Artists' Writing

Caught up in the vortex of this bellicose age, adrift on the sea of digital information and misinformation, without perspective enough to glimpse the future that is actually forming, I am finding it hard to think. Here is a book about thought right now and about how to think in a world that asks us at every level not to. Discontent? Malcontent? Sarah Wood looks at the world through Freud and fraud.

PERSONA is the second magazine in a series in response to a series of meetings of female artists entitled "A conversation to know if there is a conversation to be had" held in New York, Amsterdam, Berlin and London in 2010-11. The first journal LABOUR, addressed the question of women's work, and used the lens of the feminist critique of unpaid labour to look at the contemporary condition of the artist. PERSONA as a jumping off point looks at the condition of self-presentation for the contemporary artist, but in an expansive manner encompasses discussions on embarrassment, refusal, interiority and identification.

Contributors: Rita McBride, Celine Condorelli, Avery Gordon, Isla Leaver-Yap, Eva Kenny, Melissa Gordon, Marina Vishmidt, Josephine Pryde, Sabeth Buchmann, Chris Kraus, Audrey Reynolds, Elisabeth Subrin, Alison Carr, Karolin Meunier, Sue Tate, Nadia Hebson, Jen Liu, Da

Sad Sack is a book of collected writing by Sophia Al-Maria, taking feminist inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’; opposing ‘the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic.’ Encompassing more than a decade of work, Sad Sack tracks Al-Maria’s speculative journey as a writer, from the first seed of her ‘premature’ memoir, through the coining and subsequent critique of ‘Gulf Futurism’, towards experiments in gathering, containing, welling up and sucking dry.

For me this book is a bag... Like any single-use carrier bag – I disapprove. It shouldn’t exist, it contributes to pollution, it should be banned... And yet, in spite of the fact I know this book may be a waste product... I’m still writing, redacting, expanding... I’m still waiting, wasting, wanting. According to Ursula, ‘It is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag.' – Sophia Al-Maria

A set of generative texts following the genetic sequencing of DNA as the underlying structure or score for its characters.

Graphic design by Gerard Herman

Recipes for you: A vegan and gluten free recipe and story book with additional life skills is a new cookbook and survival guide by artist Holly White. Rather than selling an aspiration, the book looks honestly at our conflicted relationship with consumption. White intersperses recipes and self-sufficiency notes with prose, as the contributions collected on her food blog (http://holly-white-food.tumblr.com/) spark imagined and remembered references and memories.

Skinned and Detouched, a pair of artists books, are a portal to a single performative stage in the industrial production of two large scale sculptures, one of which is on show at Large Glass. The books, including writing by Jennifer Boyd, photography by Thierry Bal and design by Europa, imaginatively document the multiple embodiments and disembodiments involved in one moment in the production of the two works.

Tom Buckle is an ambitious young moderate Labour apparatchik, rising happily through the party bureaucracy on a diet of bottomless brunches, legitimate concerns and drug-fueled Blairite sex parties. That is until he meets Otto, a charismatic young radical whose urge for cocks, communism, and a mysterious plot for the victory of the holetariat opens his eyes to a changing world. Finding himself thrown into a chaotic new political landscape of pigfucking PMs, frog-frenzied neonazis and falafel-throwing communists, Tom has to pick a side. Will he manage to nd a third way to a safe seat, or will Corbyn’s terrifying red horde make his moderate mission impossible? And can Tom resist the most seductive of all highs — pure, high-grade socialism, main-lined straight into London’s clogged and throbbing veins? So much for a kinder, gentler form of politics!

Published April 2019.

Spectacles is a research by Sara Manente starting from the distance between language and experience, specifically the experience of dance and performance.
Contains Spectacle #1 #2 #3 + the script of spectacle #4.

Writing Out Loud is a publication that brings together the transcriptions of eight lectures by the artist Jon Mikel Euba that were live translated from Spanish to English during the course Action unites, words divide (On praxis, an unstated theory) at the DAI. The lectures were delivered across the academic year 2014 – 2015 at the invitation of If I Can’t Dance. They sit within a larger writing-centred project by the artist that he has pursued for almost a decade, through which he aims to define a form of praxis that could evolve into a technical theory.

Black Hyperbox comes forth as a place that holds incompatible conceptual zones and spatiotemporalities together: Old World and New World, theater and jungle, jaguars and AI, prehistory and futurism, the earthly home and the alien space, Mecca and the North Pole, spaceships lost in cosmos and the politics of Isis, Malevich’s black square and the moon travel, thought and hallucination.

How to Sleep Faster is published as part of the collaborative discussion that form the critical direction of the gallery. and sits alongside the first two exhibitions – Sleep Faster (February), and How to Carve Totem Poles (March). It has been put together as an open ended continuation of this dialogue through which we seek to understand the contradictions / complexities that define and form our experience, existence and participation in a contemporary digital-analogue creative environment.

Arcadia Missa Publications; Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark, Jammie Nicholas, Laura Farley (eds).

How to Sleep Faster 2 is the second of our biannually published journals that form the backbone of Arcadia Missa’ critical collaborative discourse on participation, post-digital visual-production and institutional subjectivity.This issue explores moments of collapse, shift and potential in a cultural moment framed by economic, political and societal disturbance.

Arcadia Missa Publication; eds Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark et al.

How is survivalism mediated in contemporary culture? . . . For this issue we asked the semi-speculative question: is it possible that survivalism is our only remaining ideological position. This was in part to see how we might be able to understand a hyper, hysterical, hyperbolic moment of cultural production as either indicative of, or (more hopefully) creating the momentum for an escape from, an age of contemporary ‘cynical reason’.

Arcadia Missa Publications; Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark, Harry Burke (eds).

With the fourth issue of How to Sleep Faster we asked our contributors four interconnected questions: What now is a radicalised, networked, subjectivity? How can we build a commons through and from this subjectivity? Is it self-critical in its understanding of the ‘we’ it talks for? And lastly, how do, and how must, these subjectivities engage with globalised material realities?

At root, the exploration of these ideas — as connected themselves – is about a critique of readings of the network through Multitude. We are looking to think beyond immanence, and look to something else, by asking what ‘something else’ is, or could be.

Contributors: Megan Kelly Rooney, Eleanor Weber, William Kherbek, Hannah Black, Harry Sanderson, Georgina Miller, Paul Kneale, Candice Jacobs, Aimee Heinemann, Ann Hirsch, Harry Burke, Rosa Aiello, John Bloomfield, Maja Malou Lyse (Boothbitch), Holly White, Martina Miholic, Felix Petty, Huw Lemmey, Julian Molina, Rachel Schofield Owen, Charlie Woolley, Jesse Darling, KERNEL.

Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark (eds).

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)

“How can we fuck in a way that doesn’t support a patriarchal prism and standard for sex to reflect capitalist relations? Can sex be a site for identity politics, after we are imbued with the lore and failure of the sexual ‘revolution’?”

the body in pain

The platform, free speech and contempt

The book transcribes a body broken by American empire, that of ex-con Rafael Luis Estrada Requena, hacking itself away from contemporary society. Johanna Hedva, author of Sick Woman Theory, takes the ferocious compulsion to escape (from capitalism, from the limits of the body-machine, from Earth) and channels it into an evisceration of oppression and authority. Equal parts tender and brutal, romantic and furious, On Hell is a novel about myths that trick and resist totalitarianism.