Books

Words gathered from The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1986), Natural Enemies of Books (MMS, 2020), Non credere di avere dei diritti (Libreria delle donne di Milano, 1987), Dada Cannibalistic Manifesto (Francis Picabia, 1920) and WITCH (Rebecca Tamás, 2019). A first version of this poem/pamphlet was made in the context of See What I Mean, a workshop by Phil Baber at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, october 2024.

Somewhere in England, confined to a room with empty chairs and an old telephone, is I. I wasn’t born here. English is their second language. They’ve given up writing. England With Eggs depicts the psychological aftermath of migration through a personal vortex of foreign experiences. Oscillating between narrator and character, Franz Kafka and long-distance calls, I spends sleepless nights drawing eggs, rearranging the chairs and talking to an uncanny voice on the phone. The isolated protagonist’s inner life is fractured: notions of place and history grow ever more fragile, language ever less certain. Torn between stubborn expectations and the reality of a foreign country, England With Eggs unfolds against a silent backdrop of austerity, colonialism and xenophobia. It is a study of acceptance, a reminder that sometimes the things we flee from are the ones we carry along on our journey.

This publication is limited to 100 copies, which are signed and numbered by the author.

Edited by Angie Harms

Sublime landscapes, tranquil urban scenes, frolicking children; who would associate these images with Palestine? All too often the Western media show the country’s gloomy side, and Palestinians as aggressors. It is this that makes identifying with them virtually impossible. If we are to relate to the Palestinians other images are needed, images seen from a cultural and more human vantage point.

Palestinian artists, photographers and designers have mapped their country as they see it. Given their closeness to the subject, this has resulted in unconventional, very human impressions of the landscape and the architecture, the cuisine, the music and the poetry of thought and expression. The drawings, maps and photographs reveal individual life experiences. The contributions give an entirely different angle on a nation in occupied territory. In this subjective atlas it is the Palestinians themselves who show the disarming reverse side of the black-and-white image generally resorted to by the media.

CURATOR: Khaled Hourani (International Academy of Arts Palestine)
CONTRIBUTORS: Sameh Abboushi, Majd Abdel Hamid, Senan Abdelqader, Mohammed Amous, Tayseer Barakat, Sami Bandak, Baha Boukhari, Mahmoud Darwish (poem), Reem Fadda, Shadi Habib Allah, Majdi Hadid, Shuruq Harb, Dima Hourani, Khaled Hourani Munther Jaber, Khaled Jarrar, Abed Al Jubeh, Hassan Khader (foreword), Yazan Khalili, Suleiman Mansour, Basel Al Maqousi, Sani P. Meo, Inas Moussa, Hafez Omar, Hosni Radwan, Awatef Rumiyah, Ahmad Saleem, Shareef Sarhan, Majed Shala, Sami Shana’ah, Maissoon Sharkawi, Mamoun Shrietch, Lena Sobeh, Mohanad Yaqubi, Inass Yassin

Sun of an Ignored Putrid Productivity is a speculative novel about the influence of artificial intelligence and accelerating technological progress on our human interactions. The dialogical script is based on personal reflections and pop-cultural, scientific and philosophical references from the beginnings of cybernetics to more recent voices. Randomly generated, constructed and quoted contents cannot be distinguished from each other. The borderline between fact and fiction becomes blurred. What is left is a flickering effect, disorientation, which reflects our perception of reality under conditions of never-ending information overflow.

This eponymously titled publication by fierce pussy brings together thirty-nine of the legendary art collective’s posters, from works made in the urgent early days of the AIDS crisis to present-day advocacy for Queer and Trans rights. In keeping with fierce pussy’s activism in public spaces, the publication is designed to allow readers to tear out any of the posters to share, wheatpaste, scan, photocopy, and distribute or to easily open the book to any page to hang it on a wall. Combining calls for political and social action, proud reclamations of derogatory language, and pointed questions, the posters in fierce pussy address pressing sociopolitical issues in the group’s distinctive voice.

Emerging during a decade steeped in the AIDS crisis and LGBTQ+ activism, fierce pussy brought Queer identity directly into the streets in a manner characterized by the urgency of those years. In recent years they have expanded to also present their work in galleries and museums, while continuing to intervene in the public space, always working with an economy of means and a collective ethos of inclusion and solidarity.

