Amazonia – Anthology as Cosmology

A monograph / artists' book that engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories. Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.

From December 11, 2015, until April 10, 2016, the German Library in Guangzhou, China, became The German Library Pyongyang, a reimagining of an initiative of the Goethe-Institut that originally operated in North Korea between 2004 and 2009. This temporary intervention by Sara van der Heide is an imaginary transformation of the current geography of the German Library in Guangzhou. Van der Heide’s project is a contemporary version of the Goethe-Institut’s original library initiative in North Korea, devised as a vessel to discuss national cultural policy in a post-Cold War and postcolonial era that looks critically toward the parallel histories of Germany and the two Koreas. The German Library Pyongyang offers a space for critical questions, but it also functions as a context for transcending thinking that is prescribed by the lines of the nation-state, language, and geography. The several artistic, linguistic, and graphic interventions in the library merge with the continuing activities of the German learning center in Guangzhou, and all institutional printed matter in Chinese is replaced by Korean.

This publication brings together the four original exhibition booklets in German, Korean, English, and Chinese. An additional reader is included with critical reflections as well as documentation of the exhibition and the organized seminar.

Design by Dongyoung Lee
English/German/Korean/Chinese

Valerie Solanas's rarely published, legendary play, Up Your Ass, explodes social and sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces them through her signature irreverence and wit, incisiveness and camp.

The play, whose full title is Up Your Ass Or From the Cradle to the Boat Or The Big Suck Or Up from the Slime, marches out a cast of screwy stereotypes: the unknowing john, the frothy career girl, the boring male narcissist, two catty drag queens, the sex-depraved housewife, and a pair of racialized pickup artists, among others. At the center is protagonist Bongi Perez—a thinly veiled Solanas—a sardonic, gender-bending hustler who escorts us through the back alleys of her street life. The fictionalized predecessor to SCUM Manifesto, the play shares the same grand, subversive, implicative language, equally spitting and winking, embracing the margins, the scum, and selling a trick along the way.

Valerie Solanas (1936-1988) is an American radical feminist intellectual, known for her SCUM Manifesto—a pamphlet with which she declares the power of women and imagines a political future through the margin—, and for having tried to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Edited by Leah Whitman-Salkin.
With a contribution by Paul B. Preciado.
Graphic design: Roxanne Maillet.

The collected writings of artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, along with the stories behind them told by Alexis Vaillant.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz was an acclaimed visual artist known for his performances, installations and curatorial flair. He was also a writer. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of writings by the artist, includes seminal interviews, chitchats, jokes, performance reports, insightful statements and letters in essay form, as well as rare documents, such as early surviving leaflets, typewriter handouts and hard-to-find articles. Spanning 1971–2023, the book unlocks the work of an artist considered to be a refreshing role model for a new generation of culture mavens and style savants.

Drawing from literature, modernist architecture, interior design, art theory, glam rock and camp culture, the collection reveals the artist's inner self alongside the art, social flânerie and the goings-on of his time. Entertaining and witty, the texts stand out brilliantly with their early acumen and inclusivity, while setting a new template for an expression of queerness through writing. With access to Chaimowicz's personal material and photographs, curator and editor Alexis Vaillant is a guide to the artist's writings. Vaillant provides behind-the-scenes commentary and context—a time capsule of pleasure featuring Andy Warhol, Des Esseintes, Josef Frank, David Bowie, Vito Acconci, Eileen Gray, Alex Kapranos, Jean Cocteau, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Genet, Bob Dylan, Emma Bovary and Roger Cook, among others.

Edited by Alexis Vaillant.

Retrospective monograph: a journey through over two decades of intersectional and queering practices in film, performance, sculpture, community work, and textiles.

In Daschner's textile-based works, threads are minimal yet highly visible, akin to the pinch needed to wake up from a dream. These works—as well as her collages—merge with her confronting yet inviting image politics: she cuts and pastes stories of love and pleasure, violence and resilience, death and rebirth.
The written contributions reflect on Katrina Daschner as part of a hardworking generation of queer artists and makers who have been responding to the major conceptual shifts and gender upheavals happening in contemporary art since the 1990s, especially in New York and London. They highlight Katrina Daschner's longstanding line of intersectional queer interest that continues to undermine (neo-)liberal, heteropatriarchal conceptions of sexuality, gender, subjectivity, and relationships

Edited by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu.
Texts by Amelia Groom, Tim Stüttgen; foreword by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu; interviews by Rike Frank.

