Not Going it Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating

A manifesto for the decolonization of art book fairs and publishing.

Can we decolonize art book fairs? Can we decentralize knowledge and deconstruct privilege in our contexts? Decolonizing Art Book Fairs aims to rethink through the existing and speculative frameworks of organizational practice in the art book fairs. This workbook attempts to introduce new narratives and help deconstruct the frontiers between north(s) and south(s), putting an emphasis on practitioners and initiatives from the African continent and diaspora. A workbook with (primarily newly commissioned) texts and interviews.

Contributions by Jean-Claude Awono, Yaiza Camps, Chayet Chiénin, Chimurenga, Renata Felinto, Wanjeri Gakuru, Moritz Grünke, Aryan Kaganof, Sharlene Khan, Grada Kilomba, Carla Lever, Fouad Asfour, Dzekashu MacViban, Gladys Mendía, James Murua, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Simon Njami, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Monica Nkodo, O Menelick 2Ato, Pascale Obolo, Michalis Pichler, Mario Pissarra, Sergio Raimundo, Djimeli Raoul, Flurina Rothenberger, Bienvenu Sene, Bisi Silva, Kwanele Sosibo, Parfait Tabapsi, Louise Umutoni, Zamân Books & Curating.

A multidisciplinary investigation of the interrelations of space and time, memory, architecture and urban planning through and beyond Henri Lefebvre's concept of Rhythmanalysis.

“The whole universe revolves around rhythm, and when we get out of rhythm, that's when we get into trouble.”—Babatunde Olatunji

A gathering of the echoes, memories and findings after three years of research, performances, exhibitions and conversations within “That, Around Which The Universe Revolves. On Rhythmanalysis of Memory, Times, Bodies in Space”. With chapters in Lagos, Düsseldorf, Harare, Hamburg and Berlin, the S A V V Y Contemporary project and publication bring together visual artists, urbanists, writers, photographers, performers, poets, and theorists to investigate the interrelations of space and time, memory, architecture and urban planning through and beyond Henri Lefebvre's concept of Rhythmanalysis.

Published following the exhibition project “That, Around Which The Universe Revolves. On Rhythmanalysis of Memory, Times, Bodies in Space”, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, from December 1st, 2017, to January 28, 2018.

Edited by Elena Agudio, Anna Jäger, Saskia Köbschall, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung.

Contributions by Akinbode Akinbiyi, Jacques Coursil, Thulile Gamezde, Gintersdorfer/Klaßen, Noa Ha, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin (Annemie Vanackere & Ricardo Carmona), Kampnagel Hamburg (Caroline Spellenberg), Jan Lemitz, Dorothee Munyaneza, Lucia Nhamo, Christian Nyampeta, Qudus Onikeku, Tracey Rose, Louis Henri Seukwa, AbdouMaliq Simone, Awilda Sterling, Greg Tate, Kathrin Tiedemann, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Tinofireyi Zhou, Percy Zvomuya.

THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK is the debut collection of poetry from a writer who displays a wide-ranging palette for storytelling and folklore in a suite of narrative poems. The collection is built around an ensemble of characters that range from known to unknown, through which Serubiri crafts visually-inspired poems that combine the photographic, the intensely personal, and the scholarly. In his book, he manages to domesticate larger-than-life figures, including Zanzibari-born singer-songwriter Freddie Mercury and Nigerian-born photographer Rotimi Fani Kayode. Simultaneously pondered and elastic, Serubiri’s poetry lures these figures – and the reader – into an atmosphere that is only as expansive as the interior landscapes he delineates with each succeeding poem. With this he expresses his own doubts and path, from memories of his native Uganda to New York City, through a psychology of decisions and life choices. 

Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator and author based in New York City. He currently serves as faculty in Art History at Hunter College and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He previously held positions at New York University and the New Centre for Research and Practice, and delivered lectures at Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, The New School, basis voor aktuelle kunst, and University of the Arts Helsinki. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, New York; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and the Hessel Museum, Bard College, NY. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth; received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College; and is an alumni of the Àsìkò International Art Programme. He serves on the editorial team of e-flux journal. He has published poetry in the online journals Jalada and Badilisha Poetry Exchange, as well as in print in journals Kwani? 7, Kwani? 8, and READ: A Journal of Inter-Translation (2022). His poetry has been reviewed online in The New Inquiry. THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK is his first book of poetry. 

