Psycho Nymph Exile

Moulded from clay, between 2021 and 2023, The subtle rules the dense is a series of ceramic chest plates, by the artist Phoebe Collings-James. Inspired by Makonde and Yoruba body masks and Roman muscle cuirasses, the sculptures explore the interplay between ritualistic objects’ violent histories and their contemporary presentation as fetishistic ornaments. This publication brings together responses to the series from artists SERAFINE1369 and Rehana Zaman and geographer Professor Kathryn Yusoff; exploring layered references to tarot, Shakespeare and post-colonial theory; probing the materiality and extractive politics of geology; and reflecting the plural multifaceted nature of Collings-James’ practice.

A series by Phoebe Collings-James

With Texts by Serafine1369, Rehana Zaman, Kathryn Yussof.

The platform, free speech and contempt

Constructed in Pennsylvania in 1827, Gravity Road was a precursor to the modern roller coaster; a sloping stretch of railroad used to cart coal out of mines. With passenger rides on offer soon afterwards, the rapid descent became an attraction and the technology was appropriated for thrill rides in amusement parks.

Jesse Darling’s sculptures, drawings and installations address the fallibility, fungibility and mortality of living beings, systems of government, ideologies and technologies – nothing is too big to fail. For his exhibition at Kunstverein Freiburg in 2020, Darling created a sculpture of a dysfunctional roller coaster, broken down to a child-like scale, becoming an anti-monument to a modernity that celebrates progress, acceleration and mastery and produces violence.

Exploring the entangled history of labour, leisure, extraction and entertainment, Gravity Road: A Rollercoaster Reader was commissioned in response to Darling’s 2020 exhibition, bringing together new texts by artist and Darling-collaborator Joe Highton and writer Sabrina Tarasoff along with a correspondence between Darling and the Kunstverein’s director Heinrich Dietz.

FEATURING TEXTS BY:
Jesse Darling
Heinrich Dietz
Joe Highton
Sabrina Tarasoff

The book transcribes a body broken by American empire, that of ex-con Rafael Luis Estrada Requena, hacking itself away from contemporary society. Johanna Hedva, author of Sick Woman Theory, takes the ferocious compulsion to escape (from capitalism, from the limits of the body-machine, from Earth) and channels it into an evisceration of oppression and authority. Equal parts tender and brutal, romantic and furious, On Hell is a novel about myths that trick and resist totalitarianism.

Big data (n) is high-volume, high-velocity and/or high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing that enable enhanced insight, decision making, and process automation.

Dead Minutes is a storytelling game about systemic change in an undesirable afterlife. You, the players, will decide what this hell, underworld or land of the dead is like, what its problems are, how change happens there, and what the complications might be when altering something so big, involving so many dead people, over so much time. It’s a game about impossible seeming actions at impossible seeming scales, making difficult choices, and dealing with unexpected outcomes.

The first half of this book gives you everything you need to play a session of Dead Minutes, which takes 2-5 hours with 3-6 people.

The second half features an essay by Patricia Reed that expands on the concepts of heuristic fictions and vital zombies in relation to the afterlife, and a series of afterlife generating 'seeds' contributed by different types of writers - a demonic boardroom presentation by writer and art critic Habib William Kherbek, a ritual from horror game designer Samuel Clarice Mui Shen Ern, a premise by Arthur C Clarke award winning author Chris Beckett, and a letter from Selma Selman.

Dispersed Events brings together for the first time Nick Mauss’ essays from the last fifteen years. Shimmering with the urgency of a new generation of queer thinkers, Mauss’ writing refracts contemporary art through histories of decorative art, film, theater, and dance.

An artist renowned for critically and poetically reconfiguring inherited genealogies and hierarchies of visual culture and art history, Mauss engages writing as a space for relentlessly activating counter-histories, repositioning the voice of the artist and the readers along the way. Whether he considers the practice of artist Lorraine O’Grady, the radical fashion of Susan Cianciolo, the anarcho-vaudevillian theater of Reza Abdoh, or the potential for textiles to disclose a different way of thinking, Mauss insists on the intense power of forms and feelings in their actual rather than enforced prehistories. Reevaluating experiments in fashion, dance, and the decorative arts on the same plane as painting, sculpture and cinema, he locates art as taking shape in the middle of conversations—“between art history and any afternoon.”

“Among what might initially appear, following Mauss, ‘a wildly inscrutable web of lineages,’ the reader quickly perceives unexpected, unheralded, conjunctions: affiliations, alignments, and affinities. . . . It generates a conviction that, in the best sense, is partisan. Singular, independent, illuminating.” — from the foreword by Lynne Cooke

“This book is about damage and violence, about the ramifications of channeling intensity at all costs. It is a text that is utterly compelling, that you tumble into and cannot escape from. I fucking loved it.” — Dodie Bellamy