Books

A chronicle of the genesis and creation of Memoria, the new film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. After visiting Colombia in 2017, Apichatpong chose the country as the location for his first feature shot outside of his native Thailand. In the following two years, he returned for several visits and travelled extensively, listening to the stories of the people he met along the way. The book 'Memoria' gathers the memories he collected, in the form of photographs, a personal diary and sketchbook, research notes, treatment excerpts, and email correspondence.

I Am Abandoned documents a little-known, but visionary performance by Barbara T. Smith. Taking place in 1976, it featured a conversation in real time between two psychoanalytic computer programs (known today as two of the earliest chatbots) alongside a staging of Francisco Goya’s The Naked Maja (1795–1800) and The Clothed Maja (1800–1807), in which the artist projected an image of the famous painting on top of a female model. The publication includes a full transcript of the “conversation” between the two programs; documentation and ephemera from the performance; Smith’s reflections on the night; and an afterword by scholar and artist Mashinka Firunts Hakopian.

I Am Abandoned was part of the exhibition The Many Arts and Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and rather than simply celebrate new technology, Smith also sought to challenge what she saw as a “built-in problem” that “computers were only a new example of the male hypnosis.” In collaboration with computer scientist Dick Rubinstein, she enlisted the computer science teams at Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to mount a conversation between a program named DOCTOR, which was designed to be a surrogate therapist, and another named PARRY, which was trained to mimic a paranoid schizophrenic patient.

While the computer operator worked in the next room, each new page of the conversation was projected on the wall where a model dressed as The Clothed Maja reclined beneath the text, with a slide of the nude version of the same painting, The Naked Maja, projected onto her. The audience was rapt with attention for the livestreamed conversation. The performance went on for nearly two hours, before the model eventually grew furious from being ignored (abandoned) by the computer operator, stormed over, and attempted to seduce him. Shortly after, the gallery director pulled the plug on the entire event, claiming it distracted the audience for too long from the other works on view.

To revisit I Am Abandoned today is to see the artistic and truly liberatory potential that art can have when it intervenes in new technologies. Much like the original performance, in which the model grew alienated from the proceedings, what gradually emerges are the stakes these new technologies present. Against today’s backdrop of AI and a still male-dominated tech field, Smith’s early work with emerging technologies, and in this case chatbots, is prophetic and hints at the contemporary conversation around the gendered and racialized machinic biases of our current computational landscape. Though Smith, like many women of her generation, was overlooked by the landmark surveys of art and technology during the 1960s and 70s, her career incisively probed new technologies, using them to question gender dynamics, community, and self. Her projects from the Coffin books (1966–67), created with a 914 Xerox copier in her dining room, to performances like Outside Chance (1975), which created a small snow squall in Las Vegas out of 3,000 unique, computer-generated snowflakes, and the interactive Field Piece (1971), where participants’ movements altered the soundscape of a fiberglass forest, all exemplify her open-ended approach to art and tech. “Each person lit their own way,” Smith remembers, “And produced their own soundtrack.”

Barbara T. Smith is an important figure in the history of feminist and performance art in Southern California. Her work—which spans media and often involves her own body—explores themes of sexuality, traditional gender roles, physical and spiritual sustenance, technology, communication, love, and death. Smith received a BA from Pomona College in 1953, and an MFA in 1971 from the University of California, Irvine. There she met fellow artists Chris Burden and Nancy Buchanan, with whom she co-founded F-Space in Santa Ana, the experimental art space where many of her performances were staged. Smith’s work has been exhibited since the 1960s in solo exhibitions, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024), the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2023), and Pomona College Museum of Art (2005), and featured in group exhibitions, including how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena (2022), State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana (2012); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); and Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998). Smith is the recipient of the Nelbert Chouinard Award (2020), Civitella Ranieri Visual Arts Fellowship, Umbria, Italy (2014); Durfee Foundation’s Artists’ Resource for Completion (2005, 2009); Women’s Caucus for Art, Lifetime Achievement Award (1999); and several National Endowment for the Arts Grants (1973, 1974, 1979, 1985). The Getty Research Institute acquired Smith’s archive in 2014 and published her memoir, The Way to Be, in 2023. Her survey catalog, Proof: Barbara T. Smith was published by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2024.

Slangen krioelen in de sarcofaag van het heden, in de krochten van de popcultuur, in de mummie van de natuur, in wondes en rot vlees, in artificiële woestijnen en op geoliede dad bods. Ze wentelen zich rond beursgrafieken, raken verstrengeld met wurgende algoritmes, orkestreren een trage ondergrondse revolutie. Een meisje snijdt zich aan een nepdiamanten piramide en werpt haar slangenvel van zich af.

