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Cover of On the Benefits of Friendship

Sternberg Press

On the Benefits of Friendship

Isabelle Graw

Essays €22.00

Isabelle Graw reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus.

By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity—if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.

"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships." 
Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

"Isabelle Graw has written the Elective Affinities for the twenty-first century, as a feminist novel and a dysfunctional family portrait set in the contemporary art world."
— Violaine Huisman, author of The Book of Mother

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule), Frankfurt am Main, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism. She is an art critic and co-founder ofTexte zur Kunst in Berlin.

Cover of Solution 305 – Dying Livingly

Sternberg Press

Solution 305 – Dying Livingly

Staci Bu Shea

Essays €16.00

A series of propositions and encounters in service to an aesthetic, critical, and poetic experience of living life led by death.

Part studious, part visceral, Dying Livingly is a collection of short essays written in the first few years of the author's holistic deathcare research and practice. With a focus on the truth of impermanence and the material cultures of death and dying, the writing reaches toward a future of compassionate, community-centered deathcare.

Death has been outsourced, medicalized, and commodified for over a century. Existing at a threshold of innovation and transformation today, death is not a plight to master or transcend but a reality of insistent change requiring our humble surrender. Working in tandem with the possibilities and limits of medicine, the holistic deathcare movement aims to support people and their communities in death literacy and phobia. It stewards both ancient and new practices in deathcare and centers social, political, and ecological imperatives for how we die.

If death is an amplification of living, the attention here is on bearing witness to life in and around the dying and the potential to contribute to a more vibrant culture of care. Living a death-oriented life is not simply for those and their loved ones navigating a terminal diagnosis and finite amount of time to live; it is for all of us. Death awareness leads to a valuing of life, which is urgently needed for justice, healing, and our livability.
With fervor and deep reverence, this collection demonstrates that what is needed above all is a presence—simple but challenging—that refuses to look away as life slips from our grip. In this light, the writing details lessons in what it means to be prepared for death but also impossibly ready. Death is a horizon that inspires us to live fully, with the vulnerability necessary in the transformative process of giving and receiving care.

Staci Bu Shea (born 1988 in Miami) is a curator, writer, and holistic death care worker based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, focusing on aesthetic and poetic practices of social reproduction and care work, as well as its manifestations in interpersonal relationships and daily life, community organizing and institutional practice.

Cover of Burn & Gloom! Glow & Moon!

Sternberg Press

Burn & Gloom! Glow & Moon!

Katrina Daschner

Monograph €19.00

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.

Cover of The Contemporary Condition - Contemporaneity in Embodied Data Practices

Sternberg Press

The Contemporary Condition - Contemporaneity in Embodied Data Practices

Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder

Essays €8.00

What parallels are there between a human pranayama practitioner and a migratory bird in heavily datafied environments? In Contemporaneity in Embodied Data Practices, two artistic field studies provide the starting point for a dialogical reflection on the entangling of diverse temporalities in body-related, datafied, and experiential practices. Shifting through biological, historical, and technological rhythms, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder unfold their respective more-than-human frames of reference and arrive at specific forms of agency in the contemporary moment. Published in partnership with the Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions at Aarhus University.

Cover of Up Your Ass

Sternberg Press

Up Your Ass

Valerie Solanas

Fiction €12.00

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.

Cover of The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen

Bloomsbury Academic

The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen

Oliver Fuke

This collection of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film scripts vividly evokes the close connection between their influential work as theorists and their work as filmmakers. It includes scripts for all six of Mulvey and Wollen's collaborative films, Wollen's solo feature film, Friendship's Death (1987), and Mulvey's later collaborations.

Each text is followed by a new essay by a leading writer, offering a critical interpretation of the corresponding film. The collection also includes Wollen's short story Friendship's Death (1976), the outlines for two unrealised Mulvey and Wollen collaborations, and a selection of scanned working documents. The scripts and essays collected in this volume trace the historical significance of a complex cinematic project that brought feminist, semiotic and psychoanalytic concerns together with formal devices and strategies.

The book includes original contributions from Nora M. Alter, Kodwo Eshun, Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Esther Leslie, Laura Mulvey, Volker Pantenburg, Griselda Pollock, B. Ruby Rich and Sukhdev Sandhu.

