Books – Sternberg Press
... is dedicated to an expanded notion of writing on art. Each book is an object celebrating creative publishing.
https://www.sternberg-press.com/wp-content/themes/sternberg/apple-touch-icon.png
Sternberg Press
This anthology presents work on cultures of assembly. It stresses the relevance of small-scale and decentralized spatial formats of local knowledge production to community building and embedded political decision-making in the context of the socio-ecological transition. It reinforces the role of both individual and collective action while proposing distributed assembly and proximity as core attributes in the production of the contemporary and future city. It calls for a revised form of spatial politics.

What is our future and whose voices will announce it? Museum director, curator, and writer Zdenka Badovinac argues that it is the situated voices of people, artworks, and exhibitions, rooted in the local, that can bring incisive, productive change. The call of these voices, in rethinking art, curation, and institutions, is the subject of this powerful essay.

A lifelong relation to sound and music underlies Latifa Echakhch’s work. On the occasion of her representation of the Swiss Pavilion for the 59th Venice Biennale, she has edited a volume on sound, memory, and perception. In the book, images of her installation in the Swiss Pavilion, The Concert, accompany writings by the artist and by Alexandre Babel and Francesco Stocchi, the co-curators of the pavilion.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In these essays, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishment of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.

Over the past decade, a growing number of artists, theorists, curators, and researchers have moved from “institutional critique” to “infrastructural critique,” or toward “infrastructural speculation,” in which they explore the potential of creative infrastructure-related visions and scenarios. In attempts to counter the impasse of “the cancelled future,” art has immersed itself in systemic critiques and propositional thinking, addressing major challenges, such as the rampant financialization of the economy and runaway climate change.

Published on the occasion of Nathalie Du Pasquier’s solo show at MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, this book navigates the space between an exhibition catalogue and the artist book with juxtapositions of photographs of Du Pasquier’s works, installation views of the show at MACRO, and extracts from texts by various writers and figures fundamental to her practice.

Since 1985, Gregor Schneider has occupied an abandoned house next to one of the largest chasms in the world—the brown-coal surface mine near Rheydt-Mönchengladbach known as the Garzweiler. In the building, which he named Haus u r, he proceeded to build rooms within rooms. With this publication, art historian Raimund Stecker reconnects with his first visit to Haus u r.

Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden was a kaleidoscopic curatorial project run by Tensta konsthall from 2013 to 2019 that dealt with the history and memory of the Stockholm suburb of Tensta and its inhabitants. The late-modernist suburb can also be said to be part of “New Sweden”—a place of diversity, struggle, contradiction, and solidarity distinct from the image of the twentieth-century social welfare state.

How do the two technologies of blockchain and artificial intelligence actualize and, crucially, automatize the cognition of time? These kinds of machines are increasingly part of both our contemporary present and our prospective future, but how do we really define a present and a future? And more importantly, how do these machines themselves understand, know, and sense time?

What does the promise of “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about” look like today? What are the politics of hospitality? What are the problematics of “postfeminism,” and how do we challenge the West as the authoritative subject of feminist knowledge? What are the ways that language can be a site of rupture? How do we generate mistrust in the “well-written,” and how can poetry be a radical act of refusal?

What ideas and memories do the oceans hold in their depth and reanimate in response to the trembling of earth’s ecosystems? How to escape the silos of research and inquiry that narrow and fragment the knowledge of the oceans? Asking new questions and using multiple registers of sensing can lead to a revitalization of the ways humans engage with the oceans at this precarious moment and create new pathways for reparative justice.

Yannis Tsarouchis was a Greek painter whose multifarious practice spanned seven decades, from the 1920s to the 1980s. More than three decades after his death in 1989, the artist’s immensely rich oeuvre is relatively unknown outside of Greece, where he is unanimously recognized as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century.

For more than fifty years Elisabeth Haarr has been one of the most significant artists in Norway. From early experimentation with tapestry as modern visual art in the 1960s to political works with an activist message in the 1970s, and later sculptural installations of rugs, banners, figures, and drapes, Haarr’s oeuvre has significantly contributed to the consideration of textiles as a material in contemporary art.

Today, with the total availability and saturation of images, the museum has lost its privileged status as the exclusive place for the display of art. In our age of digital media, how is a particular artwork selected for a museum collection? Which symbolic criteria must this artwork satisfy for it to obtain value? And in what ways does the institution of the museum remain relevant?

In 1989, a great political change awaited Poland: with the fall of the Berlin wall and the flourishing of capitalism, the people behind the Iron Curtain would be set free. Karol Radziszewski was nine years old, living in Białystok, and, in a graph-paper notebook, he drew pages and pages of princesses in corrective eyewear, dogs with mermaid tails, and mysterious seductresses, whose exceptionally firm bosoms would be, sooner or later, bedecked in arrows shot into a heart or a flame.