Dominique De Groen is schrijver en beeldend kunstenaar. Ze publiceerde de dichtbundels Shop Girl (2017), Sticky Drama (2019) en offerlam (2020). Ze werd genomineerd voor de Poëziedebuutprijs Aan Zee 2018, de Herman de Coninckprijs 2020 en de Fintroliteratuurprijs 2021 en won de Frans Vogel Poëzieprijs 2019 en de Fintropublieksprijs 2021.

The first monograph dedicated to the pivotal work of African American postmodern dancer, choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings.

A foundational figure in dance, Blondell Cummings bridged postmodern dance experimentation and Black cultural traditions. Through her unique movement vocabulary, which she called "moving pictures," Cummings combined the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement in order to explore the emotional details of daily rituals and the intimacy of Black home life. In her most well-known work Chicken Soup, Cummings remembered the family kitchen as a basis for her choreography.

This book draws from Cummings's personal archive and includes performance ephemera and numerous images from digitized recordings of Cummings's performances and dance films; newly commissioned essays by Sampada Aranke, Thomas F. DeFrantz, and Tara Aisha Willis; remembrances by Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar; a 1995 interview with Cummings by Veta Goler; and transcripts from Cummings's appearances at Jacob's Pillow and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Bringing together reprints, an extended biography, a chronology of her work, rarely seen documentation, and new research, this book begins to contextualize Cummings's practice at the intersection of dance, moving image, and art histories.

Blondell Cummings (1944-2015) was a choreographer and video artist who mined everyday experiences like washing, cooking and building to create works celebrated for their rich characterizations and dramatic momentum. According to Wendy Perron, Cummings crossed over from modern to postmodern, from the Black dance community to the avant-garde community. Cummings referred to her stop-motion movement vocabulary as "moving pictures," which combined her interests in the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement. Her dances drew from an accumulation of character studies that often began with photography and workshops, and included poetry, oral histories, and projection. Her interest in moving pictures is also evidenced in her commitment to dance films. She both supported the documentation of dance, and created many experimental dance films.

Edited by Kristin Juarez, Rebecca Peabody, Glenn Phillips.
Texts by Sampada Aranke, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Tara Aisha Willis, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Streb, Edisa Weeks, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Blondell Cummings, Veta Goler.

"Having a party (hope you will be there)", is a catalogue of an exhibition organized by Mickael Marman and D&TLG at CFAlive in Milan with artists from the black European diaspora, including original contributions, photos of the show, as well as a brand new intro text by Olamiju Fajemisin.

Hélio Oiticica (1937-80) is widely considered one of Brazil's most significant artists, and his influence is felt across a range of disciplines including painting, film, installation and participatory art. He is well known as a key founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as Neoconcretismo, launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1959 with the collaboration of artists and writers including Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Ferreira Gullar.

Between 1964 and 1966, moving out of his Neoconcretist period, Oiticica wrote a series of lyrical poems entitled Poâetica Secreta (Secret Poetics), and he reflected in a private notebook on their significance for his wider practice as an artist. Despite Oiticica's global fame, his "secret" poems are almost unknown and have never been published as a collection.

This bilingual edition, with accompanying essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and critic Pedro Erber, uncovers the significance of poetry for Oititica's art and shows its importance to his thinking on participation, sensation and memory

Textdemic | A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments” Ed. by A.L. Steiner and GenderFail, a publication based on A.L. Steiner + Friends on Jenny Holzer at Dia Chelsea. This book is based on the Artists on Artists Lecture Series when the Dia Art Foundation invited Steiner to curate a public program based on a work of the artist's choice.

Steiner chose Jenny Holzer’s Laments and invited Morgan Bassichis, Riel Bellow, Gregg Bordowitz, Alexander Chee, Malik Gaines, Guadalupe Maravilla + Alexa Mishell Guillen, Lucas Michael, Eileen Myles and Pamela Sneed to present in Dia’s first in-person program after the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2021. This publication features records of the poems, lectures, and performances during this memorial program. The book's design plays homage to the 1990 Laments publication by the Dia Art Foundation.

For this publication, Steiner and GenderFail invited Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Associate Curator at Dia Art Foundation and the organizer of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series, to write an afterword for the book. In this, she states: "Dispensing altogether with the monographic formula that characterizes the institution, for her Lecture A.L. Steiner convened a group of artists, writers, and activists to join her in responding to Jenny Holzer’s 1989 text-based installation, Laments. Holzer identified the thirteen texts that comprise Laments as 'voices of the dead,' a visual choir in response to the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic and government inaction. Over the protracted COVID-19 lockdown, Steiner developed the idea to organize an evening for the voices of the living to lament today's crises.”

