Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

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

Cover of Unannounced Voices – Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions

Sternberg Press

Unannounced Voices – Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions

Zdenka Badovinac

€12.00

Alternative forms of curatorial and institutional work suitable to our novel conditions, when the relationship between physical and online work must be revised.

In our current era of global pandemic and violent political upheaval, the question must be asked: What is our future and whose voices will announce it? These can only be situated voices, each with its own body and space, formed through dialogue within their own communities and in reaction and resistance to dominant discourses. Museum director, curator, and writer Zdenka Badovinac argues that these situated voices of people, artworks, and exhibitions, rooted in the local, can bring incisive, productive change. The call of these voices, in rethinking art, curation, and institutions, is the subject of this powerful essay.

Zdenka Badovinac is a curator, writer and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. She served as Director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana (1993-2020). In her work, Badovinac highlights the difficult processes of redefining history alongside different avant-garde traditions within contemporary art.

Published in 2022 ┊ 64 pages ┊ Language: English

recommendations

Cover of Raven Chacon: A Worm’s Eye View From a Bird’s Beak

Sternberg Press

Raven Chacon: A Worm’s Eye View From a Bird’s Beak

Stefanie Hessler, Katya García-Antón and 1 more

Performance €29.00

A career-spanning catalogue featuring excerpts from Raven Chacon’s scores, musical prompts, and drawings interspersed with full-color documentation and descriptive texts of installations, sculptures, and performances. Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among land, space, and people.

In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined. In 2022, Raven Chacon became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2023.

Texts by Raven Chacon, Lou Cornum, Aruna D'Souza, Candice Hopkins, Anthony Huberman, Ingir Bål Nango, Marja Bål Nango, Dylan Robinson & Patrick Nickleson, Eric-Paul Riege, Sigbjørn Skåden, Ánde Somby.

Foreword by Katya García-Antón and Stefanie Hessler.

Cover of Aftershow

Sternberg Press

Aftershow

Pauline Boudry/ Renate Lorenz

Performance €25.00

A monograph / artists' book that engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories. Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.

Cover of The German Library Pyongyang

Sternberg Press

The German Library Pyongyang

Sara Sejin Chang

From December 11, 2015, until April 10, 2016, the German Library in Guangzhou, China, became The German Library Pyongyang, a reimagining of an initiative of the Goethe-Institut that originally operated in North Korea between 2004 and 2009. This temporary intervention by Sara van der Heide is an imaginary transformation of the current geography of the German Library in Guangzhou. Van der Heide’s project is a contemporary version of the Goethe-Institut’s original library initiative in North Korea, devised as a vessel to discuss national cultural policy in a post-Cold War and postcolonial era that looks critically toward the parallel histories of Germany and the two Koreas. The German Library Pyongyang offers a space for critical questions, but it also functions as a context for transcending thinking that is prescribed by the lines of the nation-state, language, and geography. The several artistic, linguistic, and graphic interventions in the library merge with the continuing activities of the German learning center in Guangzhou, and all institutional printed matter in Chinese is replaced by Korean.

This publication brings together the four original exhibition booklets in German, Korean, English, and Chinese. An additional reader is included with critical reflections as well as documentation of the exhibition and the organized seminar.

Design by Dongyoung Lee
English/German/Korean/Chinese

Cover of Film X Autochthonous Struggles Today

Sternberg Press

Film X Autochthonous Struggles Today

Nicole Brenez, Jonathan Larcher and 2 more

First global exploration of contemporary forms of filmmaking from political and cultural self-determination movements of Autochthonous communities and peoples.

Film X Autochthonous Struggles Today brings together for the first time filmmakers, activists, film curators, and scholars who share a common interest in filmmaking practices that emerge from and participate in the various situations of struggle that the Autochthonous/Indigenous/Native/Aboriginal/First Nations peoples and communities are involved in worldwide.

Starting with the Edison Studio's 1894 short films Buffalo Dance and Sioux Ghost Dance, representations of Autochthonous peoples have been part of cinema right from its inception. The vast majority of these representations, however, have not been produced by nor for Autochthonous peoples. In the wake of political and cultural self-determination movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and with the gradual democratization and accessibility of the tools of moving-image making, Autochthonous communities have displaced and renewed cinema's forms and means of production, increasingly reclaiming their right for self-representation by way of film and video.

Along with the vibrant forms of moving images arising from within the communities, close to their existential political concerns, filmmaking has also become a potent tool in Autochthonous struggles. This book answers the need to take a global look at the diverse ways of filmmaking that fight for land rights and against environmental injustice (Brazil, Morocco, Taiwan, USA), that resist neocolonial domination, economic and political exploitation (Japan, Philippines), that offer a counterpoint during low intensity or drawn-out armed conflicts (Colombia, Mexico), that invent strategies of counter information and representation (Australia, Canada, Russia, Samoa), and that strive for visibility.