This publication was originally published by Printed Matter in 2008 to coincide with a retrospective exhibition of the collective’s work. This new expanded edition includes twenty-five additional posters.

fierce pussy is an art collective formed in New York City in 1991. Originally composed of a fluid and often-shifting cadre of dykes, the collective was active through 1994. In 2008, the four core founding members Nancy Brooks Brody (1962–2023), Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard, and Carrie Yamaoka began working together again. Adamantly low-tech and low-budget, fierce pussy has always relied on modest resources: old typewriters, found photographs, and their own baby pictures. In the early days, much of the work was produced using materials and resources they had on hand and the equipment at their day jobs. This publication exemplifies the ethos of the group—to share their work and messaging with the masses.

Managing Editor: Jules Spector
Designers: Garrick Gott and Bryce Wilner

Ian Burn has been described as many things: an activist, a trade-unionist, a journalist, an art critic, a curator and an art historian—or, as he once described himself in a moment of self-deprecating alienation, ‘an ex-conceptual artist’. Born in Geelong in 1939, Burn studied painting in Melbourne and went on to live and work in London and New York. Burn moved back to Australia in 1977 and passed away in 1993 at the age of 53. Burn sought to grapple with how art history intersects and engages with contemporary art and political debate, arguing for a decentred view of the world. 

His legacy is international and can be seen in retrospective exhibitions as recent as 2022, and his work remains a key touchstone in art history. Edited by Burn’s friend, frequent collaborator and eminent art historian, Dr Ann Stephen, this volume brings together 49 pieces of Burn’s own agile and expansive writings alongside a vast collection of his artworks. The collection concludes with reflections on Burn’s life and work from prominent figures and past collaborators in the form of memorial lectures.

Ian Burn: COLLECTED WRITINGS 1966–1993 is edited by Ann Stephen and designed by Robert Milne, with contributions by Art & Language, Adrian Piper, Paul Wood, Allan Sekula, and Mel Ramsden.

A young writer has his heart set on his aunt's large apartment. With this seemingly simple conceit, the characters of The Planetarium are set in orbit and a galaxy of argument, resentment, and bitterness erupts. Telling the story from various points of view, Sarraute focuses below the surface, on the emotional lives of the characters in a way that surpasses even Virginia Woolf. Always deeply engaging, The Planetarium reveals the deep disparity between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us.

The author of eleven novels, three works of criticism, a collection of plays, and an autobiography, Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) is well-known as one of the prime proponents of the New Novel, alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, and Claude Simon. Among her books are Do You Hear Them?, Martereau, Portrait of a Man Unknown, Between Life and Death, and Tropisms.

Sharks Come Closer at Night explores the bond the photographer Lauranne Leunis formed with friends during a first experience far from home. It becomes an intimate reflection on the sacred space they created during their evening walks. In these moments, they found solace in one another while navigating the challenges of young adulthood and the complexities of femininity. The work aims to slow down time, capturing moments of vulnerability, freedom, and connection. Yet even in the stillness, the persistent sound of crashing waves and splashing water serves as a reminder that time is always moving.

All photographs are made on analogue black-and-white film, using various camera formats. This approach adds a raw, fleeting quality to the images, distinguishing them from more staged photographs.

Blending memoir with critique, an award-winning poet and essayist's devastating exploration of sickness and health, cancer and the cancer industry, in the modern world

A week after her 41st birthday, Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living payslip to payslip, the condition was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.

In The Undying - at once her harrowing memoir of survival, and a 21st-century Illness as Metaphor - Boyer draws on sources from ancient Roman dream diarists to cancer vloggers to explore the experience of illness. She investigates the quackeries, casualties and ecological costs of cancer under capitalism, and dives into the long line of women writing about their own illnesses and deaths, among them Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker and Susan Sontag.

Genre-bending, devastating and profoundly humane, The Undying is an unmissably insightful meditation on cancer, the cancer industry and the sicknesses and glories of contemporary life.

Winner of The Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction 2020; Windham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction 2020

Peach machine comprises nine months of poems, tracing a recurrent cycle of sickness, heartbreak, reparation, and recovery from late summer back into early Spring. The work is roughshod: grieving, oxygen-starved, jetlagged, reflective, and relieved.

Designed and typeset by Phil Baber.

In Lilacs, syringa vulgaris gives its name to a form of long poem that promotes sense memory. Here, we have one lilac for each of the senses, and a sixth for love, which synthesizes them all.

Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of God Was Right and The Awful Truth. They write, broadly, about the forms that dreams and art have taken.