Depuis 2020, l’ONG d’investigation Index mène des contre-enquêtes sur les violences policières en France. De la mort d’Adama Traoré à celle de Nahel Merzouk, ses rapports ont pour objectof d’établir les faits dans des affaires où le déni est la norme. 

Ce livre rassemble des entretiens et analyses publiés par Index entre 2024 et 2025, pour exposer l’arrière-plan des affaires qu’elle documente. En donnant la parole à des sociologues, juristes, chercheur·euses, journalistes et militant·es, l’ensemble explore différentes fomes de violences institutionnelles, les logiques discriminatoires qui les traversent, ainsi que les espaces où elles s’intensifient : des quartiers populaires aux outre-mer ou encore aux zones de frontières de territoire. 

Éclairages se veut une ressource pour comprendre les conditions s’exercice des violences d’État aujourd’hui.

Contributions de Nour Abuzaid (Forensic Architecture), Matteo Bonaglia, Magda Boutros & Aline Daillère, Rémi Garayol, Thomas Chambon (Utopia 56), Groupe Retrace, Gwenola Ricordeau, Mathieu Rigouste, Sebastian Roché.

As our streets become ever more securitised and visually sanitised, and as most forms of everyday communications are shifting to the digital realm, homemade missing posters are one of the few remaining forms of paper-based citizen expression still found in public spaces.

Drawing on a collection of several hundred missing animal posters collected over the last 10 years, “MISSING” brings seemingly isolated text fragments into conversation to weave a narrative of loss and hope. 

Featuring exaggerated duotone images, the publication explores the link between the weathering of physical posters and the fading away of cherished memories. While looking through these visual artefacts, one is left to wonder how many of these animals have been reunited with their families. 

Printing: Risograph, Grafische Werkplaats Den Haag; Photography and colour separations: Livio Liechti; Design: Apsara Flury. 
First print run (Blue) – Dec 2024: 40 copies.
Second print run (Teal) – May 2025: 50 copies.

Do we always have to be nice, kind and communicate respectfully? Wouldn't it sometimes be better to change our tone, to use force or even violence? We often want to act in a spirit of “care” and benevolence, but how do we know if we're really being altruistic and sympathetic? Vol.5 asks the question: Nice?

With contributions from :
Muf architecture/art, Mélanie Mazet, Bui Quy Son, Paul-Antoine Lucas, Armelle Breuil, Annabelle Vaillant, Napsugár Trömböczky, Alessandro Di Egidio,
Elsa Muller, Clara Lenoir, Léo Jacqmin, Clem Koren, Pola Noury, Grève cœur and Cassiane C. Pfund

This publication is edited by the Woman Cave collective founded by Leticia Chanliau and Chloé Macary-Carney.

318 black & white pages, brown cover
Micro edition of 700, printed in Aubervilliers by Isiprint.

+|`me'S-pace, doc. 001.b is book 1, volume 2 of a wider, ongoing project known as "For Love Alone" Christina'S-tead, a poetic enquiry into the current state of the English tongue.

"In a time when many are questioning if we still need formalism and feminism, Wertheim's +|`me'S-pace, doc. 001.b is a spirited and fun defense of both. Written in part as a didactic instructional manual that cannot keep itself from constantly going astray into beautiful and challenging language play, this is a book that asks crucial questions and reconfigures recent histories. It is essential for its arguments. But even more, it is fun to read for its word play"—Juliana Spahr.

Introduction by Dodie Bellamy and art by Lisa Darms.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of cruising. While the term was used by men seeking casual encounters with other men in the parks and streets of New York City as early as the 1920s, historical records show the practice is much older. Cruising has existed for as long as anyone outside the dominant sex and gender systems has sought sexual encounters outside of sanctioned norms. This book offers a serious exploration of queer sex and sex cultures, exploring cruising as a mode of thinking with the body and communicating through sexuality. 

A creative dialogue between a queer artist and a queer academic reminiscing about and thinking with their cruising experiences, Crossings takes queer sex practices and cultures seriously as ways of knowing and world-making. The result is an erotic hybrid form hovering between scholarship and avant-garde experimentation, between critical manifesto and sex memoir. Here, the voices of each author, merged together in one, invite the reader to inhabit the erotic spacetime between self and other, the familiar and the strange, desire and pleasure, climax and release. That is, the spaces and temporalities of cruising itself. 