The Forgive Us Our Trespasses Reader explores radical and emancipatory significations and fabulations of trespassing, turning towards practices that transgress and reshape the boundaries of, among other dimensions, currency, governance, religion, spirituality, language, and artificial intelligence.

Complementing the thematic concerns of the exhibition of the same name, this collection of essays, poems, artistic contributions, and a sermon, conceptually maps the distance between the English word "trespasses"—with its double meaning of to sin or to physically tread—and the German word "Schuld"—referring to sin and guilt but with etymological proximities to debt (Schulden). Deviating from the line of prayer that lends the project its name, the contributors do not ask for forgiveness for the various trespasses they elucidate—be they religious, social, class-related, national, sexual, or disciplinary in nature—but rather assert them as modes of transgression, as forms of rebellion, and as possibilities for transcendence.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in 2024.

Contributions by Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Egidija Čiricaitė, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, Toussaint M. Kafarhire, Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, Chao Tayiana Maina, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Tavia Nyong’o, Mary Louise Pratt, Josefine Rauch, Deborah A. Thomas, Senthuran Varatharajah, Yuanwen Zhong.

She Follows No Progression reflects on the plurality of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)’s work and legacy, collecting essays, personal narratives, poems, conversations, letters, and the extratextual in a reader that attests to Cha’s genre-bending vision and political imagination. The writers, artists, scholars, organizers, and educators collected here, each unique in their voice and method, multiply approaches to language, colonial history, migration, and time in dialogue with Cha’s unequivocally interdisciplinary practice. Their contributions traverse subjects from Asian American studies to literary history, translation, film theory, and experimental poetics, while attending to the gaps between these fields and the intractable entanglements of race, class, and gender that underlie them. She Follows No Progression echoes Cha’s appeal for a liberatory horizon emergent from all that we are affixed to in the present.

She Follows No Progression is published on the occasion of the 2022 program, The Quick and the Dead: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Edition. The Quick and the Dead is a yearlong, multiphase project that highlights the life, work, and legacy of a deceased writer by bridging their work to that of contemporary practitioners. In its third year, the program focused on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Contributors:

Sam Cha, Marian Chudnovsky, Jesse Chun, Una Chung, Anton Haugen, Irene Hsu, Valentina Jager, Juwon Jun, Youbin Kang, Eunsong Kim, Youna Kwak, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Jennifer Gayoung Lee, Sujin Lee, Florence Li, Serubiri Moses, Jed Munson, Yves Tong Nguyen, Wirunwan Victoria Pitaktong, Brandon Shimoda, Caterina Stamou, Megan Sungyoon, Teline Trần, and Soyoung Yoon.

For years, Ukrainian journalist Maksym Eristavi has been mainstreaming the global awareness about the legacy of Russian colonialism. A few days before Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he started a Twitter thread listing all Russian colonial invasions over the last century and highlighting one specific pattern that they all went by. The post has gone viral and is now dubbed the "mother of all Russian colonialism tweets". Together with a group of Ukrainian artists, Eristavi transformed it into an illustrated pocket guide to the 48 most recent invasions of Russian colonialism — to bring everyone’s attention to a pattern of serial behavior by the largest colonial empire.

Publication is prepared with the support of the MOCA NGO and the Ukrainian Emergency Art Fund in collaboration with the Sigrid Rausing Trust. Some illustrations created during the illustrative workshop for the book Russian Colonialism 101 have been donated to the Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA).

By one of the most transcendent poets of this generation, a remarkable collection of prose poems that explores themes of love, pain, isolation, and connection. In this self-eulogy written in the final years of Mahmoud Darwish's life, Palestine becomes a metaphor for the injustice and pain of our contemporary moment.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was one of the most acclaimed poets in the Arab world. His poetry collections include Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? and A River Dies of Thirst (Archipelago Books). In 2001 Darwish was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.

An Expert Array of Talks & Essays by One of Our Greatest Living Poets.

One of our greatest living poets, Alice Notley, the author of more than 40 books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of talks and essays over the last three decades.

The publication offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets—Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver, or William Carlos Williams—noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams and what they're for, or giving us insight into her own work, Notley's observations are original, sobering, and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.