Artists' Books

Published on the occasion of  '[…] kept in private. Making it public.' an installation by Lieven Lahaye, as part of the 9th Artishok Biennial, curated by Brigit Arop and Margit Säde.  "It’s one thing to assemble a collection and display it in your private space, something else entirely to reveal what has been kept in private. Making it public. I'm standing in front of my bookshelf, looking up the meaning of 'private'. Private is still a complex word but its extraordinary historical revaluation is for the most part long completed."

Designed by: Ott Metusala

Slant is a mail art project and a publishing house. It invites artists, designers, writers and poets to express themselves through a common theme every two weeks. it has poetry as its beacon of reflection, keeping in mind that sometimes we must tell the truth slant in order to see our reality depicted.

First edition, approx. 240pp. 4-colors riso printed.
20 x 25,5cm, 200 copies. Coptic hand-made binding.
Softcover printed wraps. French and English texts.

Prepositions enacts a distinction between what language says and what it does. A catalogue of exercises, interviews, essays and creative explorations, this workbook-compendium invites the reader to investigate how we practise empathy, understanding, and contact, by learning and teaching all at once. Building on the archive of Montez Press Radio show Tongue and Cheek, and featuring work from a stellar cast of previous participants in the broader project, Prepositions asks us what active and embodied participation really means, not just in teaching, but across a whole life.

This book will change your body—and your mind. Prepositions is a set of bite-sized propositions for being and thinking otherwise. Put it under your tongue and see what happens.
— Leah Pires

This compendium of witty exercises, moving personal reflections, curious propositions, and carefully selected graphics invites readers to explore what it means to inhabit a book. It is the product of many hands, a polyphonic choir, filled with immense care and a deep sense of friendship. As one feels its weight, moves around it, folds its pages, breaths with it, or reads it out aloud, one begins to wonder: what does the book need to be completed?
Prepositions—inscribed in the tradition of works as disparate as Robert Filliou’s Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts and CAConrad’s poetry rituals—is an exercise of radical pedagogy and readership. Everyone who enters this book becomes part of its contents.
— Alice Centamore

This publication is the fourth volume in a series that documents Tarek Atoui's project Waters' Witness. Created in collaboration with French photographer and Atoui's long-term collaborator, Alexandre Guirkinger, it is intended as a visual embodiment of the work's development for Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, from the research and recording in Sydney's Port Botany, La Perouse and Frenchmans Bay, to the installation as sculptural and sonic composition in the Museum's Macgregor Gallery.

Waters' Witness is an exhibition that combines elements of artist and composer Tarek Atoui's ongoing project dedicated to capturing the sounds of harbour cities, from Athens to Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Beirut, Porto, Istanbul and now Sydney. The project encompasses an installation, performances, an archive of sounds and publications, that continually evolve as each new harbour is added.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia publication Tarek Atoui: Waters' Witness is the fourth volume in an international series of photographic books that form part of the Waters' Witness project. Produced in partnership with Atoui's long-term collaborator, French photographer Alexandre Guirkinger, the publication captures and articulates the Sydney components of this dynamic contemporary artwork.

Texts by Suzanne Cotter, Tarek Atoui, Anna Davis.

An exploration of the soundscape of coastal cities by the French-Lebanese artist.

Tarek Atoui's exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Waters' Witness, is based on the artist's ongoing project I/E, initiated in 2015, in which Atoui documents the human, ecological, historical and industrial realities of coastal cities such as Athens, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Beirut or Porto by means of sound recordings.
As an accompaniment and an extension of the exhibition, Mudam is publishing Waters' Witness #02, the third volume in a series initiated by the Serralves Museum dedicated to this ambitious and collaborative project, which seeks to explore the different ways in which sound can be experienced.

This publication includes an interview between Tarek Atoui and his long-time collaborator, artist and musician Éric La Casa; a visual contribution by photographer Alexandre Guirkinger; a rich iconography including views of the exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg and an introduction by curators Sarah Beaumont and Joel Valabrega.

Notebook from the South African artist featuring fountain pen's drawings and writings with inserted typescripts.