One of the seminal visual artists of his generation in Eastern Europe, in recent years Ion Grigorescu’s complex body of work has attracted increasing attention in the West. This volume is the second of his translated diaries—the first from 1970 to 1975 was published in 2014—and is assembled like a small literary and art-historical sensation of the period between 1976 and 1979.

Faint on stage? Umm Kulthum never did. It was the people who swooned when she sang. What if, overcome by the power of her song, the singer herself had passed out? What would have ensued during the sudden silence? Umm Kulthum faints on stage is the title Polys Peslikas coined for one of the paintings in his exhibition “The future of colour” at the Cyprus Pavilion during the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.

This book is the first comprehensive monograph of the highly accomplished Albanian artist Edi Hila. His vast oeuvre, long overlooked, describes the political and social transformations of Eastern Europe over the last half century—its paradigm shifts, the pitfalls and temptations of consumerism, changes in visual culture—in a way that is markedly different from the familiar strains of pop banalism.

With its capacity to unsettle our sense of the temporal—through montage, doublings, hauntings—visual culture can enable a sense, or theory, of time travel. It invites us to consider the visual outside the realm of art, and to think beyond the technocratic and colonial tropes of science fiction. It can send us tumbling through deep space, into the past, or toward other speculations.

Framed by a Zoom background of a rose garden, Jenny Odell spoke about the role of design in a suspended moment marked by uncertainty. Odell’s message, itself a timely reflection on observation, embraces the standstill and its potential to deepen our individual and collective attention and our sensitivity to time, place, and presence—in turn, perhaps, enabling us all, amid our “new” virtual contexts, to better connect with our natural and cultural environments.

In response to recent discussions about the value assigned to artworks, art critic and theorist Isabelle Graw introduces the term “value reflection.” Rather than an objective quality, value reflection is the potential for the specific artistic labor expended for artworks to be found in them. This book focuses on the artistic production of writer Francis Ponge and artists Jack Whitten and Banksy, and engages with the different types of value reflection detected in their work.

Since the late 1940s, the term cybernetics has been used to describe self-regulating systems that measure, anticipate, and react in response to changing conditions. Initially relevant mostly in the fields of administration, planning, criminology, and early ecology, cybernetics has become an economic factor under digital capitalism. In such a cybernetic totality, art must respond to the new situation: a cybernetics of the poor.

For the last two decades, Josephine Meckseper has created large-scale installations, sculptures, paintings, and films that simultaneously expose and encase signifiers such as advertisements, political imagery, and everyday objects to form an exploration into the collective unconscious of our time. The artist’s exhibition at the Frac des Pays de la Loire is her first major institutional survey show in France.

Our series of shared excerpts continues with a fifth installment focusing on issues of democracy and protest. From Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere, philosopher Oliver Marchart proposes an aesthetics of agitating, propagating, and organizing. Artist and researcher Sonia Boyce reconciles the aesthetic strategies of collage and montage with the political address to racism and nationalism in artworks by Rasheed Araeen and Eddie Chamber, included in The Place Is Here: The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain. We turn to artist Amar Kanwar’s video installation The Torn First Pages—referring to the Burmese bookshop owner who was imprisoned for tearing out pages with government propaganda in the books and journals he sold—and scholar and critic Erika Balsom’s essay on this work in Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary: The Commissions Book. Architect Eyal Weizman identifies the role of the roundabout as a site of eruption in recent uprisings and revolutions in The Roundabout Revolutions from the Critical Spatial Practice series. And to conclude this selection of attachments, writer and performer Johanna Hedva steers away from an ableist discourse on political participation and renders visible care as the most anti-capitalist protest there is, in their essay included in Where are the tiny revolts?

In elegantly written miniatures, Graw captures radical political, social, and cultural changes that occurred between 2014 and 2017, analyzing how these macro-shifts reach into her own life. She addresses topics ranging from the general turn to the political right, as seen in Brexit and Trump, to #MeToo, men with beards, and Balenciaga. While registering the symptoms of a world that clearly feels different, Graw also meditates on irretrievable personal losses.

In Exhibition-ism, theorist and artist Mieke Bal develops the idea that exhibiting is a significant form of the contemporary. In an exhibition, visitors are in the actual company of artworks that can perform. Looking at art as process, Bal makes the case that the being-together-in-time of an exhibition visit encourages and, if the curation is well thought-out, can heighten the sense of the contemporaneity—art being more capable of this than anything else.

