Monograph

The first comprehensive monograph on the work of Krõõt Juurak

In the past fifteen years, Krõõt Juurak has developed a series of practices and performances that do not necessarily take place in a theatre or a gallery, at a predictable time or space, but rather come to existence as performative conditions through certain other triggers. This volume is both a record and a performative expansion of Juurak’s practice. Through four themed chapters (Animal, Family, Bad Mood Audience and Sleeping Bad Mood), the publication features a rich array of text-based works, essays, interviews, documentation and ephemera that will provide an insight into Juurak’s singular body of work including Internal Conflict, Sleeping Performance, Autodomestication, Performances for Pets and Bad Mood.

Edited by Galerie / Adriano Wilfert Jensen and Simon Asencio

Text contributions by Krõõt Juurak, Alex Bailey, Kate Strain, Noor Mertens, Suzan D. Polat, Jessica Ullrich, Guendalina Pirelli, Donny Mahonney, Simon Asencio and Adriano Wilfert Jensen.

Published October 2020

Cap de Ville was a child of the nineties and noughties. The extracts from the works contained in this volume are a personal testament to this time, to his time. He refers to these book-objects as 'psychophores': they contain hair, theeth and bodily fluids, alongside collected objects, talismans, detritus, and personal photographs, all conserved in transparent adhesive tape. His archive covers the years from 1996-2019 (the year the book-objects were assembled) without clear indicators of time passing or time stamps. It remains defiantly out of time.

Six years in the making, 'BLOOD' is the first comprehensive English translation of the poems of Danish art historian, communist activist, and writer R. Broby-Johansen.

Translated, edited, and designed by Line-Gry Hørup, Broby-Johansen’s poems are accompanied by a series of full colour photographs by Amsterdam photographer Johannes Schwartz, which document the pair’s trip to Brody-Johansen’s recently established archive. So recent, that they were in fact the first to view it. 'BLOOD' was made possible with the support of Stimuleringsfonds and the Danish Arts Foundation.

This is Spanish artist Dora García’s collaborative research on the life and legacy of Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952), a socialist, activist, feminist, and intellectual. As a Soviet ambassador from 1922 to 1945, she advocated the sexual and social emancipation of women, and implemented many measures women continue to fight for today, such as legalising abortion and protecting women’s rights. Her writings found special resonance in Latin America, where her influence is still felt in contemporary feminist struggles.

The essays “On the Dragon” and “White Bird” are translated into English here for the first time, and are published alongside a selection of poems by Anna Akhmatova.

Foundlings, a video film, was shot near Wexford, in the south east of Ireland where she grew up. This visual poem without a particular narrative and full of autobiographical elements is set at a very slowed down pace. Floating images and heavy voices are central to the associative strategy that is at work here. The images allow one to listen to a hypnotic voice, while at the same time allowing the eyes to wander... to daydream... to travel over drawn out time. The images are country images, images of repetitive calm, the kind of calm one finds between awake and asleep. The speed of the sea sets the pace, regular yet irregular. The images are inhabited by people who cannot speak. Who are busy doing nothing, except passing time. Silent brothers and sisters of the sea.

The soundsculpture Unsaid, a joint work by Orla Barry and Portuguese artist Rui Chafes (1964), is very opposite to the film. The film is full of open spaces and bright colours. The sculpture is black, closed and claustrophobic and on top of that it is housed in a narrow tower five meters tall. The visitor has to take place on a rather unconventional chair and put his head in a closed off sphere, surrounding himself by darkness and leaving him with his own heartbeat. A voice addresses the visitor directly on highly intimate terms. The seating is hard and uncomfortable. One has to be strong to experience this piece that is a perpetual struggle between body and mind.

At the occassion of Barry’s show argos editions published Foundlings, a combined artist book and catalogue that can be ordered through argos. The book includes a DVD.

Orla Barry (1969) is an artist who centres her practice on language, written and spoken. Her work is strongly poetic and lyrical, crossing a wide variety of media. Barry was born in Ireland, and the rhythm of her phraseology, the pictorial and narrative vernacular on which she draws, somehow evokes her homeland’s topography, climate and literary heritage. At argos the artist presented two new works.

Encounters. On three films by Manon de Boer, Marine Hugonnier, Sven Augustijnen, George van Dam, Tris Vonna-Michell and Helena Holmberg.

Awarded for the Fernand Baudin Prize 2013

Published on the occasion of the frame by frame restauration by argos of the videos that visual artist Lili Dujourie made from 1972 to 1981. Essays by Jean Fisher and Dirk Lauwaert, 52 black and white plates of video stills.