William Kentridge is at the same time painter, sculptor, engraver, decorator, theater and film director, actor, poem-performer… In that way, he is a “total artist”, next of kin to Jan Fabre, but whose is mainly concern by apartheid, post-colonialism, general history and the drain of time.

Stop Here, written and drawn with a fountain pen, is published at editions jannink in the collection “L'Art en écrit”. The tree is the main figure of this book. Here we find the main codes which belong to the artist—palimpsest and repetition—through which we are plunged in a metaphoric reflexion. It creates an analogy between book and tree, which is represented as the mother-source of creation before being transformed in a gibbet. Kentridge pursues his meanders where he evokes at the same time the smell of bakelite, vermouth risotto, a cemetery in the Congo, Sibyl, Cranach, the Winterreise, as well as his father, lawyer of Nelson Mandela.

This book brings together a selection of photographs by artist Mekhitar Garabedian, documenting the warehouse of his late father’s company, Melantex, which exported second-hand clothing from Belgium to the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. The images inspired a one-year sculptural intervention by Garabedian, commissioned by the Antwerp Public Art Collection.

Import—Export, Friperie tells a compelling personal and collective story of how displacement can be turned into economic livelihood while creating connections between old and new homes, languages, and textiles.

The photographs are accompanied by an in-depth conversation between Garabedian and curator Samuel Saelemakers about the relationship between photography and sculpture, public representation, and diasporic thinking.

Published by Art-O-rama, FRAEME, this book is not exactly a notebook, nor is it a portfolio, an archive, or a memoir. H. is the first volume of HaYoung. This monograph takes the form of a narrative puzzle, a journey through translations: from one language to another, from one medium to another and from one space to another. H. is the beginning of a pattern, a silence, non-binary code, an ego trip, a reflection on identity, a punchline, a love story, or even a hot potato.

In 152 pages, arranged by designer Chloé Delchini, HaYoung's drawings are superposed and become rhizomatic narrators evolving over the course of the nine chapters. In their work, in life as in this book, HaYoung's voice persists in the margins around Western structures. The artist's writing proliferates within this rigid system of grids, adapting to it, attempting to communicate, creating misunderstandings, and deconstructing it.

With contributions from Aude Christel Mgba, Nelle Gevers, Sarah Netter, Anne Vimeux and Théo Casciani. H. is a book of a voice that constantly updates itself.

Published to accompany the artist’s first retrospective exhibition, Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art examines the work of the inventive yet overlooked Teddy Sandoval, a central figure in Los Angeles’s queer and Chicanx artistic circles. Sandoval was known for producing subversive and playful artworks in a range of media that explored the codes of gender and sexuality, particularly conceptions of masculinity.

This publication surveys Sandoval’s work alongside other queer, Latinx, and Latin American artists whose practices profoundly resonate. This expansive catalogue features essays by C. Ondine Chavoya, David Evans Frantz, Raquel Gutiérrez, and Mari Rodríguez Binnie, as well as biographical entries on other artists featured in the exhibition, including Félix Ángel, Myrna Báez, Álvaro Barrios, Ester Hernández, Hudinilson Jr., Antonio Lopez, María Martínez-Cañas, Marisol, and Joey Terrill.

Design by Content Object
Co-published by Inventory Press, Williams College Museum of Art, Vincent Price Art Museum, and Independent Curators International

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff: German Theater 2010–2022 is the first monograph on the work of the artist duo Calla Henkel (b. 1988, Minneapolis, MN) and Max Pitegoff (b. 1987, Buffalo, NY). Their manifold practices play out, live test, and fictionalize the mechanisms that shape creative communities. Chronicling over a decade of production in Berlin, the book is organized around the influential bar and theater spaces they ran there: Times Bar (2011–12), New Theater (2013–15), Grüner Salon at the Volksbühne (2017–18), and TV Bar (2019–22), and includes an interview with curator Fabrice Stroun and essays by David Bussel and Patrick Armstrong. Henkel and Pitegoff's photographs, plays, writing, and films address the complexity of collective action, painting a deadpan picture of the social and economic systems that sustain communal exchanges and their eminently fragile autonomy.