Our series of shared excerpts continues with a fourth installment focusing on issues of representation and decolonization. The late Senegalese artist and poet Issa Samb questions the “representativeness” of race and art in a 1989 text reprinted in his monograph WORD! WORD? WORD!; art historian Nomusa Makhubu writes about depictions of South African eco-racism in Uriel Orlow’s monograph Theatrum Botanicum; artist Pedro Neves Marques looks toward alternative Indigenous science fiction in the anthology Futurity Report; artist and theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva identifies the disco’s black light as a device for Black feminist thought in Otobong Nkanga’s monograph Lustre & Lucre; media theorist Andrea B. Braidt turns to queer subjectivity and affect in the anthology On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency; and art historian T. J. Demos links global geopolitics and visual culture in Against the Anthropocene.

This book arises from the 2019 activities of the MA Fine Arts program at the Zurich University of the Arts. It reflects the conviction that an arts school can be a pedagogical nexus dedicated to the transmission of knowledge, experimentation, and research as much as a locus for civic and critical debate and exhibition, involved in its community, locally and globally.

Hannah Beachler is known as an award-winning production designer, but she tells the audience that she considers herself to be more of a story designer. As film stills and concept art from a few of those stories—Moonlight, Miles Ahead, Creed, Lemonade, and Black Panther—flash across a screen, Beachler engages in a conversation with Jacqueline Stewart and Toni L. Griffin about set building and curation, urban design, location scouting, Afrofuturism, fictional histories, and Black feminist narratives, and elucidates her role: a designer behind on-screen tableaux that provide not only visual feasts of artistry and imagination but also intimate spaces of emotion, humanity, and constructed memory.

Our third packet includes art-historical chapters from Sven Lütticken’s Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Revolution and Josephine Berry’s Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry; “On Passive Resistance,” a conversation between Vanessa Joan Müller and Cristina Ricupero in New Ways of Doing Nothing; and Mark Fisher’s “We’re Not All in This Together: Public Space and Antagonism in the Wake of Capitalist Realism” from Caring Culture: Art, Architecture and the Politics of Public Health, edited by Markus Miessen and Andrea Phillips.

Drawing on original documents, photographs and detainee artwork, this book offers a unique insight into the experience of immigration detention in the UK. Together, the authors, from interdisciplinary backgrounds in art, design and criminology present views of everyday life under this form of border control. In offering a glimpse of life within these hidden sites, they explore fundamental questions about coercion, censorship and control, as well as belonging and resistance.

Can contemporary art’s practitioners change the way we perceive nature? Employing a variety of forms that include speculative essays, poems, pencil sketches, and photo essays, twenty authors challenge the exclusive human claim to intelligence by pointing to, or inventing, new forms of coexistence for all life-forms. Far more complex than the necessary and continuous exercise of critique, these contributions introduce new ways to experience culture.

The first selection of Social Distances includes María Belén Sáez de Ibarra’s “Cosmopolitics of the Living” from What about Activism?, edited by Steven Henry Madoff; Martin Herbert’s “On and Off the Grid: Agnes Martin,” from Tell Them I Said No; as well as Fernando García-Dory’s “Inside Us: A Dinner as an Aesthetic and Agro-political Excursion” and Chris Fite-Wassilak’s “Species of Specialties: St. Louis’s Provel Cheese”—both featured in Politics of Food.

Driven by the central question “What are we learning from artists today?” the first volume of the new series edited by Anthony Huberman and Jeanne Gerrity at the CCA Wattis, A Series of Open Questions, is informed by themes found in the work of Dodie Bellamy, such as contemporary forms of feminism and sexuality, the rebirth of the author, and ways in which vulnerability, perversion, vulgarity, and self-exposure can be forms of empowerment.

Shadow Citizens offers an insight into the radical film praxis and extensive oeuvre of filmmaker Želimir Žilnik. From his beginnings in the lively amateur film scene of Yugoslavia in the 1960s, Žilnik has gone on to make more than fifty films. The notion of shadow citizens, conceived as different minorities that are increasingly becoming majorities everywhere, runs through Žilnik’s oeuvre.

Tomato Target takes a comprehensive look at the unique artistic work of Annette Kelm and the visual idiom she has developed over the course of her career. The publication contextualizes Kelm’s profound practice—that deftly probes the medium of photography and portrays a simultaneously heterogeneous yet decisive use of subjects to signify and act as telling abstractions within her visually opulent object worlds.

It was the concept of the ocean as a global commons, free for everyone—first formulated by Hugo Grotius in his 1609 treatise, Mare Liberum—that stimulated a free global market. Today, the free market and the free ocean both suffer from rigorous, exploitive use. Solution 295–304: Mare Amoris proposes nine new practical, technological, and metaphysical scenarios of how to fall in love with the sea, and, eventually, have the sea fall in love with us.

