most recent ones, such as ‘Carpet Beater Carpet’ and ‘Striped Knitwear’. The invisible work done by “housewives”, but also by workers or maintenance staff, is certainly one of the themes addressed in ‘Carpet Beater Carpet’. The above works are textile works, created with so-called “soft skills”. In the arts, these “soft skills” are often attributed to female artists — women often being assigned a certain medium.
Kato Six in conversation with Eva Wittocx in “sawing a plank is like going for a walk”

The motifs produced during time-intensive dyeing processes – which uses indigo, urine, and extracts of natural waste materials – are neither conventional fabric nor lace patterns, and they have only a distant relationship to batik painting. Yet, they are simulations and portraits of both.

Pattern Nor Painting starts in a batik Workshop in Bantul, Indonesia where an artist reconnects with her blank canvas and the batik techniques she learned from an artist in Serekunda, the Gambia many years ago. As documented in this publication Van Hoorebeke’s installations and performances deftly combine unique textiles and ceramics with production-chain goods, ranging from car parts to strawberry jam. Engaging with ages-old traditions of batik production for present-day communities and settings, her work embodies ancient craft, story-telling, time, female thinking, and above all, a connection to the natural world.

Covering the past thirty years of William Scott's practice, this monograph offers the largest comprehensive selection of paintings, drawings, masks and architectural models, as well as an unique insight on his creative and transformative approach.

Published on the occasion of Malmö Konsthall William Scott's exhibition at Mälmo Konsthall en 2022.

William Scott (born 1962 in San Francisco) has developed his own artistic practice while working at Creative Growth, an art center in Oakland where people with development disabilities are given the opportunity to work and advance creatively as artists. Combining image and text, his colourful paintings tie in stylistically with current popular culture. Scott's vividly graphic and highly detailed paintings, drawings, and sculptures explore the intersections of community, cultural memory, faith, and science fiction. "Rebirth" is a constant subject for the artist, who reimagines the social topography of his native San Francisco as well as new, interstellar organizations. His portraits depict family members and neighbors, and celebrate Black actors, musicians, and civil rights leaders. For Scott, painting is a transformative as well as a documentary tool; a way to re-craft his personal narrative and even undertake extraordinary acts.

Edited by Nicola Wright
Texts by Carson Cole Arthur, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Helen Delaney, Tom di Maria, Simona Dumitriu, Nathan Hamelberg, Kathleen Henderson, Matthew Higgs, William Scott, Nicola Wright

A panorama of the multifaceted and transversal production of Sedje Hémon, with fifteen essays.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Sedje Hémon. Imran Mir. Abdias Nascimento. Abstracting Parables", as part of the international Arnhem based art manifestation sonsbeek20→24, at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 2022.

Dutch-Jewish painter and composer Sedje Hémon's (born Sedje Frank, 1923-2011) artistic practice was a deep deliberation on natural sciences, as well as an exploration of other ways of knowing. Her work was strongly influenced by her lived experience as a Shoah survivor and a member of the resistance movement. Educated as a violinist, incarceration during WWII left Hémon physically unable to play, upon which she turned her attention to painting—without ever abandoning music. During the 1950s and 1960s, she developed an intricate method for translating her paintings into musical scores. Hémon described her paintings as musical compositions, and their abstract forms are to be read as such—in relation to musical parameters such as duration, pitch, and timbre. Her visual works can actually be performed musically according to the system that she herself developed. Defiantly, Hémon worked to show the common origin and intersectionality of all arts and sciences, culminating in the development of a theory for the "integration of the arts."

Edited by Amal Alhaag, Aude Christel Mgba, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Gwen Parry, Ibrahim Cissé, Krista Jantowski, Zippora Elders.

Contributions by Amal Alhaag, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Ibrahim Cissé, Sophie Douala, Zippora Elders, Krista Jantowski, Aude Christel Mgba, Gwen Parry, Peter Jasper Wapperom, Elmyra van Dooren, Cannach MacBride, Siji Jabbar, Claire van Els, Marianna Maruyama, Maurice Rummens, Romy Rüegger, Jake Schneider.

A survey of Imran Mir's abstract and contemplative work, with fifteen essays.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Sedje Hémon. Imran Mir. Abdias Nascimento. Abstracting Parables", as part of the international Arnhem based art manifestation sonsbeek20→24, at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 2022.