In banana boxes, Maxime Le Bon collects and stores a lot of documents in a jumble. Most of them are printed, cut out from newspapers, magazines, old publications, erratas and other fragments of texts. Added to this are drawings that he improvises - some of them torn or stained that he don't want to display or throw away. This collection of heterogeneous items is then being rearranged and slipped into plastic pockets where he stores them. Unstable and in constant change, this improbable archive grows with the years. It sedimented layers of experiences and constitutes this heterogeneous deposit from which can emerge all sorts of fragmentary narratives and accidental arrangements. The publication ZILCH brings together a selection of images from this extensive archive.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. “Flurry” is the 15th issue (a best-of, of sorts) edited by Will Holder. “I realized very slowly over a period of time that the activity of framing a performance and the intentions that accumulate around that activity produce a certain anxious kind of mode, and I became bothered by the flurry of activity and how it tends to mask so many things.”

Orbiting around the saddest house in the history of Grand Designs, Sam Moore’s Chesil Cliff House and other failures takes us to North Devon where, standing at the cliff’s edge, we meet Edward Short: a man with a Fred Perry shirt and a dream. Amongst a chorus of characters including Kevin Mcloud as Father Time, Moore by means of Short leads us into a study of creative failure, gender, and, ultimately, the desire to keep writing.

"I struggle to see anyone living here. It feels like a distorted wonder of the world, a cautionary tale. Something that could never have been lived in, but that had to be made."

About the author:
Sam is a writer, artist, and editor. They are the author of All my teachers died of AIDS (Pilot Press), Long live the new flesh (Polari Press), and Search history (Queer Street Press). They are one of the co-curators of TISSUE, a trans reading and publishing initiative based in London.

About A Series of Attempts:
This new series published by Sticky Fingers Publishing explores the essay form through the etymological root of essay: to try, trial or attempt. In 1508, French theorist Michel de Montaigne published a collection of 107 texts called Essais, described by his contemporaries as ‘self-indulgent and embarrassingly confessional.’ It is through these roots we find the attitude and intentions at the heart of this series; that through thinking together, through trying to figure it out on the page, we can reach new and increasingly nuanced ways to understand each other and the worlds we inhabit.

When living things bloom & molder all in a heartskip, when they expand toward death, this is what worms hear.

Artist’s book of paintings by Mikołaj Moskal: gouache, archival paper elements, simple & meaningful captions. REMMUS is a graft of Podlasie earth-water-sky and Mikołaj’s pigments, heart, and intuition. Designed in close collaboration with graphic artist and designer Kaja Gliwa.

The paintings are bracketed by a poem each by Kuba Niklasiński (“Flows | Flaws”) and Stefan Lorenzutti (“What Worm Heard”), handwritten by Mikołaj in English and Polish.

Extensive survey of the politically outward-looking Conceptualism emerging from Art & Language in the UK. Especially considering its critique of the norms of Modernist art practices in contemporary art, particularly practices of art education.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood, Biting the Hand: Traces of Resistance in the Art & Language diaspora is about a dissident formation of artists active in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.

The book tells the story of artists engaging with a critique of then-contemporary modernist art education, who have embarked on a series of theoretical investigations which became increasingly politicised under the pressures of an evolving social crisis. Increased racism, unemployment and attacks on the organised working class all raised questions about how a critical art might respond.

By the late 1970s, these radical artists, mostly in the orbit of the Art & Language group, were producing posters and leaflets for a wide range of left-wing causes, as well as analyses of the politics of art and design education and the role of cultural ideology in maintaining consensus. In the 1980s, as Thatcherism tightened its grip, those involved went their separate ways into areas as diverse as media work, trade unionism, health and education.

Biting the Hand has three parts: a retrospective introduction setting the formation in its historical context, and two annotated documentary sections presenting examples of the work as both text and image, written and edited by Paul Wood.

It also includes a foreword by Sezgin Boynik, publisher, and an afterword by Ann Stephen, curator and art historian, further expanding on the book's subject.

For many years Paul Wood worked for the Art History Department of the Open University. His publications from that period include Conceptual Art (2000), Western Art and the Wider World (2013), and the four-volume anthology Art in Theory (1990-2020), co-edited with Charles Harrison and others.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood.
Foreword by Sezgin Boynik; afterword by Ann Stephen.

As a stretch of land cultivated for crops to grow, a field evokes sensuous associations of smells, turned soil, exposure to weather. In a sense, fields ground our entire sedentary civilization and the cultures it gave rise to. At the same time, the field is where bodies fall in battle, the site that hosts the perishing of things.