Edited by Fabrice Stroun
Design by Dan Solbach

Dreaming Alcestis is an artist's book by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, conceived as an accompaniment to her holographic film installation of the same name. Dreaming Alcestis was co-directed and co-scripted by Gibson, her partner Nicholas Gordon and critic Maria Nadotti. The publication features a specially commissioned essay by poet and translator Allison Grimaldi Donahue, as well as a reprint of the American poet Alice Notley's 1991 essay What Can Be Learned From Dreams?

Drawing on the protagonist of Euripides's ancient myth as its ancestral guide, Dreaming Alcestis offers a poetic reflection on living and dying at a time of acute social, political and economic turmoil, documenting—via dream life—Gibson and Gordon's relocation from Northern to Southern Europe. In the film, two characters, dreaming of a long-dead queen, are filmed in long takes, refracted holographically and interrupted only by the sounds of the city and the sea. In Gibson's words, "2,500 years after her birth, Alcestis—in the film, a mysterious, Lynchian figure—returns from the underworld, dreaming of, or possibly dreamed by, a man and woman who have traversed Europe in search of her, from North to South, with family in tow. Meanwhile, the ice caps melt, 43 wars rage around the globe and another city burns on TV." In a feminist key, Gibson, Gordon and Nadotti reclaim a minor heroine from Greek mythology, using her as a therapeutic device to reflect on what it is to be human in the contemporary context.

Premiering at the British Art show in 2022, Dreaming Alcestis was exhibited on the occasion of the artist's first solo show in Italy, Dream Gossip, at Ordet in Milan, and was subsequently taken on tour, first to the Museo Civico di Castelbuono and then to Macro, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. The book and the film Dreaming Alcestis are part of Alkestis, a project orchestrated by the Museo Civico di Castelbuono in partnership with the British Art Show 9 (Hayward Gallery Touring, Southbank Centre, London).

Edited by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Beatrice Gibson.
Texts by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Alice Notley.

In The Book of Na, translation acts at the edge of perception. Tracing across projects in film, video, and performance, Na Mira reflects on the violent fragmentation of bodies while refusing the containment of geographic and corporeal borders. In 1977, a name is cut at an immigration office. This gap turns into an intergenerational score for becoming heat, hexagram, hologram. Using oracular and glitching technologies, Mira witnesses what escapes data: doppelgängers, dreams, endangered tigers, tesseracts, A. Turiyasangitananda Coltrane's stairs, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in a theater, Korean shamanism, frozen ligaments, wildfires, borderlands, subatomic particles, and pink. Syncing to a clock with neither face nor hands, Mira’s hauntological permutations in time, death, and relation travel outside the symbolic order and draw energy from the void.

Na Mira’s autobody rites have been presented at sites including Seoul Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art; Participant Inc., New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She grew up between the US and East Asia and teaches outside.

In 2015, artist Patty Chang (1972) followed the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, the longest aqueduct in the world, which brings water from southern to northern China. While walking, she collected her urine in plastic bottles, drinking their contents before refilling them, in turn drawing a connection between the large-scale infrastructural attempt to control the flow of water and the uncontrollable flows of her own body. Once back in Boston, Chang began making a series of portable urinary devices from discarded plastic bottles, which were then hand-blown in New York by glass-blower Amy Lemaire. In fashioning them from discarded plastic and rendering them permanent in glass, the devices channel Chang’s unfolding ruminations on water as a point of connection between geopolitics, human excess and waste. Designed by Sabo day, this indexical publication is the first book dedicated to depicting the series of sixty-four sculptures in its entirety. It was published on the occasion of Patty Chang’s exhibition at A Tale of A Tub, which ran from September 14–November 3, 2024.

Goswell Road presents Fous Moi La Paix a book of drawings by multidisciplinary artist Vava Dudu. Vava made 37 exclusive drawings for the publication, which launched at Paris Ass Book Fair 2024 at Palais de Tokyo. The drawings are offset with her texts, poems and several images of her iconic clothing and accessories.