Pakistani artist, sculptor, and designer Imran Mir's (1950-2014) oeuvre can be interpreted as a constant refusal to provide comprehensive elaboration beyond what one experiences. The act of contemplation is a guiding principle to interpreting Imran Mir's work, an approach that reverberates into a practice that grew out of conversations with a community of artists, activists, poets, relatives, and other thinkers in Karachi.

Non-figurative, non-representational, geometrical and very bold, Imran Mir's works can be read as theorems and positions on multiple modernisms and abstractions. Without being a critique or a response, he played with the rules, bypassing and expanding them to other realms to explore ways of being, ways of knowing time and space outside of the confinements of the West.

Edited by Amal Alhaag, Aude Christel Mgba, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Gwen Parry, Ibrahim Cissé, Krista Jantowski, Zippora Elders.

Contributions by Amal Alhaag, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Ibrahim Cissé, Sophie Douala, Zippora Elders, Natasha Ginwala, Hajra Haider Karrar, Krista Jantowski, Momtaza Mehri, Aude Christel Mgba, Nighat Mir, Quddus Mirza, Gwen Parry, Nafisa Rizvi.

A survey of the pictorial work of the Afro-Brazilian artist, writer and activist, with fifteen essays.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Sedje Hémon. Imran Mir. Abdias Nascimento. Abstracting Parables", as part of the international Arnhem based art manifestation sonsbeek20→24, at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 2022.

The life and work of Afro-Brazilian painter, poet, essayist, dramatist, activist, and member of Parliament Abdias Nascimento (1914-2011) is a testament to his active commitment to Black expression and solidarity, both artistically and politically. Above all, Nascimento was a Pan-African activist. He organized the National Convention of Brazilian Blacks (1946) and the 1st Congress of Brazilian Blacks four years later. During the same period, he founded the Black Experimental Theater (1944) and the Black Arts Museum project (1950), both in Rio de Janeiro. While curating the latter, he began to develop his own creative work.

Edited by Amal Alhaag, Aude Christel Mgba, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Gwen Parry, Ibrahim Cissé, Krista Jantowski, Zippora Elders.

Contributions by Abdias Nascimento, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Shade Mary-Ann Olaoye, Amal Alhaag, Ibrahim Cissé, Sita Dickson Littlewood, Sophie Douala, Zippora Elders, Lélia González, Keyna Eleison, Krista Jantowski, Elisa Larkin Nascimento, Aude Christel Mgba, Goia Mujalli, Kabengele Munanga, Gwen Parry, Olabiyi Yai.

First comprehensive monograph of the Swedish queer and feminist performance artist.

Holes Dug, Rocks Thrown is the first comprehensive presentation of Line Skywalker Karlström's work. It documents a practice, that over a period of more than twenty years have been committed to "queer feminist world making" using a performative and embodied approach. Correspondingly with Skywalker Karlström's understanding of art as a chaotic and associative knowledge production, which unfolds as a collaborative and ongoing conversation, their book has become a bastard monograph, which describes an artistic practice through its relationships and its flock. For the book, Skywalker Karlström has invited a number of colleagues to engage in conversations with them departing from selected works and jointly attempt to expand upon the strengths and qualities of queer and feminist artistic strategies. In addition to an extensive documentation of works, drawings and ephemera, Holes Dug, Rocks Thrown contains a number of inserts with works by other artists, which have informed Skywalker Karlström's art practice.

Line Skywalker Karlström (born 1971 in Karlstad, Sweden, lives and works in Berlin) is a Swedish performance artist who works with a diverse range of materials dealing with the role of art in life, lesbian and gay identity and the perception of space. Her performances take place in the public realm and also in gallery installations. Karlström was a member of the feminist performance group High Heels Sisters (2002-2007), and a founding member of YES! Association / Föreningen JA! (2005-2018), a group of Swedish artist activists that she left in 2009.

Created by Mary Heilmann in 1999, The All Night Movie beautifully wraps a memoir inside of a monograph, creating an artist book in which each page is designed as though it were a painting. The artist delicately utilizes color, text, candid photographs, reproductions of paintings, and song lyrics that unfold seamlessly to create an immersive visual experience. Heilmann has described the book as “the story of my life, told in words, painted images and photographs.”

