Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

Search books by title, author, publisher, keywords...

Cover of Sarah Lucas – Describe This Distance

Mousse Publishing

Sarah Lucas – Describe This Distance

Quinn Latimer

€24.00

A literary tribute to Sarah Lucas, at once an adroit art-historical study and a poetic travelogue.

“Distance is far, nobody said. (Somebody, surely.)” So begins Quinn Latimer's strange, elliptical account of an exhibition and a body of work by Sarah Lucas that the poet and critic has never seen, made and installed in a city she had not yet visited. In the spring of 2012 the renowned English artist's exhibition “NUDs” was mounted in Mexico City at Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli, the famed pyramid-like museum built by the muralist and architect Juan O'Gorman to house Rivera's approximately 50,000 Mesoamerican artifacts and objects. In the summer of 2012 Latimer found herself in Elba, the island of Napoleon's exile, where she embarked on this small, charged book. In four interconnected essays, the writer limns the myriad impressions, ideas, objects, personages, and histories relevant to Lucas's fantastically transparent yet complicated “NUDs,” and their storied making and installation in Mexico. Exploring shame, passivity, palindromes and fertility statuary, as well as notables including Antonin Artaud, Napoleon, Susan Sontag and Mary Wollstonecraft, Describe This Distance is at once an adroit art-historical study and a poetic travelogue, once or twice removed.

Language: English

recommendations

Cover of I am not done yet

Mousse Publishing

I am not done yet

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Monograph €40.00

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed grapples with the poetics-pleasures-politics of Black knowledge production, information technologies and belief formation. Her work looks at knowledge and how it is created, embodied, stored, cataloged, hidden, learned, and also unlearned, with particular focus on facets of incompleteness, information (il)legibility and the use of seemingly error-ridden image and text data.
Rasheed works primarily with paper and vinyl that she attaches to walls and public spaces, creating what she describes as "ecosystems of iterative and provisional projects." Based on a 1974 poem of the same name by American writer Lucille Clifton, her exhibition "i am not done yet" deals with questions of incomplete knowledge and continuous learning through "Black storytelling" and "Islamic mysticism." At the same time, the titular sentence "i am not done yet" can also be understood as an assertive, declarative statement in its own right.

This artist book is published on the occasion of Kameelah Janan Rasheed's first ever institutional exhibition in Germany at Kunstverein Hannover in 2022.

"When I think about the density of language, I imagine the material presence of the language in space. But I also hope there is acknowledgment that no sentence is a simple sentence. Every sentence holds meaning, exceeds meaning, moves in different directions simultaneously." - Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Texts by Sergey Harutoonian, Kathleen Rahn, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Legacy Russell

Cover of Mousse #90 – The Fiction Issue

Mousse Publishing

Mousse #90 – The Fiction Issue

Periodicals €16.00

Mousse celebrates its 90th issue with a collectible edition, with a special design and format, entirely focused on fiction.

Bringing together a cohort of writers and artists, Mousse #90 – The Fiction Issue stems from the eponymous Fiction column that has dwelled in our pages for five years, and expands its scope. It was developed together with Rosanna McLaughlin, Skye Arundhati Thomas, and Izabella Scott, who collectively coedited the art and literature quarterly The White Review between 2021 and 2023.

Here you'll find reprints from both Mousse and The White Review as well as new stories and translations we have jointly commissioned. Seven interludes, intended to open up other worlds through images, feature portfolios of drawings by Atelier dell'Errore, Michael E. Smith, Camille Henrot, Michael Landy, Simone Forti, Adelaide Cioni, and Evelyn Taocheng Wang.

Cover of The Trial

Mousse Publishing

The Trial

Rossella Biscotti

The Trial is an extensive publication chronicling the decade-plus-long evolution of one of Rossella Biscotti's seminal works, focusing on the trials of members of the revolutionary left-wing movement Autonomia Operaia in the early 1980s, an emblematic judicial drama of Italy's Years of Lead.