“I wanna ____ all my friends at once”: how would you complete the lyric Arthur Russell wrote for “Go Bang”? In Rainer Diana Hamilton’s hands, “smell” or “touch”—or “talk to,” for Hamilton a near-synonym for “love”—might be more appropriate than Russell’s “see.” Or maybe they’ll have argued us into believing that yet a different faculty counts among the senses, in these poem-essays that swerve from memory to love letter to argument. A narrative of lost and developed capacities, a felt history of class antagonism, a treatise masquerading as a flower, a flower in every organ—Lilacs is rude with ambition, underneath its abundant charm.” —Kay Gabriel

“Every new poem by Rainer Diana Hamilton is a gift in which poetry is made new again.” —Andrew Durbin

Created by Mary Heilmann in 1999, The All Night Movie beautifully wraps a memoir inside of a monograph, creating an artist book in which each page is designed as though it were a painting. The artist delicately utilizes color, text, candid photographs, reproductions of paintings, and song lyrics that unfold seamlessly to create an immersive visual experience. Heilmann has described the book as “the story of my life, told in words, painted images and photographs.”

Across eight chapters, Heilmann recounts her life, from childhood in California through New York in the 1990s, providing intimate insight into the development of her work, friendships, and formative life experiences. Snapshots by the artist and others provide a portrait of Heilmann’s evolving artistic community, which included Gordon Matta-Clark, Pat Hearn, Dicky Landry, Jack Pierson, Keith Sonnier, Pat Steir, William Wegman, and Jackie Winsor, among others. And this is just the first half of the book. Included with the artist’s memoir is an essay by Jutta Koether and a survey of paintings from 1972-1999. This highly revered and extremely scarce publication was co-designed with Mark Magill and is reproduced here as a facsimile edition. The All Night Movie was originally published by Hauser & Wirth and Offizin Verlag.

Mary Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940. She studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara, San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley before moving to New York in 1968. Heilmann began her career creating sculpture before quickly pivoting into abstract painting once on the East Coast, experimenting with bright colors and unusual geometries that bridge two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements. She has been the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award as well as a Guggenheim Foundation award.

Pippa Garner’s Better Living Catalog, originally published in 1982, takes the form of a mail order catalog featuring clever and whimsical inventions that parody consumer goods while simultaneously critiquing America’s obsession with ingenuity, efficiency, leisure, and comfort. These works, which were made as prototypes and photographed for the publication, take the form of improbable accessories, clothing, footwear, home appliances, and office gadgets.

For example, the “Reactiononometer,” a portable wristband, instantly measures social success, while the “Digital Diet Loafers” display the wearer’s weight with every step. If the “Munch-o-Matic” reduces deskwork interruptions by flinging a snack right into the user’s mouth, other items promise financial solvency (the controlled cash flow “Autowallet”), sustainable waste management, or mess-free companionship (the “Pet-a-Vision” TV console). The artist asserts that all of the products in the book are “absolute necessities for contemporary survival.”

The Better Living Catalog was a pop hit when it was published, earning Garner spots on nighttime TV talk shows and attention from magazines like Vogue and Rolling Stone. In a meme-filled culture, the works still resonate today, finding their analog in widely-circulating consumer products, and—in the case of the “High Heel Skates”—even appearing unattributed in the runway collection of a major luxury fashion brand.

A few years after the Better Living Catalog was published, Garner began her gender transition, which she has characterized as an artistic project that draws conceptual parallels to the altered consumer goods she has continued to create since the 1970s. The artist’s practice has always been about hacking—gender hacking, she stated, was “an excellent premise for maverick conceptual art and diametrically opposed to anything I’d ever done.”

Many of the prototypes Garner created for the publication were repurposed or recycled, making this previously rare gem of an artist book one of the artist’s few works to now be widely available.

Born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, Pippa Garner (formerly known as Philip Garner) began her practice in the late sixties as a member of the highly regarded Transportation Design department at ArtCenter, California, with plans to become a car stylist, and was drafted to Vietnam to serve as a combat illustrator. In the mid-80s, Garner began her gender transition, which she considers a conceptual artwork, marking an extension of her practice from twenty years of altering cars, garments, and consumer products to using her own body as raw material. Garner appeared on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and other talk shows, showcasing her satirical consumer product inventions, and her artwork has been featured in Car & Driver, Rolling Stone, Arts & Architecture, and Vogue, among other publications. In the 1980s, her performance, design, and video work was exhibited in institutions including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; since 2015, she has had exhibitions at STARS, O-Town House, Redling Fine Art, and Parker gallery in Los Angeles; Jeffrey Stark in New York; JOAN, Los Angeles; Kunstverein München; 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Art Omi, Ghent, New York. She is the author of three other books: Utopia… or Bust! Products for the Perfect World (1984), Garner’s Gizmos & Gadgets (1987), and the zine Beauty 2000 (1992/2021).

