Books

Tender yet brutal vignettes on a girlhood in Gaza, Palestine, filled with honey and warmth.

Winner of the Creative Award in the 2022 Palestine Book Awards.

Chosen as a 2021 Book of the Year by The White Review, Middle East Eye & The New Arab.

Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies is written for those who had to leave—collected remembrances of a childhood in Gaza by a woman far from Palestine’s sun and sea. Overindulgent, chaotic and sentimental, Heba Hayek’s narrator struggles to navigate life in colder, unfamiliar worlds. She holds tightly to memories of home, hoping they will lead back to her sisters and mothers.

With brilliance and grace, Hayek’s vignettes explore the methods of survival nurtured by Palestinian women in the face of colonial occupation and patriarchy—the power of community care, and of loving what’s not meant to be loved. Her reflections reveal the intimate magnificence and quiet devastation of everyday life: a family drive on the shore, waxing for the first time with aunties, or peeling figs while waiting at a checkpoint.

Heba Hayek is a London-based, Gaza-raised Palestinian author, creative and facilitator. She completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Miami University, Ohio, and studied for an MA in Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London.

Heba’s first book, Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies, won the Creative Award in the 2022 Palestine Book Awards and was chosen as a 2021 Book of the Year by The White Review, Middle East Eye and The New Arab.

Looking at pictures, she was reminded of the lack of time. And anyway, where did all the time go?

In Day Book a woman artist looks at time in an address to quotidian events and their unfolding. Exploring motherhood, unpaid labour, childcare, and the time of the artist, she reads the work of contemporary women filmmakers through the earlier works of filmmakers, writers, and photographers, including Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras, Natalia Ginzburg and Christa Wolf, Bertien van Manen and Bernadette Mayer. The inability to capture the accumulation of days emerges—a form without form, day after day after day.

Recognized as a poet, less so as a visual artist […] Mina Loy also wrote in the style of Crystal Pantomime, a text from one hundred years ago [c. 1915] describing a ballet in prose. The writing evokes images with which actual theater effects can only interfere. It projects in the mind as onto a screen. But this restless writing does more than that, shifting registers and unfolded in equal parts fairy tale description, precise impossible stage directions, notes for impossible costumes and sets, guidelines for impossible choreography, and a glancing archeology of personal association, opinion, art historical commentary, and psychoanalysis, all floating in suspension, all shading into poetry, and with this manner of overflowing every frame defining its poetics. — Matthew Goulish

This first standalone edition of Crystal Pantomime opens with a biographical introduction by Mina Loy’s literary executor—poet Roger Conover—originally published in Eliot Weinberger’s journal Montemora in 1981, as well as a dramaturgical introduction by Matthew Goulish of Chicago performance group Every house has a door, originally prepared as opening remarks to Every house’s reading of Loy’s Pantomime at the Arts Club of Chicago in spring of 2024. In tandem these supplementary texts begin to frame what is a rather strange and singular sketch for a work never realized.

What are our politics of refusal? Sleep? Catatonia? Hedonism? Transgression even? #hustle? 

[Can refusal can be performed as resistance and not operate as preemptively fucked. . .]

Arcadia Missa Publications; Rózsa Farkas, Holly Childs, Leila Kozma, Tom Clark (eds)

In Kish, An Island Indecisive by Design, artists Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi explore the modern development of an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf. Removed from mainland Iran, Kish is a place where extremes in politics, ideology and urban design intersect. The island's many years of infrastructural indecision is distinctly evident in its architecture, which lacks any trace of coherence or feel for locale. This volume gives an often moving account of the chaos of middle-eastern modernity.

Mystique des rues vides et peu éclatantes des banlieues pavillonnaires, ce court poème en prose interpelle par sa langue sombre. Dans une parodie de messe noire – beigeasse comme le crépis des façades –, Théo Robine-Langlois dépeint le monde mystérieux des maisons individuelles, du repli sur soi démonique, et des vieilles qui marmonnent entre leurs gencives au retour du marché, le panier plein de gros sel et de radis noirs en guise d'hostie. Les mots occitans qui ponctuent le texte comme des conjurations en accroissent l’escur.