The core of the book is the English transcription of a six-hour audio piece, originally composed from hundreds of hours of the trial's archival recordings broadcast by Radio Radicale. Edited like a theatrical script, The Trial becomes a polyphonic narrative that foregrounds the political voices of defendants in opposition to the structure and language of the legal machine: prosecutors, judges, lawyers. The transcript is accompanied by critical texts by Michael Hardt, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, and Giovanna Zapperi, as well as a conversation between the artist and philosopher Antonio Negri, one of the trial's key defendants. It investigates how political memory is carried, translated, and embodied across time.

Featuring visual documentation and multilingual excerpts from performances staged across various institutions and countries, this publication traces the work's ongoing reactivation through translation, collaboration, and context-specific interventions.

Cover of Twelve Body Doubles

Mousse Publishing

Twelve Body Doubles

Brice Dellsperger

An overview of the French artist's film remakes over a decade.

"There's something deeply unsettling about the fact that Brice Dellsperger has spirited Laura Palmer away and replaced her with a doppelganger."—Evan Moffitt

Since 1995, the French artist Brice Dellsperger has been working on remakes of cult film sequences, which he has collected under the generic title "Body Double." The doubling of the actor or actress playing all the characters, both female and male, involves cross-dressing and raises questions about gender, originality and artifice. This book covers a decade and brings together video stills from his twelve most recent films, Body Double 29 (2013) to Body Double 40 (2024), with texts by Evan Moffitt and Rebekka Seubert and views of his latest exhibitions.

Brice Dellsperger (born 1972 in Cannes, France, lives and works in Paris) pushes the boundaries of genre and gender. In his multifaceted reprises of iconic film sequences—all assembled under the generic title Body Double—the cineast and artist reenacts the selected scenes frame for frame and lets his “body doubles” perform all of the roles, be they male or female.

Brice Dellsperger has exhibited extensively in Europe and abroad, and began his well-known Body Double series in 1995. His work is in collections that include the Museum of Modern Art, Musée d'Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.

Texts by Evan Moffitt and Rebekka Seubert.

Cover of Mousse #92

Mousse Publishing

Mousse #92

Various

Regions surface often in this issue—across arts, tales, and gatherings of individuals and meanings—as a possibility to bypass the borders of nation-states and the meta-geographies of colonial modernity.

Slavs and Tatars; Hera Chan on Stephanie Comilang; Stephanie Bailey on Ho Tzu Nyen; Drifting into the Atmospheric by Sohrab Mohebbi; Lauren Cook contributes nine newly commissioned note-like fiction pieces; Asad Raza on Édouard Glissant; Mira Dayal in conversation with Shanzhai Lyric, TJ Shin, and jina valentine; Temporary Communities, Four Points on Radically Public Institutions by Elvira Dyangani Ose; A Signature Truer Than the Name by Dani Blanga Gubbay; tidbits: Ruoru Mou by Amy Jones; Virginia Ariu by Brit Barton; Bagus Pandega by Harry Burke; Ceidra Moon Murphy by Alex Bennett; Oshay Green by Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi; Shafei Xia in conversation with Danielle Shang; books by Christian Rattemeyer; Guest Design: Lamm & Kirch.

This issue comes with different covers, randomly distributed.

Mousse is a bimonthly contemporary art magazine. Established in 2006, Mousse contains interviews, conversations, and essays by some of the most important figures in international criticism, visual arts, and curating today, alternated with a series of distinctive articles in a unique tabloid format.

Cover of Devenir minéral | L’éditeur du dimanche

Avarie Publishing

Devenir minéral | L’éditeur du dimanche

Giuliana Prucca

Essays €38.00

Echoing Jean Dubuffet's idea that thought must arise from material in artistic practice, Giuliana Prucca, through this essay, reinterprets a moment in the history of 20th-century art using materials such as stone, sand, earth, and dust. She employs the mineral to illustrate that the creative act would be a trace of the body's disappearance. The loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject objectify themselves in the image. In other words, art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, ultimately leaving nothing but an image.

Drawing from the influential figure of Antonin Artaud, she weaves critical and poetic connections between the texts and works of various artists, writers, and thinkers, ranging from Jean Dubuffet to Jan Fabre and Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein and Gutaï, Joë Bousquet to Camille Bryen and Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard to Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille to Aby Warburg.