This first comprehensive monograph encompasses the manifold painterly practice of Allison Katz. Gathering together Katz's successive bodies of works since the beginning of the 2010s, the publication includes essays by Oakville Galleries director Frances Loeffler, art critic Kirsty Bell, Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, and The MIT List Visual Arts Center Director Yuri Stone.

Texts by Kirsty Bell, Allison Katz, Frances Loeffler, Lisa Robertson, Yuri Stone, Camilla Wills.

The first monograph on the work of artist Tony Cokes, creating a visual cartography of a body of moving image work that spans twenty years.

Tony Cokes's video works are eviscerating critiques and affective art works, bringing together color theory, sound, music, and texts, and quoting a polyphony of voices including Aretha Franklin, Mark Fisher, David Bowie, Public Enemy, and Donald Trump. Combining political and social commentary with cultural theory and a critique of capitalism, Cokes's works viscerally confront the social condition, particularly the prejudices and threats suffered by black subjects. This book is the first monograph on his practice, creating a visual cartography of a body of work that spans twenty years.

It features four critical pathways into Cokes's decades-long practice, with essays contributed by notable academics, and conversations between Cokes and artist Kerry Tribe. Cokes's work deals with mediation and distribution, and the book itself becomes another conduit for the dissemination of theory, critique, and counter-narrative—a process that Cokes so powerfully engages in as an artist.

This book accompanies Cokes's solo exhibition, If UR Reading This It's 2 Late: Vol. 1–3, across three international art institutions: Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University; and ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels.

L'Incroyable is a monographic magazine dedicated to an artist's teenage years and his cultural background. This third issue proposes an immersion into the young years of artist Nicole Eisenman in New York in the 1980s.

Founded in 2015 by artist Clotilde Viannay, L'Incroyable magazine is dedicated to adolescence and retraces the teenage years of a personality, examining the cultural context of his youth.
The magazine is extended by the “Mini” series. Each book immerses itself in the youth of artists through an interview about their teenage years.

Since the 1990s the American artist Nicole Eisenman (born 1965 in Verdun, France, lives and works in New York) has garnered attention with her figurative paintings that, playfully and with great artistic freedom, cross stylistic and compositional elements from the history of art from Renaissance painting to modernism with comics, slapstick, TV culture, pornography, and subcultural image strategies. 

Central to Eisenman's oeuvre is a complex, excessive, drawing-based work that comprises all the classical picture genres as well as a wit formulated between the outrageous and the idiotic. Nicole Eisenman's work is an inspired and gleeful deconstruction of conventions in art and society and it questions social models above all by reversing the clichés of female and male roles. It is about power and powerlessness, about art and commerce, consumerism and sex, about the possibilities made available by professionalism and dilettantism, and how artistic success and everyday life are constructed.

At the same time her work deals with the subsequent question of how the individual and she herself as artist and woman can take up a position within these roles. Eisenman's narratives of grotesque reformulations of social orders, or her depictions of human individuality, are always interspersed with possible failure or scenic breakdown: the pictorial content, the painting procedure, and the message contradict each other, and investigate a state of decline in historical as well as current conventions.

L'Incroyable is a monographic magazine dedicated to an artist's teenage years and his cultural background. This second issue focuses on Jim Shaw's Californian youth between the late 1950s and the beginning of the 1970s.

34 contributors—including Jim Shaw, Tony Oursler and Cary Loren—discuss childhood, adolescence, being a student in California in the 1970s, Mike Kelley, comic books, drawing, painting, California, the hippies, LSD, Charles Manson, the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, My Mirage and Oism, Born Again Christians, catechism, transhumanism, cyborgs, Scientology and the Church of Satan, Terrence Malick, the Beat Generation, counter-culture, Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, Janis Joplin and Basil Wolverton, Michigan, Ann Arbor, proto- punk, Destroy All Monsters, MC5, John Sinclair, and Tiki culture.

Works by Mathilde Agius, Joan Braun, Bertrand Dezoteux, Golgotha, groupe CCC – Alice Gavin and Valentin Bigel and École Duperré Paris students, Jérémy Piningre, Jim Shaw, Pierre Vanni.
Founded in 2015 by artist Clotilde Viannay, L'Incroyable magazine is dedicated to adolescence and retraces the teenage years of a personality, examining the cultural context of his youth.
The magazine is extended by the “Mini” series. Each book immerses itself in the youth of artists through an interview about their teenage years.

Jim Shaw (born 1952 in Midland, Michigan, lives and works in Los Angeles) is an atypical figure in the Californian art world, sharing with Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley a similar desire to produce an immersive visual oeuvre aimed at exploring the dark side of the American psyche.