Across eight chapters, Heilmann recounts her life, from childhood in California through New York in the 1990s, providing intimate insight into the development of her work, friendships, and formative life experiences. Snapshots by the artist and others provide a portrait of Heilmann’s evolving artistic community, which included Gordon Matta-Clark, Pat Hearn, Dicky Landry, Jack Pierson, Keith Sonnier, Pat Steir, William Wegman, and Jackie Winsor, among others. And this is just the first half of the book. Included with the artist’s memoir is an essay by Jutta Koether and a survey of paintings from 1972-1999. This highly revered and extremely scarce publication was co-designed with Mark Magill and is reproduced here as a facsimile edition. The All Night Movie was originally published by Hauser & Wirth and Offizin Verlag.

Mary Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940. She studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara, San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley before moving to New York in 1968. Heilmann began her career creating sculpture before quickly pivoting into abstract painting once on the East Coast, experimenting with bright colors and unusual geometries that bridge two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements. She has been the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award as well as a Guggenheim Foundation award.

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

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

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

Edited by Luca Lo Pinto.

Richly illustrated, this book provides for the first time a visual overview of Lawrence Abu Hamdan's works of more than a decade, and elaborates on a formal vocabulary characterized by the aesthetics of sound and language.

On the occasion of Lawrence Abu Hamdan's exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm in 2021, a group of authors have been invited to engage with individual works and their underlying concepts. Abu Hamdan recognizes the space for art as a site where attention can be drawn to real socio-political conditions in order to challenge the structures behind them. The artist can therefore push at the boundaries of what constitutes testimony. The title "Dirty Evidence" comes from Abu Hamdan's definition of evidence in which a truth value is derived from its very inadmissibility before the law. It is precisely the evidence's figurative dirt and dirtiness that works toward the production of truth.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan (born 1985 in Amman, Jordan, lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon) is an artist and “private ear” whose projects have taken the form of audiovisual installations, performances, graphic works, photography, Islamic sermons, cassette tape compositions, potato chip packets, essays, and lectures. Abu Hamdan's interest with sound and its intersection with politics originate from his background in DIY music.

Edited by Fabian Schöneich.
Graphic design: David Bennewith. 

Texts by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Natasha Ginwala, Ruba Katrib, Andrea Lissoni, Ramona Naddaff, Fabian Schöneich, Yasmine Seale, Theodor Ringborg, Eyal Weizman.

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

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

A monograph on the German painter Amelie von Wulffen (born 1966).

For more than 20 years, the artist has been developing a formally and stylistically diverse oeuvre (including collages, installations, animated films, drawings, sculptures and paintings) that possesses a remarkable thematic consistency. Amelie von Wulffen: Works 1998-2016 shows the artist returning again and again to the process of coming to terms with the repercussions of German cultural history. These heavy themes are lightened by an acid humor, most obvious in Wulffen's drawings and comics, which spares no sacred cows. Richly illustrated with texts by Bernhart Schwenk and Amy Sillman, Amelie von Wulffen: Works 1998-2016presents the painter as a role model for a younger generation of artists.

An extensive and comprehensive polyphonic exploration of the work of The Otolith Group, coming at a pivotal point in their practice.

The work of this London-based artist's collective comprised of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun covers politics of race and diversity and incorporates film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the environmental conditions of life we all face. 

Presenting all bodies of work contained in the Xenogenesis exhibition, this publication includes many materials and graphics from The Otolith Group's broader practice, including performance, lecture and research material. The outcome of over four years of collaboration, research and conversation, the publication is not a chronological exhibition catalogue or retrospective but a cross-section of their work which includes substantial contributions from the artists themselves, in the form of writing and direct engagement with its production.

The publication also brings together important thinkers, scholars, art historians and writers from disparate fields, who know and have worked with the group, as well as those who are writing from a contemporary perspective. They include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Annie Fletcher, Anselm Franke, Shanay Jhaveri, George E. Lewis, Mahan Moalemi, Fred Moten, Grant Watson, Vivian Ziherl and the late Mark Fisher each of whom reflect on a particular aspect of the Group's practice with supplementary materials such as archival images, documented conversations, early lecture performances as well as other accompanying texts and examinations of their research sites.