This monograph explores the work and the artistic activities of Italian radical performer, poet, visual artist and feminist Tomaso Binga through a specific lexicon (Agora, Biographies, the Corporeal Nature of the Word, Correspondences, Geographies, Vaginal Value), and also features a selection of poems by the artist.

The volume explores the key passages of Tomaso Binga's artistic practice, and as such is divided into three macro areas. The first, purely textual, following institutional introduction by the President of the Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee Angela Tecce, features texts by Eva Fabbris, Daria Khan, Quinn Latimer, Lilou Vidal, and Stefania Zuliani, as well as a conversation between the artist herself and Luca Lo Pinto. The second part brings together a series of short critical texts that offer an in-depth analysis of single works and small bodies of work by Tomaso Binga. These contents are further subdivided into six categories (Agora, Biographies, The Body of the Word, Correspondences, Geographies, Vaginal Value) with the aim of delving into the key areas of interest in Tomaso Binga's practice in chronological order. Critical contributions are thus provided by Marc Bembekoff, Barbara Casavecchia, Martina Cavalli, Chiara Costa, Anna Cuomo, Valérie Da Costa, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Daria Khan, Émilie Notéris, Raffaella Perna, Antonello Tolve, and Andrea Viliani. The third and final part is dedicated to the artist's visual poems. Each poem is accompanied by an English translation, in several cases published here for the first time.

Embedded in the language of visual and sound poetry, the practice of Tomaso Binga (Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, born 1931 in Salerno) is based on an ironic, insightful questioning of the idea of gender. In her work, this theme is not only a generator of identity, but also a way of looking afresh at the social roles, rights and opportunities traditionally available to women. Her decision to work under a male pseudonym from 1971 onwards was intended to parody male privilege and to provoke a barbed reflection on the political dimension of what it is to be a woman. Her attitude has served as a key marker within the gender equality issues at the center of the debate raging amongst the younger generations.

Edited by Eva Fabbris, Lilou Vidal, Stefania Zuliani with Anna Cuomo.

Texts by Tomaso Binga, Eva Fabbris, Daria Khan, Quinn Latimer, Luca Lo Pinto, Lilou Vidal, Stefania Zuliani.

Bricks from the Kiln is a semi-yearly journal and multifarious publishing platform established in mid-2015 to support critically minded and explorative writing on and around art, design and literature. Edited by Matthew Stuart and Andrew Walsh-Lister, the forthcoming issue, number five, begins with a single sentence:

blankets topologies in glistening snow and blood — produces instructional spattering, again and again — coughs up clotted network diagram hairballs of illegibility — parasitically draws on / from Thomas Browne’s quincunx — meets for The Big ROAR tomorrow, yesterday — lifts loud cows off the page, aloud — flips the coin of language, heads or tails? — politely speaks on writing heard yet seen — twists tongues, transliterates and teases — makes contact with ancestral spirits — traverses the foothills of La Marquesa, past and present — is the Spectre at the feast — (re)traces polymorphous concrete poems — dashes, gestures, speaks, breathes, moves, joyness — is, as ever, tentative, incomplete and inconsistent.

Contributions by Helen Marten, Rebecca May Johnson, Johanna Drucker, Louis Lüthi, Daisy Lafarge, Holly Pester, Ursula K. Le Guin, Quinn Latimer, Stefan Themerson, Slavs and Tatars, Ashanti Harris, Catalina Barroso-Luque, Kevin Lotery, Bronac Ferran with Greg Thomas and Astrid Seme with Alex Balgiu.

Through work by artists and poets of various generations and geographies, as well as additional contributors, SIREN (some poetics) considers the ways in which language is increasingly employed by artists in works that trouble the line between language as a literary practice and language as a visual one. Both human and nonhuman forms of language-making and poetics are insisted upon, from precolonial myth to scientific speculation, fungal networks to gut bacteria, text to textile, poem to algorithm. Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at Amant, in Brooklyn, SIREN (some poetics) figures language in manifold forms: poem and essay, score and script, list and litany. All, though, emit and evidence a kind of parapoetics: poetry as opaque metabolic structuring or as some wild surfacing.

With texts by Hana Noorali & Lynton Talbot, Ruth Estevez, Quinn Latimer and excerpts by Don Mee Choi, Anais Duplan, Franz Kafka, Christa Wolf, a.o., and with artist contributions by Katja Aufleger, Patricia L. Boyd, Bia Davou, Sky Hopinka, Liliane Lijn, Bernadette Mayer, Rosemary Mayer, Nour Mobarak, Senga Nengudi, Rivane Neuenschwander, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Aura Satz, Ser Serpas, Shanzhai Lyric, Jenna Sutela, Iris Touliatou, and Dena Yago