Texts by Philippe Aronson, Jacques Barbéri and Yves Ramonet, Claire Barliant, Laura Ben Hayoun, Mathieu Buard, Robert Buchard, Laurent Courau, Michel Croce-Spinelli, Michel Parbot, Jill Gasparina, Étienne Greib, Doug Harvey, Yves-Alexandre Jaquier, Cary Loren, Alex Mar, Robert Somma, Philippe Vasset, Clotilde Viannay, interviews with Jim Shaw, Tony Oursler, Cary Loren, Neil Harbisson, Natasha Vita-More, Gilbert Shelton.

First comprehensive monograph on Marion Baruch's work. This edition presents a broad span of Baruch's oeuvre, from the 1960s to her recent textile production. It includes three essays—by Fanni Fetzer, Martin Herbert, and Noah Stolz—as well as polyphonic focus texts by curators, friends, and art historians from the artist's circle, all providing compelling insights into her works and methods.

The first monograph on Christiane Blattmann takes its title from her solo show Un-Break My Walls at Kunsthalle Münster in 2019. Blattmann intricately interweaves, intermeshes, combines, compounds, merges, and processes in her work not only materials but also structures, things, stories, characters. The volume includes extensive illustrations of exhibitions, projects, and works, and a great number of black-and-white images capture the artist’s studio practice. The interactions of materials, along with theoretical and literary references, serve as important points of departure, and the emblematic outcomes involve text and texture as material structure and patterned surface; vivid condensation and entanglement; and invitations to exploration and reflection. The book compiles different elements designed on a series of shifting layers. Texts by Merle Radtke and Chloe Stead and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark provide insight into Blattmann’s art, complemented by a piece of fiction by Huw Lemmey.

Texts by Merle Radtke, Huw Lemmey, and Chloe Stead, and a conversation between Christiane Blattmann and Than Hussein Clark

The reprint of Pati Hill's 1979 book, composed of images and texts by Hill through which she intended to contextualize and explain her working methodology to Jill Kornblee, her New York gallerist.

Published on occasion of Pati Hill's first posthumous solo exhibition at Kunstverein München in 2020.

Pati Hill (1921, Ashland, Kentucky – 2014, Sens, France) left behind an artistic output spanning roughly 60 years and encompassing various disciplines. Untrained as an artist, she began to use the photocopier as an artistic tool in the early 1970s and continued to do so until her death, leaving behind an extensive oeuvre that explores the relationship between image and text. In addition to this comprehensive body of xerographic work, she published four novels, a memoir, several short stories, artists books, and poetry. Drawing also became an essential part of her practice.

By using the copier—a machine that was stereotypically linked to secretarial work and thus to feminized labor—to trace everyday objects such as a comb, a carefully folded pair of men's trousers, or a child's toy, Hill developed an artistic practice that programmatically translated invisible domestic labor into a visual and public language. Through her use of this reproductive apparatus, she created a model of artistic production that critically opposes the convention of individual expression as well as the supposed neutrality of technologically produced images.

Publication documenting the research made by Dora García for a video project on Oscar Masotta, pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Latin America and influential art critic.

It features a selection of Masotta's writings as well as contextual essays on his work.Segunda Vez is an art research project centered on the figure of Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires, 1930, Barcelona, 1979), an author of groundbreaking texts about the Happening, art, and dematerialization, a pioneer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Spanish-speaking world, and a happenista. The project has yielded a full-length and four medium-length films by Dora García, two Cahiers documenting the research, and this book. Segunda Vez: How Masotta Was Repeated offers a selection of Masotta's writings, including his early study of Argentinean author Roberto Arlt, as well as texts that contextualize Masotta's thought and broaden the reach of his reflections on the intersections between performance and psychoanalysis, art and politics.

Edited by Emiliano Battista.
Texts by Dora García, Oscar Masotta, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Jinkis, Inés Katzenstein, Ana Longoni, Emiliano Battista, Aaron Schuster, Julio Cortázar.

English edition

13,5 x 21 cm (hardcover)

320 pages (color & b/w ill.)

‘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)

Poet, philosopher, speculative architect and transdisciplinary artist, Madeline Gins is well known for her collaborations with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on the experimental architectural project Reversible Destiny, in which they sought to arrest mortality by transforming the built environment. Yet, her own writings — in the form of poetry, essays, experimental prose and philosophical inquiries — represent her most visionary and transformative work. Like Gertrude Stein before her, Gins transfigures grammar and liberates words. Like her contemporaries in conceptual art, her writing is attuned to the energized, collaborative space between reader and page.

The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader is a revelatory anthology, edited and with an introduction by the writer and critic Lucy Ives. It brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins' 1969 masterpiece, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G, R, E, T, A, G, A, R, B, O, It Says), along with substantial excerpts from her two later books What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Long out of print or unpublished, Gins' poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics at the close of the 20th century.

