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Cover of A is for Anarchist

Universe Publishing (NY)

A is for Anarchist

Billy Woods

€25.00

A sardonic spin on the ABC book, A is for Anarchist is a sharp knife in a drawer full of safety scissors. 

Wryly written by critically acclaimed rapper billy woods and sublimely illustrated by artist m. musgrove, A is for Anarchist upends the traditional ABC format with earnestness that belies its irreverence. Anarchist takes modest ideas, like E is for Energy and G is for Ghosts, and flips them into incisive commentary on modern life and the state of the world. Also, it has to be the only alphabet book with annotated footnotes and a Nas reference.

woods is a writer, rapper, and father who needed somethingcool to read to his children. The child of a Jamaican intellectual and a Zimbabwean revolutionary, woods's childhood spent between the U.S., Africa, and the West Indies leaves its imprint on all his work. musgrove is a Brooklyn-based painter, illustrator, and amateur animator. She is inspired by Wimmen's Comix, William Morris, and tumult.

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Cover of Waters' Witness #03

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Waters' Witness #03

Tarek Atoui

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.

Cover of Welcome to the Shitshow

Birthday, Felony & Fuss

Welcome to the Shitshow

Casper Boone

“There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. Yet, whatever happened at the Shitshow holds six truths.” Welcome to the Shitshow with Casper Boone was launched on Friday, December 2nd at KBK Brussels. We celebrated the birth of our inaugural publication, allied with an exhibition with works by Casper.

Cover of Real State

Studio Operative

Real State

Asta Meldal Lynge

Real state is the first publication by artist Asta Meldal Lynge, a visual essay with text by Eleanor Ivory Weber, that takes a critical stance towards the subjects of housing, urban development and image production. Employing video-stills, photographs and found images, Lynge explores the social and political value of the image, in a specifically urban context, emphasising the fictions present in the (re)production of space.

In particular, Real state investigates the ramifications of architectural renderings within the public sphere, documenting building site hoardings, symbolic points at the threshold of construction, where a yet-to-exist everyday and a predicted image of the city meets the real one.

Processing this documentation through layering, editing and retouching, Lynge highlights (and challenges) both the intensifying tendency of ‘image-building’ or the production of buildings as icons and the subsequent transformation of public space into an infinite extension of image surfaces.

As the content is framed and re-framed, trackpad gestures are overlaid, ultimately bringing the stability of any image surface into question. This destabilising approach is mirrored in Weber’s text which combines excerpts from e-mail conversations, with differing registers of fiction, expanding on the disconnection between the idea of housing as a basic human need and its position within market logic and neoliberal ideology.

The book’s title alludes to these systems at play, both the power structures of governed entities and the business of real estate; whilst troubling the promise that there is something real or true to be revealed.

Cover of Prepositions

Montez Press

Prepositions

Aaron Lehman, Timmy Simonds

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

Cover of Le Dictateur #05 – FAQ

Le Dictateur

Le Dictateur #05 – FAQ

Myriam Ben Salah, Maurizio Cattelan

FAQ is an accordion-fold art publication edited by Maurizio Cattelan and Myriam Ben Salah and commissioned by Le Dictateur. Coinciding with the 10th anniversary edition of Le Dictateur, the first volume will expand into a yearly series.

FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions, referencing an attempt to synthesize a recurrent flow, a tenor, an ideal visual representation of a given and very subjective “now”. 
Born out of an accute image eating disorder, FAQ reflects the mental assimilation of a relentless roving within physical and virtual art spaces: from galleries to tumblr accounts, museums, or artists studios; it can be seen as a portable exhibition, a show on paper, a project of restitution, a hybrid object that you can leaf and scroll through. Far from being a rational enterprise because of its lack of rules, hierarchy, order—or concept for that matter—it is expressly and brazenly as personal and biased as possible and reflects the obsessive mannerism of its authors.

Works by Korakrit Arunanondchai, Thomas Bayrle, Neil Beloufa, Judith Bernstein, David Douard, Carroll Dunham, Dan Finsel, Llyn Foulkes, Kathy Grannan, Camille Henrot, Charles Irvin, Elad Lassry, Jon Rafman, Steven Shaerer, Emily Mae Smith, Peter Sutherland, Slavs and Tatars, Andra Ursuta, Aleksandra Waliszewska, Charlie White, Jakub Julian Ziolkowski...