"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.

24 transcribed public conversations led by Xavier Le Roy with artists and cultural workers, creating a space where Le Roy's work meets the experiences of his guests.

Lives Shaping Works Making Life is a collection of 24 transcribed public conversations titled Practices: Strategies and Tactics, led by Xavier Le Roy and hosted by the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen between November 2022 and November 2024. These dialogues bring together artists and cultural workers creating a space where Xavier Le Roy's work engages in conversation with the experiences of each guest. Each encounter follows the same set of 14 questions—printed on the book's cover—which serve as a flexible framework guiding the conversations. Through the careful editing of Giulia Casartelli, Daniel Cordova, and Livia Andrea Piazza, these conversations have been transformed into vivid, polyphonic texts that invite further reflection and offer a point of departure for expanding the dialogue beyond the original live encounters.

Conversations with Antonia Baehr, Matthias Mohr, João Fiadeiro, Herbordt / Mohren, Carolina Mendonça, Rolf Michenfelder, Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić, Joana Tischkau, Giulia Casartelli, Susanne Zaun & Judith Altmeyer, Florence Lam, Olivia Hyunsin Kim, Jorge Alencar & Neto Machado, Rabih Mroué, Ruth Geiersberger, Swoosh Lieu, Arkadi Zaides, Valeria Graziano, Mette Edvardsen, Mala Kline, Sarah Parolin, Andros Zins-Browne, Rose Beermann.

Vanus übermann des villes, le roi de la ville, le roi du monde, se fait des odes à lui-même et met ses chaussettes dans la pâte à pain. Sophie Couderc raconte quelques-unes de ses péripéties.

Vanus übermann of the cities, the king of the city, the king of the world, writes odes to himself and puts his socks in bread dough. Sophie Couderc recounts some of his adventures.

Je jette le matelas dehors, il rebondit sur trois cons et tombe dans une grosse flaque de jus de rue. Ok, pas mal mais il m’en faut plus. (Vanus)

Carie, comme le trou qu’on bouche au plomb, est une collection de textes courts et moyens qui se glissent dans la poche. Chaque livre (la dent) de la collection (la bouche) est troué (la carie) et cerclé d’un œillet métallique (le plombage).

Carie, like the hole filled with lead, is a collection of short and medium-length texts that slip into the pocket. Each book (the tooth) in the collection (the mouth) is holed (the cavity) and circled with a metal eyelet (the filling).

Chile Chico et le quartier Versailles, c'est une exploration qui inventorie, interroge et révèle les mémoires invisibles en listes et en collections. Une mémoire qui ne soffre pas en bloc, qui résiste, se fragmente, se transforme. A travers cette archive collaborative, nous avons voulu capter ces va-et-vient ď'un passé qui dialogue avec le présent, des images qui oscillent entre Vintime et le collectif. 

Le point de départ de cette fabrique visuelle, c'est lexil des Chilien.nes, débarqué.es dans les années 70, qui se tissent une nouvelle vie sur le sol de Neder-Over-Heembeek, dans le quartier Versailles à Bruxelles. Ces trajectoires, arrachées à un ailleurs, s'ancrent dans des espaces rêvés comme de transit pour devenir des lieux d 'appartenance, où lexil se mue et les racines finissent par se déployer. A ces récits se greffent d'autres histoires, d'autres trajectoires. Un quartier comme un carrefour, ou les individualités se rencontrent, où les vies se croisent et s'allient.

The Weight of the Concrete explores the legacy of the Turinese artist and publisher Ezio Gribaudo (1929–2022), examining his multifaceted oeuvre at the confluence of image and language. This publication, named after Il Peso del Concreto (1968)—a seminal work that featured Gribaudo’s early graphic creations alongside an anthology of concrete poetry edited by the poet Adriano Spatola (1941–88)—places Gribaudo’s work in conversation with approximately forty artists and poets from different generations, all of whom similarly engage with explorations of text, form, and visual expression.