Interweaving strands of autobiography with mythological and cultural tropes, Julien Bruneau explores the field as a metaphor rich with meaning and possibility. How do we inhabit fields and their furrows? How in turn do their history and imagination traverse us? As if it were a dance on the page, Fields invites the reader to encounter, think and feel our entanglement with space and places.

Julien Bruneau is an artist working with dance, presence, drawing and writing. His interest lies in the dynamic interplay between interiority and the collective.

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making.

The experiment of the one hundred word constraint, each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long, amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground.

What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? 

The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.

Emil Lime collects various materials that nurture and give shape to Esther Gatón’s artistic practice, including collages made with her phone pics, sketches, sporadic notes and drawings, together with the writing of authors that have been influential on the work: Fredy Massad, María Fernanda Ampuero, Darya Diamond and Cory John. 

Poetry as both a form and genre has many possibilities to exist within; however, poetry too often is burdened by the imperative to have an argument and a set of imagery and meanings that are preconceived and placed within the poem. In this way, poetry gets conflated with writing a thesis or project, and the poet simply the presenter of perfectly argued language. When poets attempt to bridge the gap between genres and write within the contemporary essay form, they are tasked to construct perfect arguments there as well and avoid the associative and aesthetic logic that makes poems important. The term essay itself was coined by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s — it comes from the French word essai, which means to test or experiment with what one knows as a learning tool, and is in partial opposition to the terms we use to discuss the essay now

ESSAYS calls on thinkers and writers to move beyond this linear thinking into the realm of what an essay by someone like Montaigne might do. His essays do as they say they will—they test out ideas, they are unafraid to get messy in their execution, they are brave enough to go forward into the uncharted waters. In them, it’s completely beside the point to get back to where they started, let alone where they’d say they would go. They are simply beside the point. It’s true.

ESSAYS, edited by Dorothea Lasky, is a book of essays on the essay, which enact and query these directives. The volume collects essays by poets Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, Fred Moten, and Mónica de la Torre.

This publication brings together the texts from the pieces Black (2011), No Title (2014), We to be (2015) and oslo (2017) created and performed by Mette Edvardsen. These pieces have been developed using language as material, looking into the relationship between writing and speaking, between language and voice. Mette Edvardsen is working on the verge of the visible, considering choreography as writing.

Brooklyn-based poet Asiya Wadud's fifth collection of poetry, Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent, engages migration, climate change, race, sexuality, and art-though not necessarily in that order-with a dynamic urgency and graceful restraint held in balance by a deep literary investment in the historical aesthetics of abstraction.

Punctuated by images of Wadud's own original art, the poems and prose of Mandible, Wishbone, Solvent offer an indirect meditation of the concepts of the drift ("Embedded in the act of drift can be the prior commitment or desire against drifting") and the isthmus ("An isthmus is a passageway, a threshold, underbrush, thicket, and deliverance"). Wadud constructs a latticework through which language circulates and creates new patterns that probe the natural world's edges, fissures, gaps, and seams. Further, the lyric poems suggest a relationship between speaker and environment that yearns to invert or dissolve the subject-object divide, creating instead an isthmus that joins and allows a drifting between them.

Explorations of the audio essay as medium and method.

With contributors including Justin Barton, Angus Carlyle, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, and Iain Sinclair, Sonic Faction presents extended lines of thought prompted by two Urbanomic events which explored the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought.

Three recent pieces provide the catalyst for a discussion of the potential of the "audio essay" as medium and method, a machine for intensifying listening and unsettling the boundaries between existing forms: documentary, music, ambient sound, audiobook, field recording, radio play….

Kode9's Astro-Darien (2022) is a sonic fiction about simulation, presenting an alternative history of the Scottish Space Programme, haunted by the ghosts of the British Empire. Justin Barton and Mark Fisher's On Vanishing Land (2006) is a dreamlike account of a coastal walk that expands into questions of modernity, capitalism, fiction, and the micropolitics of escape. Robin Mackay's By the North Sea (2021) is a meditation on time, disappearance, and loss as heard through the fictions of Lovecraft, Ccru, and the spectre of Dunwich, the city that vanished beneath the waves.

Alongside photographic documentation of the events and edited transcripts of the artists' discussions, Sonic Faction brings together contributors with diverse perspectives to address the question of the audio essay and to imagine its future.

Contributors
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Justin Barton, Ben Borthwick, Angus Carlyle, Matt Colquhoun, Jessica Edwards, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Ayesha Hameed, Eleni Ikoniadou, Lawrence Lek, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, Emily Pethick, Iain Sinclair, Shelley Trower