Conceived as a "bio-monograph", this catalogue offers a unique insight into the life and work of the French artist, sculptor and ceramist Valentine Schlegel. It features a large iconography, archives, and texts by sculptor and Schlegel specialist Hélène Bertin.

Valentine Schlegel developed her constantly changing daily art practice between Paris and Sète. Like a Swiss Army knife, she eventually mastered several techniques, producing everyday objects with sculptural shapes that include wooden flatware, ceramic vases, leather bags, and plaster fireplaces. Designed without any inherent hierarchy, and often in collaboration with the artist's friends, this body of work is made up of objects in a range of sizes and uses, from the fantastic to the quotidian. Schlegel also created many architectural elements in plaster intended for home interiors. Because of their immovable nature, these sculptures for everyday life are also the reason why Schlegel's work has remained little known. If she did not address only the world of art exhibitions through her work, she was nevertheless part of historic events at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at a time when the Pompidou Center did not exist.

Today, through Schlegel's practice, this publication, conceived as a "bio-monograph" devoted to Valentine Schlegel, seeks to highlight other addresses of art. Including new iconography and archival material, with biographical notes written by Hélène Bertin that provide readers with a clearer picture of both Schlegel and her approach, this reference monograph documents for the first time all of the fireplaces that Valentine Schlegel created for private homes—about one hundred from 1959 to 2002. The other aspects of her work are also discussed in order to understand the whole of her practice, intimately linked to her way of life, where the questions of autonomy of production and friendship are central.

Fourth edition (2021), expanded edition with English texts.

An unconventional invocation of Michael Stevenson's practice over the past 35 years.

From his refuge in upstate New York—the studio/ living complex where he enacted a late pivot back to figuration—the American painter Philip Guston once offered the following outburst to the question of how such a turn could happen.

"What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?"

Over time, this sparse utterance takes on an architectural form in the imagination, a model that proposes a tantalizing proposition when fleshed out. The painter's words situate us in two distinct yet adjacent rooms. The first: a lounge with a TV, its live feed constantly aflicker. The second, a space that's more sequestered, which we can simply understand as a place of production: "the studio." Between these spaces, the painter, often working through the night, is also the viewer or reader, shuffling back and forth as he navigates these two rooms. At a certain point, night becomes day, and we shuffle back and forth together, the presence of one room arriving in the other.

Published following the eponymous exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, in 2021.

Described as an “anthropologist of the avant-garde”, Michael Stevenson (born in 1964 in Inglewood, New Zealand, lives and works in Berlin) investigates the mythology that surrounds renowned and controversial events which have been significant in the spheres of both art and politics.

Graphic design: Will Holder

Reference monograph on the work of one of Belgium's most discreet, yet most important, female artists, with a dozen essays and contributions.

The work of Jacqueline Mesmaeker is intangible, discreet and captivating. Starting from analytical intentions and experimental protocols linked to perception and representation, her practice remains anchored in a literary and poetic universe, including references to Lewis Carroll, Mallarmé, Melville or Paul Willems. Minimal, sometimes even unnoted, her rare and precise work is nonetheless present. It willingly takes over space, playing with the actual and symbolic architecture, revealing the structures and lines of force, but also the errors, by thwarting their perspectives or correcting them with delicate touches.

In the year of 2020, CC Strombeek, BOZAR and Museum Roger Raveel have exhibited new selections of Mesmaeker's fragile ensembles; poetic works that evade every semantic description. CC Strombeek succeeded—in consultation with the artist—to reconstruct the work Enkel Zicht Naar Zee, Naar West (1978) to its original presentation, after 35 years. The work consists of 5 projections captured on transparent, natural silk scrims. They show a flock of flying birds, circulating and mingling in space, appearing and disappearing through the veils.

This book forms a catalogue of Mesmaeker's trilogy of solo-exhibitions in 2020: Ah, Quelle aventure ! at Bozar (May–July 2020) and CC Strombeek (January–March 2020) and De page en page at Museum Roger Raveel (December 2020–March 2021). 

Jacqueline Mesmaeker (born 1929 in Brussels) started her career as fashion designer from 1962 till 1972, before she turned to visual and artistic issues. Drawing, an art form she teached in several art schools (ERG, La Cambre...), runs throughout her rich work that includes installation, video, photography, writing and design. She won the Norwich East Award, in 1996.