Reflecting the editorial premise of Il Peso del Concreto, The Weight of the Concrete revisits the influential anthology, including archive material that documents its production, and reimagines it, pairing Gribaudo’s graphic work with a new selection of historical and contemporary concrete and experimental poetry.

At the heart of the volume is Gribaudo’s emblematic Logogrifi series, developed from the 1960s onward. The Logogrifi reveal his deep engagement with the art of bookmaking and fascination with industrial printing processes, relief matrices, typefaces, and language games.

In this new edition, the editors take the opportunity to revisit Gribaudo’s pioneering work, examining previously overlooked dimensions—gendered, geographical, and technological—and exploring contemporary associations beyond the original context. The book also includes essays that elucidate the poetic and political interplay between image, language, and materiality.

This publication is released following Ezio Gribaudo – The Weight of the Concrete, an exhibition held at the Grazer Kunstverein in Graz, Austria (2023–24), and at the Museion—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy (2024).

Edited by Tom Engels and Lilou Vidal
Published by Axis Axis and Grazer Kunstverein

Contributions by Anni Albers, Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga, Irma Blank, Al Cartio, Paula Claire, CAConrad, Natalie Czech, Betty Danon, Constance DeJong, Mirtha Dermisache, Johanna Drucker, Bryana Fritz, Ilse Garnier, Liliane Giraudon, Susan Howe, Alison Knowles, Katalin Ladik, Liliane Lijn, Hanne Lippard, Sara Magenheimer, Françoise Mairey, Nadia Marcus, Giulia Niccolai, Alice Notley, Ewa Partum, sadé powell, N. H. Pritchard, Cia Rinne, Neide Dias de Sá, Giovanna Sandri, Mary Ellen Solt, Alice Theobald, Colleen Thibaudeau, Patrizia Vicinelli, Pascal Vonlanthen, Hannah Weiner, and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt

Essays by Alex Balgiu, Tom Engels, Nadia Marcus, Luca Lo Pinto, Mónica de la Torre, and Lilou Vidal

When he was prevented from guiding a writing workshop, Quim Pujol resorted to collecting exercises for the participants to work with by themselves, either alone or in small groups. These exercises, suggestions and scores draw on a wide variety of sources, such as poetry, experimental literature, dance, popular performance practices, visual art and all kinds of text populating everyday life. Now expanded into a book, they are invitations to read, write and daydream, to ‘complicate our relationship to language’ and imagine texts in multiple guises. Potential literatures that give pause, redirect the attention or, at times, simply ‘produce a comforting doodle in the volatile palimpsest of human flesh’.

Quim Pujol is an experimental artist and curator working at the crossroads of language and live arts.

Spring 2020. During lockdown in a mountain village with his partner and young child, Yann Chateigné Tytelman becomes haunted by the presence of his dead father. Provoked by memories of him, of their laconic relationship and of the class antagonisms that emerged between them – the father was a manual labourer while his son ‘turned his back’ and entered the art world – Chateigné Tytelman starts writing letters, piles of them, which have as their subject that most mystical, most incomprehensible of phenomena: silence.    

Condensed into a series of short fragments, Blackout interweaves the letter to the father with the observations of an art theorist who surveys with precision the occurrences and experiences of silence in painting, music, literature and philosophy.

In a reality in which the boundaries between cinema, art, installation and multimedia experimentation seem to be increasingly blurred, History of a Tree by Flatform is a project that sets out to radically alter the idea of the portrait in western art. 

A non-human living organism – the Oak of the Hundred Knights of Tricase, the oldest Vallonea oak in Europe at the age of 900 years – and the territory in which it has stood for centuries become the subject: through a film and a robotized video installation, statements become a portrait, and are transformed into a work of art. 

