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Cover of Resurgent Nahda – Arab Exhibitions in 1930s Jerusalem

Kaph Books

Resurgent Nahda – Arab Exhibitions in 1930s Jerusalem

Nadi Abusaada ed.

€40.00

The cultural and political legacies of the the 1933 and 1934 Arab Exhibitions in Jerusalem.

Resurgent Nahda examines the 1933 and 1934 Arab Exhibitions in Mandate Jerusalem, highlighting the city's role in asserting a regional Arab Nahda and fostering economic, cultural, and artistic exchange amid post-WWI geopolitical fragmentation.

The book emerges from Nadi Abusaada's seven years of research, including an award-winning 2019 essay in the Jerusalem Quarterly and two exhibitions he curated at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah (2022–2023) and Darat al-Funun in Amman (2024). Featuring six essays, an interview, and primary materials—archival documents, crafts, and artworks—the book explores Jerusalem's connections with Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut, tracing the journeys of artists, craftspeople, architects, and journalists who shaped this pivotal chapter in modern Arab history.

Nadi Abusaada is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut. His work focuses on the material histories and visual cultures of the modern Arab world. He holds a PhD in architecture from the University of Cambridge. He has also held various academic fellowships including the ETH Zürich Postdoctoral Fellowship at ETH Zürich and the Aga Khan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Islamic Architecture at MIT. Besides his writings, Nadi Abusaada has also been involved in research-based curatorial work. He has curated and participated in a number of exhibitions around the world including in Ramallah, Amman, Zurich, Venice, Dubai, and Montreal.

Edited by Nadi Abusaada.
Texts by Nadi Abusaada, Nisa Ari, Wesam Al Asali, Samira Badran, Nadine Nour el Din, Kirsten Scheid, Sary Zananiri.

Published in 2024 ┊ 288 pages ┊ Language: English

recommendations

Cover of Russian Colonialism 101

IST Publishing

Russian Colonialism 101

Maksym Eristavi

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).

Cover of Discipline Park

Wendy's Subway

Discipline Park

Toby Altman

Non-fiction €18.00

Toby Altman’s Discipline Park documents the demolition of Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, a landmark of architectural brutalism designed by Bertrand Goldberg in the 1970s. Altman was born in the building, and years later, was employed by Northwestern University when they tore it down. His personal proximity to the site leads to a wider critical evaluation of the cruelty of a neoliberalism that asks us to draw sustenance from the very institutions that poison and erase our bodies, habitats, and histories. But, as it indicts the present and its claustrophobic, ruinous politics, Discipline Park also recovers or reinvents utopian vistas through an extended engagement with Goldberg's architectural practices.

Cover of In the Delirium of the Simulation: Baudrillard Revisited

becoming press

In the Delirium of the Simulation: Baudrillard Revisited

Achim Szepanski

Philosophy €15.00

Third edition featuring afterword by Alessandro Sbordoni & several appendices, including a new translation & edit of “Taylor Swift Does Not Exist”. 

This is a monumental and extensive work from someone who is arguably the most well-versed scholar of Baudrillard, Deleuze & Laruelle in the German-speaking world, Achim Szepanski, the original founder of Mille Plateaux, Force Inc Music Works and NON. This book is dedicated to Jean Baudrillard, who would be described by Achim as the most radical and advanced stimmung in Philosophy. Through this comprehensive and devouring analysis of Baudrillard’s work, the author presents a gripping account of their own philosophy; alongside his magnum opus Die Ekstasie der Spekulation, this book, In the Delirium of the Simulation, provides the strongest case for what might be called, in light of his passing, Szepanskism or Szepanskian Economics. 

From Finance, to non-philosophy and radical experimental music, Szepanski is an anomalous and unique theoretician with one hell of a history. 

CONTENTS:

  • Metabox of Terms: Simulation, Code, Hyperreality, Fractal, Seduction and Implosion 
  • Baudrillard's Maximisation Hypothesis: the System and the Other
  • Baudrillard & Marxism: Signs, Production and Money
  • Distinguishing the Consumer System (or Shopping Mall) from the Landfill
  • Baudrillard & the Financial Simulacrum
  • Excursus on Jonathan Beller's World Computer 
  • Hyperreality & Artificial Intelligence
  • Baudrillard & Quantum Theory
  • Afterword: Hyperculture by Alessandro Sbordoni
  • Appendix 1: Taylor Swift Does Not Exist
  • Appendix 2: Baudrillard: After the Orgy
  • Appendix 3: Imagination & Reality: Psychoanalysis vs Baudrillard
Cover of Art et production

Éditions Sans Soleil

Art et production

Boris Arvatov

Non-fiction €19.00

Art et production de Boris Arvatov fait partie des classiques oubliés des avant-gardes qui se sont épanouies durant la Révolution russe. Publié à Moscou en 1926, il vient porter le fer dans les débats qui agitent l’école constructiviste : que doit être le statut de l’art après la révolution, ses liens avec les techniques industrielles de reproduction, avec la critique de la vie quotidienne, comment doit-il entrer dans l’usine ? Autant d’interrogations radicales, témoignages d’une séquence politico-sociale bouillonnante. Une nouvelle conception de l’art émerge, qui laissera une empreinte indélibile sur une tradition de critiques matérialistes de la culture, de Walter Benjamin à Peter Bürger, en passant par Fredric Jameson, celle qui posera la question de l’articulation entre pratique artistique et logiques propres à la sphère de la production. Un document exceptionnel enrichi d’illustrations, paraissant en français pour la première fois, une porte prviliégiée sur un moment-clé de la modernité exthétique du XXe siècle. 

Boris Arvatov (1896–1940) est un artiste et critique d’art russe. Il est notamment connu comme théoricien du productivisme, un mouvement d’avant-garde post-révolutionnaire lié au constructivisme. 

Cover of Parapraxis 06: Resistance

Parapraxis

Parapraxis 06: Resistance

Periodicals €25.00

In 1911, Sigmund Freud addressed his followers gathered at Nuremberg, where he restated the import of his practice: “the task of psychoanalysis lies not at all in the discovering of complexes, but in the dissolving of resistances.” A formal antipode to political resistance, psychoanalytic resistance dams up desire and obstructs traumatic knowledge. It is conservative, allergic to change, and aims for the kind of frictionless normativity against which the unconscious drives rail. Meanwhile, we associate political resistance with change itself, with a blockade that pushes for revolution—rather than a blockage that censors its very possibility. If we read Freud as urging his followers to help their patients move through their resistance, psychoanalysis is a project on the side of material and political reality by bringing patients out of isolation and into social struggles. However, psychoanalysis is often glossed in reverse: as a project of isolated relief for the stubborn individual.

Should psychoanalysis only succeed at rendering patients compliant in their cure? Is psychoanalysis a tool for nullifying political resistance? If so, Freud’s edict for the aim of psychoanalysis is now but an epitaph. It would be easy, then, to give up the ghost, to let psychoanalysis go. But why should psychoanalysis retreat from collective symptoms back into the consulting room for individual treatment—away from strikes, riots, and uprisings, and toward complacency and normativity, if not quite literally marriage and babies? Why should the clinic not dare to be in and of the world?

Feeling restless. Hunger tactics. Laughing in the face of fascism. Breaking through. Diagnosing revolution. Madness in the Maghreb. Essays by Fady Joudah, Jamieson Webster, Dylan Saba, Yasmin El-Rifae, Ussama Makdisi, Mary Turfah, Hannah Proctor, and more.

In Memory of Joshua Clover (1962-2025).