Rodrigo Quijano’s An Inherent Tear assembles a suite of poems first published in Lima in 1998 as Una procesión entera va por dentro and his 2014 essay “A Terrace in Valparaiso,” translated into English for the first time by Judah Rubin. Written during the Fujimori years of the 1990s—a period characterized by the end of the conflict between the Maoist Sendero Luminoso insurgency, the Peruvian army, and the Marxist-Leninist Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement—Quijano’s bracingly mournful and incisively wry poems insist that we not turn away from the unburied dead. Shifting between neo-baroque hermeticism and a poetics of the conversational, his work destabilizes lyric subjectivity, testing the limits of the structure of metaphor to relay the impasses of the present. Reflecting almost twenty years later from the “city of wildfires,” Quijano’s essay charts the continued landscape of state violence that carries with it the “payroll of bones” Cesar Vallejo evoked nearly a century earlier. In this new, searing collection, Quijano searches amid the smoke and the ashes for “A place to spend the night, / or a language to speak in, / walking through the desert, or drilling into our / insubstantial dreams.” 

About the author
Rodrigo Quijano is a poet and art researcher. He has worked on contemporary art exhibitions in Lima, São Paulo, Mexico, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Bogotá, and the 57th Venice Biennale.

About the translator
Judah Rubin is the author, most recently, of Antiquarian Historiography (Oxeye Press, 2020). Recent translations can be found in the anthology The Beauty Salons/Salones de la Belleza (Aeromoto/Gato Negro/UNAM, 2021), the journals Firmament and Jacket2, and elsewhere. He is the editor of A Perfect Vacuum and lives in Queens, New York.

Featuring writing and artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, A Grammar Built with Rocks explores artists’ engagement with sites of physical dispossession and socio-ecological crisis, highlighting how creative research methodologies can serve as radically new place-making practices. The publication brings together a range of feminist-decolonial texts and visual contributions that explore how movement, transience, and improvisation offer alternative ways of being-together while being-in-place.  

Contributions by: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Fawz Kabra, Jheanelle Brown and Julien Creuzet, Carolina Caycedo, Ryan C. Clarke and Cauleen Smith, DAAR—Decolonizing Architecture Art Research with Nicola Perugini, Sandra de la Loza, Demian DinéYazhi’, rafa esparza, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Tia-Simone Gardner, Raquel Gutiérrez, Suzanne Kite with Mahpíy̌a Nážinn, Candice Lin, Jumana Manna, K-Sue Park, Christine Rebet, Susan Silton, and Asiya Wadud.

The book also includes a reader, with grounding texts, sources of inspiration, and research references, by Jason Allen-Paisant, Dionne Brand, Suzanne Césaire, Lisa Lowe, Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and K. Wayne Yang.

About the editors

Shoghig Halajian is a curator, writer, and artist whose work explores queer and diasporic imaginaries, place-based practices, and experiments in collectivity and collaboration. She is co-editor of the online journal, Georgia, which is supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Select curatorial projects include: A grammar built with rocks (Human Resources LA, One Archives at the USC Libraries, and REDCAT, 2018); At night the states (Hammer Museum, 2017); DISSENT: what they fear is the light (LACE, 2016); and rafa esparza: I have never been here before (LACE, 2015). She was a TBA21 Ocean Space Fellow in Venice (2021) and a curatorial fellow at École du Magasin in Grenoble (2011), where she co-curated the exhibition, The Whole World is Watching, on the the collective Vidéogazette (1973–76), which organized a public access television program in the city. She received her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a specialization in Critical Gender Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2024. 

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, where she serves as the Executive Director and Curator at JOAN. Her practice is invested in long-term collaborations with artists, critically engaging with the intersections of art, politics, and social histories. She explores strategies of image-making through the lens of colonial histories and contemporary surveillance states. Halajian has curated exhibitions and public programs at institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Hammer Museum, and Human Resources Los Angeles, as well as Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York), Oregon Contemporary (Portland), Kunstverein (Amsterdam), UKS (Oslo), Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna), and the Sursock Museum (Beirut). She also serves on the Programming Committee at Human Resources and has worked with nonprofit organizations including the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles) and Ashkal Alwan (Beirut). Her curatorial work and writing have been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant—for Georgia, a journal she co-founded and co-edits with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian—and a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Halajian’s writing has appeared in ArteEast, BOMB, X-TRA, Ibraaz, and other publications. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and is currently a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Visit [country] is an artist’s book that brings together texts taken word for word from official government tourism websites and state-produced promotional videos from every UN-recognized country in the world. Stripped of the usual accompanying imagery and inspirational music, what becomes clear is how tourism feeds on — and is fuelled by — nationalism, chauvinism, and the invention of identity.