The book retraces the genesis, development and implementation of this original idea, providing a visual score, the film in 80 images, dialogues in ten languages, the contributions of a tree searcher, an art historian and two philosophers, as well as a series of in-depth essays drawing on the fields of science, history, anthropology, music and linguistics. 

Acoustic Thought is an exegesis of the Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal gospel found at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945.
 
With a score for six female voices by Lisa Holmqvist; a collage of writings by medieval female mystics; and photographs taken by Jeff Weber at the Coptic Museum in Cairo, during a research period at Beirut project space.
 
The book’s covers reconstruct patterns found on the covers of Nag Hammadi Codex II, which, as well as the Gospel of Thomas, contains the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Philip, the Hypostasis of the Archons, On the Origin of the World, the Exegesis on the Soul, and the Book of Thomas the Contender.
 
Presented and performed during Perfomance Days, Amsterdam (November 2014) and Hotel Theory, REDCAT, Los Angeles (November 2015).

With echoes of Shirley Hazzard and Virginia Woolf, a new novel of startling intelligence from prize–winning author Michelle de Kretser, following a woman looking back on her young adulthood, and grappling with the collision of her emotions and her values.

In the late 1980s, the narrator of Theory & Practice—a first generation immigrant from Sri Lanka who moved to Sydney in her childhood—sets up a life in Melbourne for graduate school. Jilted by a lover who cheats on her with another self-described "feminist," she is thrown into deeper confusion about her identity and the people around her.

The narrator begins to fall for a man named Kit, who is in a “deconstructed relationship” with a woman named Olivia. She struggles to square her feminism against her jealousy toward Olivia—and her anti-colonialism against her feelings about Virginia Woolf, whose work she is called to despite her racism.

What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? In Theory & Practice, Michelle de Kretser offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in this gap. Peopled with brilliantly drawn characters, the novel also stitches together fiction and essay, taking up Woolf’s quest for adventurous literary form.

How To Become est une maison d'édition autogérée basée à Paris. Nous publions les textes d'auteuces engagés dans des pratiques féministes et peu diffusés par le réseau des grandes maisons d'édition françaises.

Créée en 2016, elle est composée d'artistes et écrivaires en majorité gouines, HTB publie de la litterature expérimentale née d'influences post-post- sapphiques ainsi qu'un choix de tradu d'auteuices non traduites en langue française. HTB s'articule autour d'ateliers d'écriture: How to Become a Lesbian, et d'une revue annuelle publiant les choses issues de l'atelier.

The current crisis of museums and the future of Institutional Critique.

Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critique has responded to the social embeddedness of art institutions by looking at the inner workings of such organizations. In After Institutions, Karen Archey expands the definition of Institutional Critique to develop a broader understanding of contemporary art's sociopolitical entanglements, looking beyond what cultural institutions were to what they are and what they might become.

Karen Archey is curator of contemporary art at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She is a 2015 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient for short-form writing. Since joining the Stedelijk Museum in April 2017, Archey has organized solo exhibitions by artists Rineke Dijkstra, Stefan Tcherepnin, Catherine Christer Hennix, Steffani Jemison, Metahaven, Jeff Preiss, Charlie Prodger, and Hito Steyerl. She has written numerous catalogue essays and is a contributor to several art publications, including Artforum and Frieze.

Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.

In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

If capital makes life a seething, complex nightmare for most people on the planet's surface, if "words do cleave the producer from the land," then what does all this dispossession feel like? Amy De'Ath turns poetry into a hot, potent, and highly funny form of criticism, in which social force is felt intimately, and voiced in the acid niceness of a work email. Amy's poems move like pieces of machinery in a cognitive amusement park, which spit you a thousand feet into the air but keep your viewpoint fixed on the same spot as before—what's different? "Land in Saskatchewan, land in Delhi," or "everything…that you want from women and gays." Not a Force of Nature makes me want to change everything. "Behold me I'm you now," Amy writes—we should be so lucky, to be thus transformed. — Kay Gabriel