Edited by Lucy Ives. 

By means of a dialogue between the text and the visual material from the videos, Steyn Bergs and Emma van der Put want to take a critical look at how images are mobilised, not only to illustrate certain visions of the future, but also how they contribute to the creation of such visions—which are never ‘neutral’—in the present. On the basis of the videos made by Van der Put, this publication focuses on the specific working and politics of images in the Noordwijk and the Expo area in Brussels. Within these locations, developments that are currently taking place throughout Europe (from property speculation to migration flows) manifest themselves in a concrete and local manner.

This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow's Theatrum Botanicum (2015-18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation, which looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history. It links nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity across different geographies, histories, and systems of knowledge—exploring the variety of curative, spiritual, and economic powers of plants. The project addresses "botanical nationalism" and "flower diplomacy" during apartheid; plant migration; the role and legacies of the imperial classification and naming of plants; bioprospecting and biopiracy; and the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island prison.

This substantial archive offers an ideal point of entry into the work and reception of Los Angeles–based performance artist and writer Andrea Fraser (born 1965). The interview format provides particular insight into Fraser's self-positioning as a central aspect of her practice. By presenting the artist's voice as mediated through various interlocutors (ranging from professional peers to popular media), Collected Interviews, 1990–2018 uniquely contextualizes Fraser's practice in the artistic and institutional fields in which she intervenes.

In the late 1960s, Lee Lozano conceived of and executed a series of 'language pieces,' written in the pages of her notebooks, consisting of rules and parameters for the actions that would constitute a piece. From offering money to house-guests to smoking as much marijuana as possible, Lozano boldly tested social norms, culminating in two of her most famous works: 'General Strike Piece' (1969), which saw her retreating from the art world completely, and 'Decide to Boycott Women' (1971), in which she ceased engaging with all members of her own gender.

Stemming from a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, this monographic catalogue offers a range of perspectives on urgent issues around gender, sexuality and labour in the digital age.

This book orbits “Second Sex War”, a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen addressing political and ethical questions arising from the use of digital bodies in contemporary visual culture and the means of production and distribution for these commodities. Realising that the same avatars are used across the pornographic, gaming and cultural industries, she investigates the working conditions and relationships that structure these fields. Through numerous essays and conversations, Second Sex War, the book, emphasises her collaborations with various practitioners (animators, musicians, writers) and the way they have inflected her practice. Media theorist Helen Hester (author of the Xenofeminist manifesto) reflects on the limitations of the porn industry and the use of female avatars. Artists collective Radclyffe Hall talks to photographer Phyllis Christopher about early lesbian erotica magazine in the 1980s. Linda Stupart compiles quotes by Sara Ahmed, Kathy Acker and Ursula K. Le Guin to consider what is radical sex today.  Artist Hannah Black's contribution, which opens the publication, reads like a manifesto for artists being crushed under the weight of current political circumstances. 

Edited by Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Robert Leckie.

Texts by Robert Leckie, Hannah Black, Helen Hester, Phyllis Christopher & Radclyffe Hall, Linda Stupart, Josefine Wikström. Entretiens with Helena Vilalta, James B Stringer, Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) by Sidsel Meineche Hansen.

Publication focusing on Cantor's final project Pinochet Porn (2008–16)—an epic experimental film taking the form of a soap opera about the intimate life of people under the military dictatorship of Chile. A dramatic, transgressive and explicitly feminist work, embodying and radically extending Cantor's multifaceted artistic practice. 

Ellen Cantor combined ready-made materials with diaristic notes and drawings to probe her perceptions and experiences of personal desire and institutional violence. This book is concerned with, and a document of, Cantor's work through the lens of Pinochet Porn (2008–16) and its making—an epic experimental film embodying and radically extending her multifaceted artistic practice. Taking the form of an episodic narrative about five children growing up under the regime of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and shot between her dual hometowns of London and New York, history is observed through Cantor's fictive speculations on private experience within a totalizing political order. A history of the world as it has become known to me brings together writings and archival materials of Cantor's, including a reproduction in full of her drawing-based script Circus Lives from Hell (2004), alongside contributions by writers, artists, collaborators, and friends reflecting on Cantor's practice, Pinochet Porn, and a singularly transgressive vision: explicitly feminist, remorselessly emotional, dramatic in tone, and, as Cantor herself liked to put it, adult in subject matter.

Livret de 56 pages; format 13x21; illustré; couverture souple; cousu. Traduction originale du portugais ("Teoria do indiscernível" texte figurant dans le vol. "Abissologia - Teoria do Indiscernível", Lisboa - 2012). Édition bilingue portugais-français.