Much like a “choose your own adventure” book, the reader is guided by a series of questions that connect one country to another through recurring ideas and clichés, and must decide whether to visit the destination with “the best food”, “the most beautiful women”, “the friendliest people”, or “the most authentic history”. The book also includes an extensive concept index that maps the thematic and linguistic patterns linking the nations’ self-descriptions. It is a journey where every country is the best.

The project grows out of The Complete National Anthems of the World, a durational performance first presented in 2023, and stands as a parallel, autonomous, yet complementary work.

The new issue consists of 8 plays and performance texts by Iranian women writers living in or outside Iran. Whether based on actual experience, fictional, or drawn from archives, these texts deal in one way or another with the question of the stage. They produce a contested space of performance that is inevitably linked to the performer's body, whose thresholds are stretched and contracted into potentially new forms of staging. The authors in this issue place their writing in performative relation to the specific historical and sociopolitical conditions in which they live and work. In many ways, the writings interrogate the politics that delineate the stage itself.

The authors in this special issue are: Nasim Ahmadpour, Nil (Alista) Aghaee, Naghmeh Manavi, Athena Farrokhzad, Nazanin Sanatkar, Azade Shahmiri, Zahra Mohseni and Naghmeh Samini.

An artist text centring around the ghost lamp “like a sentinel an eerie outpost watching over the theatre.”

140x200mm
14 pages
edition of 150

Afternoon Editions no. 2: text and drawings by Chrysa Parkinson titled Weaknesses. Between January and March 2019 Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine was presented as a solo-exhibition at Index Foundation in Stockholm. During this period Chrysa Parkinson was invited as a guest writer for Afternoon Editions. Weaknesses is a leap in memory.

Twenty Bookmarks is a result of Production & Workflow class of Graphic Design Department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Ba1 Class of 2026.

‘Piles of Bricks / Piles de briques’ by Bie Michels presents the working proces of her project ‘Bricks in Madagascar’. This project consists of two films, ‘La couleur de la brique’ and ‘Ingahy Kama’, the installation ‘Circular construction versus human body—referring to Toshikatsu Endo’, which she showed in Madagascar (October 2017) and Argos Brussels (May 2018), and the performance ‘Piles of bricks (working process)’, on which she will work 8 weeks before the book presentation and which will be performed at that moment.

Besides images and stills, five writers deliver a contribution in their own working field related to the project: Hobisoa Raininoro (Art assistent and former director of CRAAM (Centre de Ressources des Arts Actuels de Madagascar, MG), Rafolo Andrianaivoarivony (Professor History University of Antanarivo, MG), Petra Van Brabandt (Doctor philosophy Sint Lucas Antwerp, B), Gwyn Campbell (Professor History Mc Gill University, CA) and Nanne op ‘t Ende (writer, NL)

In this interview, Palestine solidarity activists form the Chinese diaspora speak with Iranian activists in exile about the uprising that took place in Iran in January 2026, comparing notes about resistance to various forms of authoritarianism.

A collection of Pauline Julier’s art that expands from the terrestrial to the cosmos to comment on our place in the universe. 

At the interface of documentary and fiction, the multimedia works collected in Pauline Julier take us on a dizzying journey through space and time. Julier’s art travels through the geological ages of planet Earth, through different histories, natural disasters, and the Anthropocene’s paradigm shifts and into outer space. Her background in political science and photography is reflected in her work: looking into the past and the future, she investigates topical questions about our unlimited use of natural resources, escapism, and the colonization of space. 

Conceived and designed as a work of art in its own right, this volume offers a comprehensive insight into Julier’s art and thought through a conversation with eminent scholar of science and technology studies Donna Haraway alongside contributions by curator Céline Eidenbenz, anthropologist, and writer Nastassja Martin, and art historian, curator, and author Chus Martínez. 

Edited by Céline Eidenbenz and Sarah Mühlebach.

With Contributions by Donna Haraway, Pauline Julier, Nastassja Martin, and Chus Martínez.

Basta Now - Women, Trans & Non-binary in Experimental Music is a non-academic essay by French poet, novelist and music enthusiast Fanny Chiarello. It’s also the first book to be published by Permanent Draft, an all-female record label and micro-press founded by Chiarello & musician Valentina Magaletti, dedicated to promoting contemporary female, non-binary and transgender artists. 

Basta Now is essentially a huge (yet admittedly not definitive) overview of 3867 womxn in the global experimental sound & music scene. It’s been written in playful and compelling prose and stylishly presented with photos, illustrations, and discographies. 

Now in its expanded edition, the book includes 80 more pages and an additional 1496 names than the first edition, extended lists and discographies, and updated chapters – especially Wild Things, All-Stars and Madame Bricolage. “This book has nothing against men, it’s just not about them” (Fanny Chiarello)