Not a Force of Nature's expertly crafted poems explore the catastrophe we live among and speak through. They form a sort of feminist manifesto addressed to all forms of resistance. But also: here are love sonnets! This book is angrily precise and always a lot of fun. "No, you're a Canadianist!" — Kevin Davies

Not a Force of Nature is the kind of book that becomes possible only after rejecting the "we" evoked so often in contemporary literary culture—sometimes said to need poetry now more than ever, sometimes called community. Amy De'Ath's motley vision of solidarity, of "actual emboldened people," is way weirder, more lively, and possible. Nor do these poems content themselves, like the ghost of Marxist theory past, with pointing towards the contradictions that surround them. Do you remember email? Sonnets? Not a Force of Nature is like that, thrashing inside generic forms and always coming next: after the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, after Jane's abortion service, after the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, after Creeley, after Raworth, after Mayer, after the Xenofeminist Manifesto, after Pluto enters Aquarius. "There are still tactics like this roaming free," De'Ath writes. There are still these fervent lyric parries. Be with Not a Force of Nature now. — Stephanie Young

Through slips of verbal acuity, Amy De'Ath scrapes her way out of determinism to a world "made by hands," where our material relations are ours to make and break. History is long and history is short. History is translucent. De'Ath presents the Ferris wheel of capitalist production, where the subject lives once as worker, twice as commodity. Here, in these "concrete trousers," is a "totally liberated" working class poem turning everything into nothing as praxis. — Anahita Jamali Rad

A widowed writer begins to work on a biography of a novelist and artist—and soon uncovers bizarre parallels between her life and her subject’s—in this chilling and singularly strange novella by a contemporary master of horror and fantasy.

The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband, but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe , and the inspiration for his classic children’s book.

But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most storied painting too shocking, too powerful—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves a reluctantly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s life and her own. Whose biography is she writing, really?

Ant Mag is an independent zine publisher located in Ghent, Belgium publishing zines showcasing artists interests and practice.

The act of translation as a pedagogical tool, a political act, and ultimately a gesture of care in these tense cultural times.

Based on practical experiments, Unlearning with Translation posits the act of translation as a pedagogical tool, a political act, and ultimately a gesture of care in these tense cultural times. Written by French curator, writer, editor, and self-taught translatress Virginie Bobin, the essay revisits a series of workshops, exhibitions, and other collective activities that took translation as both subject and method to unsettle entrenched conceptions of language, identity, and belonging. In particular, the ambiguous notion of "untranslatability" is used as a lens through which to examine the power relations at play in those institutional, economic, and political contexts inhabited by art workers. Alongside collaborations with artists including Mercedes Azpilicueta, Serena Lee, and Mounira Al Solh, Bobin's reflections are grounded in her experience co-founding and facilitating the editorial and curatorial platform Qalqalah قلقلة†, which relies on translation as a tool for the production and publication of situated knowledge in three languages—French, Arabic, and English. Informed by feminist genealogies and methodologies throughout, the book maintains that collective labor and relations are key aspects of any critical practice, as exemplified in the concluding correspondence with Andrea Ancira.

Virginie Bobin operates across research, curatorial and editorial practices, writing, pedagogy and translation, with a particular interest in performance, experimental forms of artistic research, the role of art, artists and art institutions in the public sphere, and formats that exceed that of the exhibition. Between 2009 and 2018, she has worked for various art centers and residency programs (Villa Vassilieff, Bétonsalon, Witte de With, Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, Performa). She is a Doctor in Artistic Research (PhD-in-Practice, Academy of Fines Arts, Vienna, 2023), a professor in Art and Social Practices at ésadhar (Rouen, since 2024), and a co-founding member of the editorial and curatorial platform Qalqalah قلقلة. In addition to her contributions to various international journals, she has edited the collective publications Composing Differences (Les presses du réel, 2015), Republications (with Mathilde Villeneuve, Archive Books, 2015), and Bestiario de Lengüitas (with Mercedes Azpilicueta, k.verlag, 2024).

Edited by Alice Dusapin and Sophie Orlando.
Contribution by Andrea Ancira.