Cover of Postcommodity, Alex Waterman and Ociciwan: “in memoriam…”

uh books

Postcommodity, Alex Waterman and Ociciwan: “in memoriam…”

Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective

Performance €15.00

Eighty-page programme book score, and libretto, for performances by Indigenous musicians of in memoriam…Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau and Robert Ashley’s in memoriam... Curated and edited by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective.

[from back cover] …in memoriam Mary Cecil,Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau adds a new score and production by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman to a suite of four early scores by the American composer Robert Ashley. The fifth score honours the lives of Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (née Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau, three Indigenous women from territory at the turn of the Century as it became the province of Alberta. This significant addition continues Ashley’s project investigating the connections between musical forms and constructs of historicization, opening a conversation regarding whom and how we memorialize individuals and inscribe their legacies.

[from essay by Candice Hopkins] What histories are remembered and who is doing the remembering? What form do these rememberings take? It is not as simple as taking down one monument and replacing it with another. We need to ask more questions, take note of the voids that stand in for the past, and actively make way for other voices, particularly those are trapped under the ‘sea ice of English’. “Listen for sounds”, writes the Tlingit poet and anthropologist Nora Marks Dauenhauer, “They are as important as voices. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen.”

Cover of Scrapbook – 40 ans de Light Cone

Light Cone

Scrapbook – 40 ans de Light Cone

Federico Rossin

A visual anthology compiling the contributions of the filmmakers who are part of the Light Cone collection, a key institution for the distribution, promotion and preservation of experimental cinema in France and around the world, on the occasion of its 40th anniversary.

2022 marks an important moment for Light Cone: its 40th anniversary. Such an event should be celebrated in the best possible way. Light Cone has come together thanks to the filmmakers whose films entered the collection over the years. We've decided to invite them to participate in an editorial project, a book in which we would publish their contributions: letters, postcards, photographs, drawings, film stills, collages, etc., which they have sent us for the occasion of the anniversary. A collective scrapbook in which the materiality of the objects—paper, photos, colors, handwritten notes—evokes that of analog cinema, which we have always defended. A book of images is born, and through the creation of this micro-collection, so is a portable museum of about one hundred pieces, which are ready to be exhibited and which will remain in the care of Light Cone's archive.

With Michel Amarger, Martin Arnold, Caroline Avery, Peter-Conrad Beyer, Giuseppe Boccassini, Patrick Bokanowski, Louise Bourque, Robert Breer, Dietmar Brehm, Claudio Caldini, Stefano Canapa, Abigail Child, Pip Chodorov, Martha Colburn, Philippe Cote, Sandra Davis, Frédérique Devaux, Karel Doing, Anja Dornieden, Flatform, Cécile Fontaine, Olivier Fouchard, Su Friedrich, Siegfried Alexander Fruhauf, Peter Gidal, Milena Gierke, Christoph Girardet, Juan David, Gonzalez Monroy, Christophe Guérin, Nicky Hamlyn, Barbara Hammer, Teo Hernandez, Tony Hill, Mike Hoolboom, Jakobois, Larry Jordan, Patrice Kirchhofer, Maria Kourkouta, Alexandre Larose, Christian Lebrat, Emmanuel Lefrant, Maurice Lemaître, Jeanne Liotta, Rose Lowder, Johann Lurf, Pablo Marín, Mara Mattuschka, Bruce Mcclure, Miles Mckane, Luc Meichler, Barbara Meter, Peter Miller, Matthias Müller, Michel Nedjar, Dominique Noguez, Vivian Ostrovsky, Simon Payne, Emmanuel Piton, Charlotte Pryce, Gisèle Rapp-Meichler, Abraham Ravett, Emily Richardson, D.N. Rodowick, Gaëlle Rouard, Martine Rousset, Pierre Rovere, Ben Russell, Daïchi Saïto, Maki Satake, Sylvia Schedelbauer, Jeff Scher, Stanley Schtinter, Guy Sherwin, José Antonio Sistiaga, John Smith, Vicky Smith, Michael Snow, Malena Szlam, Mika Taanila, Marcelle Thirache, Trinh T. Minh-ha, David Wharry, Telemach Wiesinger, Antoinette Zwirchmayr.