The material is not merely a thematic pretext; it is an active and explosive catapult that questions the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated art history. Following Ponge's example, Prucca applies the principles of poetry to criticism, starting from Artaud's material, the most undisciplined of poet-artist-thinkers of the modern era. This results in a critically inventive approach dangerously suited to its object, celebrating an anti-critique. The chosen writing materials, stonepaper for the cover and recycled paper for the pages, is consistent, intending to give the impression of being covered in dust.

The essay disrupts traditional reading habits and shatters the conservatism of art criticism by inhabiting writing space differently, presenting a physically engaging interaction. This is an essay in the literal sense, an experience where form never contradicts content, urging readers to take the risk of thinking deeply and embracing a new rhythm. A complex and challenging design invites them to choose different reading options, ultimately treating criticism as one would poetry.

Giuliana Prucca [Paris | Berlin] is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She is the founder and art director of the publishing house AVARIE, specialising in contemporary art books that explore the relationships between text and image, body and space.

Graphic design, art direction by Vito Raimondi

Cover of Charismatic Spirals

Isollari

Charismatic Spirals

Will Alexander

Fiction €20.00

Charismatic Spirals is for an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological and political consequences.

An archetypal outsider, Will Alexander released his first poetry collection aged forty-four while working at the Los Angeles Lakers' ticket office. Three decades on, he has ascended to the legendary status of the city's great living surrealist, existing, as Eliot Weinberger wrote, in a state of "imaginal hyperdrive," with forty such collections to his name.

Operating at the edge of language, Alexander deploys words in a way that feels prophetic—human psyches synthesize with technological artifacts; atoms and archetypes collide; bodies are vacated, voices are newly incarnated. His America—like Glissant's—is multinational and—like Coover and Spiegelman's—multivalent and symbolically unstable. That is to say, he belongs to an America circa 2024, where poetry—the art of developing new means of speaking—has never been of such artistic, technological, and political consequence.

In doing so, Alexander draws from a vast array of influences, from luminaries like Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to holistic visions such as Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, the Mayan numerical system, and Cheikh Anta Diop's perspectives on ancient Egypt. In a preview of Charismatic Spirals in the New York Times, Anne Boyer captured the essence of his work: "visionary poetry [that] achieves its effect through sound, not image...Cadence [that] can shatter us, set the world ablaze."
Read it syllabically, surf it quickly—there is no single way to approach this work.

Will Alexander (born 1948 in Los Angeles) is an African-American artist, philosopher, poet, novelist, essayist and pianist.

Cover of Cue the Cue

Bierke Verlag

Cue the Cue

Jack O’Brien

Monograph €39.00

This publication accompanying his most comprehensive exhibition to date exhibition is Jack O’Brien’s first monograph. Conceived by the artist himself, it complements the exhibition in both form and content, documenting his practice from 2021–2025 and transfers it into a different medium. Developed as an artist’s book it stands in direct relation to the magazine collages in the exhibition. The torn book cover, perforated paper pages, and a shoelace sealed under cellophane make the publication itself a sculptural gesture.

O’Brien negotiates themes such as staging, visibility, queer identity, and the circular dynamic between consumption, body, and performance. The title refers to the English “cue”—a theatrical cue—and at the same time to its repetition. This double meaning reflects O’Brien’s working method, in which material, form, and gesture continually oscillate between suggestion and withdrawal, presence and dissolution. O’Brien works with found and discarded objects, which he transforms through gestures of wrapping, binding, and perforation. His sculptures, installations, and collages use industrial materials such as cellophane, shrink wrap, and synthetic textiles.

The catalogue brings together the first substantial essays on O’Brien’s work. Alexander Wilmschen introduces the exhibition, in which chance becomes the driving force of reordering, and situates O’Brien’s work within the context of queer phenomenology. Kristian Vistrup Madsen examines the sadomasochistic dimensions of the work. Juliette Desorgues reads the sculptures as embodied punctuation. In conversation with Jeppe Ugelvig, O’Brien reflects on his artistic methodology and language.

The result is a monograph which also formally works with the moments of controlled instability that are so striking in the exhibition: floating, supported and warped.

Texts: Juliette Desorgues, Kristian Vistrup Madsen, Jack O’Brien & Jeppe Ugelvig (Interview) and Alexander Wilmschen