Texts by Luk Lambrecht, Lieze Eneman, Michel Baudson, Jean-Michel Botquin, Saskia De Coster, Anne Pontégnie, Melanie Deboutte, Sophie Lauwers, Philippe Van Cauteren.

First monograph devoted to the work of video artist and performer Wolfgang Stoerchle (1944-1976), an artistic figure of the Californian scene in the 1970s, based on extensive research and three international exhibitions.

Wolfgang Stoerchle is a particularly notable artistic figure of the early seventies who left a certain but little advertised mark on a generation of Californian artists, especially through videotapes and performances involving his body as raw material. His short but eventful life is surrounded by rumors, and his abrupt death in 1976 may have emphasized the myth around him even more. His entire body of work was produced in eleven years, between 1965 and 1976. Forty-five years after he passed away, his name still drifts across the West Coast art world, awaiting wider recognition.

Wolfgang Stoerchle: Success in Failure is the first monograph on the artist's work, written by Alice Dusapin who has dedicated extensive research into his life and work since 2017 and organized several international exhibitions during this time (Ampersand, Lisbon; Gallery Overduin & Co, Los Angeles; Gallery Air de Paris and Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome). 

The publication includes interviews with Daniel Lentz, Paul McCarthy, Matt Mullican, David Salle, Helene Winer, and an unpublished review by James Welling, alongside ephemera and documentation of Stoerchle's video works and performances, as well as rarely seen sculptures, installations, and paintings.

Edited by Alice Dusapin, with Justin Jaeckle.
Texts by Alice Dusapin and James Welling; interviews with David Salle, Helene Winer, Matt Mullican, Paul McCarthy, Daniel Lentz.

Over the last four decades, American artist and filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh has forged a distinctive moving image practice in the ruins of originality and authority. monWith contributions from Erika Balsom, Elena Gorfinkel, Tendai Mutambu, John David Rhodes and Shola von Rheinold, Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines explores how she has extended and contested the paradigm of experimental cinema.

Since the early 1980s, Peggy Ahwesh (born 1954 in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania) has produced one of the most heterogeneous bodies of work in the field of experimental film and video. A true bricoleur, her tools include narrative and documentary styles, improvised performance and scripted dialogue, synch-sound film, found footage, digital animation, and crude Pixelvision video. The work is primarily an investigation cultural identity and the role of the subject, in various genres. Ahwesh work with subversively amateur forms, and also a discourse that yielded traditionally female-gendered themes like home and family, relationships, and confessions, which she appropriated as scenarios. Her practice insists on political and social topicality, handled with theoretical and formal rigor, with a nod to popular culture forms. She draws the audience into the world and traditions of avant-garde film and video, where, as she has remarked, "there's nothing to prove and no money to make," only the pleasures of the text.

Comprehensive monograph of the Californian artist and political activist.

This book covers Suzanne Lacy's whole career, presenting a selection of her major projects: from the pioneering Prostitution Notes (1974), an artwork that combines conceptual and performance art with social commitment focused on the theme of prostitution exploitation in some areas of Los Angeles, to Crystal Quilt(1985-1987), probably Lacy's most famous work, a huge performance which involved 430 women over 60 seated at tables arranged in the pattern of a large quilt created by Miriam Shapiro, mingling their memories with sociological analyses of society's failure to exploit the potential of old age, to Storing Rape(2012), a discussion among important media personalities, activists and politicians in the attempt to find a different way of describing sexual violence.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition (Suzanne Lacy's first major European exhibition) at Museo Pecci Milano, in 2014-2015.
 
Suzanne Lacy (born 1945 in Wasco, USA, lives and works in Los Angeles) is a visual artist whose prolific career includes performances, video and photographic installation, critical writing and public practices in communities. She is best known as one of the Los Angeles performance artists who began active in the Seventies and shaped and emergent art of social engagement. Her work ranges from intimate, graphic body explorations to large-scale public performances involving literally hundreds of performers and thousands of audience members. She has published over 70 texts of critical commentary, and has exhibited in The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The New Museum and P.S. 1 in New York, and The Bilbao Museum in Spain.