"The multidisciplinary artist Vava Dudu refuses to follow convention: she draws and writes poetry, makes clothes and accessories, and builds furniture and guitars. She asserts her position as an outsider in contemporary art by stating that she “prefers extremes to the middle ground.” Her work as an independent stylist goes hand in hand with her activity as a singer in La Chatte, an electro-zouk punk new wave band founded in 2013 with Stéphane Argillet and Nicolas Jorio, aka “Nikolu.” Her underground artistic world, which joyously combines text and image, is expressed through various media.

Vava Dudu was born in 1970 in Paris, where she lives and works."

Text from Lafayette Anticipations website

Goswell Road publishes ‘Numbered Map’ by Archie Chekatouski, to accompany his exhibition 'You can do so much more with a chair than you can with a painting?'. The publication is edited in 30 copies and focuses on Chekatouski’s Paint-by-numbers Series.

Bio: Archie Chekatouski (born 1996 in Minsk, Belarus) lives and works in Paris. His works are touchingly silly and beautifully simple.
 

Presented in a flip-book style, Man Unraveling consists of twenty-eight painted-on photographic images by Creative Growth artist Alice Wong. Wong's colorful palette adorns a group of photographs of the Italian fashion designer Valentino as he works at his desk. Identified only by the book's title, Valentino's image gradually evolves into greater abstraction with the paintings' general sequence. With colored edges and a textured softcover with flaps, this interactive book is a vivid journey into Alice Wong's imaginative world. 

Creative Growth Art Center is the oldest and largest nonprofit art studio for artists with developmental disabilities in the United States. Since 1974, Creative Growth has played a significant role in increasing public interest in the artistic capabilities and achievements of people with disabilities, providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition and representation.

Grace Crowley is a publication based on letters sent to the Australian artist and pioneer of modernist painting Grace Crowley (1890–1979) by friends, family and colleagues. Parts of those letters, which are now housed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the State Library of New South Wales archives in Sydney, were transcribed and categorised by Riet Wijnen in subsections such as ‘Marital Status’, ‘Teaching’, ‘Hosting’, ‘Eurasia’, ‘X’, ‘Being A Woman’, ‘War’, ‘$’ and ‘Making Work’. The result is an alternative biography constructed solely through a living set of relations.

Conceived as a catalogue and an artist's book, the publication offers a deeper insight into the eponymous 2022 exhibition staged at Indipendenza Roma, and explores tensions that can be generated between artworks and their surrounding architectural context, raising questions of taste, value, function and decoration.

A portrait of the cohesive community of women artists in Frogtown, Los Angeles, including Ruby Neri, Hilary Pecis, Megan Reed, Lily Stockman, and Austyn Weiner.

The Glover Group: A Los Angeles Story narrates the journey of an extraordinary group of artists who have nurtured their unique artistic voices within the same studio complex in Frogtown, Los Angeles. The Glover Group includes Ruby Neri, Hilary Pecis, Megan Reed, Lily Stockman, and Austyn Weiner, a coincidental yet cohesive community of women artists sharing a unique bond through their interconnected workspace.

This catalog, designed to document their collaborative exhibition held at MASSIMODECARLO in Milan during July and August 2023, features interviews to the artists by Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Justine Ludwig, Marta Papini, and Heidi Zuckerman, together with photographs by Tracy Nguyen.

Contributions by Ruby Neri & Alison M. Gingeras, Hilary Pecis & Cecilia Alemani, Megan Reed & Marta Papini, Lily Stockman & Heidi Zuckerman, Austyn Weiner & Justine Ludwig.

Through the harsh noise of reality, a signal appears. At first faint, but slowly, as we approach, it grows louder, more defined. Aerial photographs depict odd structures and garbled sounds, blurred images of decaying media, alien architecture. It calls out your name.

Psalmist Kaput lures the reader into a misama of fragmented speech, disembodied voices, deteriortating thresholds, and lo-res nightmares. Fusing text and image, it is a work undefinable and wholly its own.

Enter the exclusion zone, witness its monuments, and if you're able, find your way back out again. "Soon we will all be submerged."