Contributions by Myrla Baldonado, Mayaw Biho, Nadir Bouhmouch, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Carolina Canguçu, Amaranta Cesar, Karrabing Film Collective, Rupert Cox, Nicolas Défossé, Etienne De France, Sophie Gergaud, John Gianvito, David Harper, Aurélie Journée-Duez, Blackhouse Lowe, Caroline San Martin, Laura Langa Martínez, Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Dan Taulapapa Mcmullin, Chie Mikami, Francisco Vázquez Mota, Omar Moujane, Marie Pierre-Bouthier, Perrine Poupin, Ariel Arango Prada, Beatriz Rodovalho, Roberto Romero, Jonathan Sims, Mercedes Vicente, Jamahke Welsh.

Cover of Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity

Pluto Press

Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity

Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars and 1 more

Essays €20.00

In many places around the world, the freedom to simply care for one another is under attack by the powerful, and acts of solidarity are being made illegal. In a moment of struggle defined by the rollback of social welfare programs, the criminalisation of migration, and the right-wing clampdown on bodily autonomy, radical networks of care are fighting back.

From volunteer rescue boats in the Mediterranean to underground labs for preparing gender-affirming hormones, from the sharing of copyrighted health knowledge to the provision of abortion and contraception, people are reclaiming the means to care for one another in defiance of a system that devalues and exploits the labour of care.

Against atomised despair, Pirate Care shows that fighting back isn't only about legal and legislative changes but also about organizing, direct action, and disobedient care.

Cover of The Architect is Absent

Kyklàda.press

The Architect is Absent

Dimitra Kondylatou, Nicolas Lakiotakis and 2 more

Essays €12.00

The white cubical house, the vernacular architecture in the Aegean Archipelago, knows no author. Its capacity to resist harsh climatic and topographic circumstances has been improved and adjusted through time and seems today close to perfection. The white-washed Cycladic House has become iconic to the image of Greece through the construction of national and tourism narratives. What happens when an architect steps into this process of anonymous transmission of skills? In 1966 music composer, architect, and engineer Iannis Xenakis articulated a response to this tradition and designed, from his base in Paris, a holiday house on the island of Amorgos while choosing to remain absent throughout the construction process.


CONTENTS

Constructing through Absence
by Hulya Ertas

Meteorites
by Mâkhi Xenakis

Summer Home for François-Bernard Mâche by Iannis Xenakis, 1966–74
by Sharon Kanach

Villa Mâche: a harsh hijack against the space of the sun
by David Bergé

Traveling to the Cyclades: Modernist Projections
by Dimitra Kondylatou

Iannis Xenakis, Selected Projects from Critical Index
by Sven Sterken

Cover of Prompt Thinking

Polity Press

Prompt Thinking

Jianwei Xun

Essays €16.00

Prompt Thinking explores how artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming the nature of thought. In the age of generative AI, prompting becomes more than a technical instruction: it emerges as a philosophical practice.

This book arises from an experiment with AI in which the fictional philosopher Jianwei Xun sparked global debate by publishing a book about power and perception in the digital age. That book, Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality, was written with the assistance of AI. Rather than casting AI as either savior or threat, Prompt Thinking proposes a third way: conscious dialogue with artificial intelligence as a means to expand critical awareness. The book shows how critical philosophical engagement with AI can produce unexpected insights while preserving intellectual autonomy.

Part theoretical framework, part methodological provocation, Prompt Thinking offers tools for navigating cognitive transformation. It proposes an ethics of the threshold, neither rejecting technological change nor surrendering to it.

Cover of  Sung Hwan Kim: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea

Afterall Books

Sung Hwan Kim: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea

Janine Armin

Essays €20.00

A richly illustrated exploration of Sung Hwan Kim’s complex record of migrant stories, displacement and belonging, border-crossings and translation.

In A Record of Drifting Across the Sea (2017–), Sung Hwan Kim looks at histories of migration. The artist parses the traces –archival and bodily – left by undocumented Korean migrants who came to the US by way of Hawai’i at the turn of the twentieth century, and ponders over their impact on other migrant and indigenous communities. As an ongoing film and installation series, comprising two chapters and a third in progress, A Record unsettles the limits of the ‘one work’ with its distributive, open-ended and collaborative nature.

In this speculative inquiry, Janine Armin explores each chapter in Kim’s multi-layered work as a mycelial network of feelers entangling and extending the wider work in-process. Engaging history through embodiment, folklore and myth, as much as through archival material, Kim navigates and crosses the boundaries between displacement and belonging. Focusing on the artist’s attempt to escape from representation, Armin illuminates and attends to the different stories and non-sovereign ways of being together towards which his work points us.

This title is part of the One Work book series, which focuses on artworks that have significantly changed the way we understand art and its history.