About her collaboration with Robert Glück, Kathleen Fraser writes:

"In Commemoration of the Visit of Foreign Commercial Representatives to Japan, 1947 is a small picture book assembled as a memento of Japan’s finest tourist sites, to be given to their new allies (and recent adversaries). I discovered the book when my friend Bob Glück sent me to an Asian antique store, where he thought I might find 'little things' for Christmas gifts. Seeing this book in the $1 box, I bought a copy and began to write a poem sequence based on each of the photos and their captions, not knowing that Bob had also bought this book and was writing his own version from the same collection of pictures."

Featuring color reproductions of the entire postcard book, In Commemoration of the Visit is an accidental collaboration–and we couldn’t be happier for the accident.

For British artist Delaine Le Bas, dress is divine. Clothes appear as both mask a nd memorial within an expansive body of work exploring mythologies of Le Bas’s Romani ancestry. Embroidered and hand-painted textile is central to the artist’s lyrically activist practice, alongside costume, writing and performance. In a new series of portraits by the British photographer Tara Darby, directed by Jane Howard, gold leaf dances across the planes of Le Bas’s face in repose, it wraps and jangles around her wrists, glimmers across her clothes. In a notebook she has inscribed: “In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold.” The grief is alchemical.

As Stephen Ellcock writes:

‘The maxim ‘Know Thyself’ was inscribed in gold on a column on the threshold of Pythia’s temple, serving as a warning that wisdom, understanding, empathy and anything remotely resembling peace of mind are unachievable without selfawareness, reflection and ruthless self-criticism.’

The fragments of hope, anger, magic and curiosity redolent in Le Bas’s work form a call to action. A reminder of the racism, exclusion and subjugation that abound. Photographs of Le Bas, which Darby has been making for more than a decade, present the artist as truth sayer, inquisitive goddess and modern-day Sibyl.

Through the incorporation of texts—a conversation between gallerists John Marchant and Keiko Yamamoto with curator Claire Jackson—drawings from Le Bas’s journals, archival images taken at her home and the restyling—and reflection—of her own personal wardrobe, In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold radiates psychological, social and political wisdom. Fashion is revealed as both tyrannical disguise and liberating regalia.

Contextures was originally published in 1978 by New York City’s legendary Just Above Midtown gallery. Edited by gallery founder Linda Goode Bryant and Marcy S. Philips, the publication provides an extensive history of Black artists working in abstraction from 1945 to 1978, while also articulating a newly-emerging movement of Black Conceptual Art in the 1970s.

The publication contains extensive writing by Goode Bryant and Philips drawn from interviews with the featured artists, as well as 58 black-and-white and 16 color images documenting the work of 25 artists: Banerjee, Frank Bowling, Donna Byars, Ed Clark, Houston Conwill, John Dowell, Mel Edwards, Wendy Ward Ehlers, Fred Eversley, Susan Fitzsimmons, Sam Gilliam, Gini Hamilton, David Hammons, Manuel Hughes, Suzanne Jackson, Noah Jemison, James Little, Al Loving, Senga Nengudi, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Sharon Sutton, Randy Williams, and William T. Williams. A newly commissioned afterword by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, curator of the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces at the Museum of Modern Art, is also included.

Goode Bryant and Philips originally conceived Contextures to accompany The Afro-American Artists in the Abstract Continuum of American Art: 1945–1977. Functioning more like a textbook than a traditional catalog, the book nonetheless realizes a vital mission of their curatorial vision, placing Black artists within the still-prevalent, white-dominated canon of post-war abstract art. Despite its historical importance and visionary scholarship, Contextures was originally produced in a limited run of just a few hundred copies by the gallery and remains rare and largely unknown.

This new edition is produced in facsimile form and is a co-publication with Pacific.

You wake up in the footwell of a mid-sized hatchback somewhere on a highway in outer Bangkok. You compile neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, whilst your work emails pile up without ever being read. You quit your job. You launch a banal start-up. You grieve for a past relationship. You stare endlessly at the waves coming in from a beach in Koh Pha Ngan. You vape intensely. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror.

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which ‘you’ are the main character. Through text and image – autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction – you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product.

i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced whilst living in Thai ‘party hostels’. Although these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.

With a Coda by Hana K. Ohnewehr, commissioned by Yu’an Huang