Alexandra Kollontai was a writer, a revolutionary, and after the 1917 October revolution the people’s commissar of social welfare as well as one of the first female ambassadors in the world. This reader, in which artists and thinkers revisit Kollontai’s legacy, asks: How to read Kollontai’s vision of love today and relate it to current feminist struggles?

Does art possess the power to cause structural and meaningful changes in daily life? By means of a critical essay, correspondence with kindred spirits from the field, and visual impressions, this book reflects on the possibility to merge art and life, fiction and reality, and on the importance of this process for the future of artistic practice.

The questioning of thingness is an integral part of presentation and has informed and shaped the social relevance of the field of the curatorial. Immanent to presentation as a mode of being (public) in the world, the curatorial has the potential to address, visualize, and question the central effects of the changing status and function of things.

This is a subjective chronicle of contemporary art from 2011 to 2017. During this period, the curator, writer, and educator Maria Lind regularly wrote a column for the print edition of ArtReview. The writings focused on individual art works and exhibitions, extending to conversations and debates that were developing in the art world and beyond during these seven years.

In Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, writer and musician Jörg Heiser argues that context switching between art and pop music is an attempt to solve the contradictions faced in one field of cultural production by moving to another. Exploring the intertwined histories of pop music and art from the early 1960s on, Heiser shows that those leading double lives are often best equipped to detect such contradictions while pointing toward radical alternatives.

A penchant for abstraction when it comes to complex social conditions, a drive to effect change, and a resilience of analysis and representation are all characteristic of Hungary’s art scene since the 1960s, and especially of its “abstract artists.” The abstracted visual language of Hungarian artists is thematized by the Künstlerhaus in the 2019 exhibition “Ábstract Hungary.”

In The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky looks at the different directions that painting has taken since the turn of the millennium. He deflates the twentieth-century belief that abstraction and figuration in painting are dichotomous. Instead, Schwabsky argues, they are methods of asking or answering the questions: What is painting?

Drawing is thinking, thinking is moving. These words summarize the layered work of Belgian artist Ronny Delrue (b. 1957). For many years, drawing has been central to his oeuvre. On the one hand, a drawing is an autonomous artwork, but on the other hand it is the direct crystallization of a fleeting line of thought that systematically opens the door to new work.

Jolly Rogers is a collection of Peter Wächtler’s latest short texts, written in preparation of his two solo exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall and Kunsthalle Zürich (both 2019), and combined with a nearly complete collection of the artist’s drawings and prints from recent years. The texts operate like vignettes to a larger story, and the images as unreliable illustrations to the narrative.

Through four essays by critics and curators, as well as texts and images of the works on exhibit—more than eighty works by nearly sixty artists—the book aims to present a vital component of the Chinese art world which is under-represented on the global art scene, namely the contemporary art production from the Pearl River Delta.

As the Cold War gained momentum in Europe, Tito’s break with Stalin led to Yugoslavia being expelled from the Eastern bloc in 1948. Confronted with this new reality, the Yugoslav government decided to bridge the indeterminacy of its cultural politics through a creative strategy: it commissioned young artists and architects to draft the aesthetics of a non-Soviet form of socialism.

One of the most significant shifts in contemporary art during the past two decades concerns artists and collectives who have moved their artistic focus from representation to direct social action. This publication shows why this transition might change our understanding of artistic production at large and make us reconsider the role of art in society.

“Standstill” could be the name for the exact kind of experience that is the hiatus between social expectations and real possibilities of agency. The essays of this book transverse these dimensions of standstill as an in-between of time. The book includes essays by Georges Didi-Huberman, David Lapoujade, Peter Osborne, Jacques Rancière, Christine Ross, and others as well as conversations with Via Lewandowsky, Aernout Mik and Marcel Odenbach.

Resonating with the ethos of open dialogue and the experimentation of women artists’ collectives in the ’70s and ’80s, Of Other Spaces constructs a dynamic, open, and collaborative arena that foregrounds practices of resistance, collectivity, and self-organization. The book seeks out the lodestone of a volatile politics that calls for and instigates urgent alternatives to the cultural, political, and economic machineries of power that haunt this world.

The artist as entrepreneur has become a common topic of discussion. Here, however, we put forward the notions of “self” and “system.” First, every artistic practice is self-reflexive and self-contextualizing. Second, each system an artist builds allows for innovation. Let’s construct a space where we inevitably find ourselves together with others, even if we feel lonely, like a witch lost in a library of artists’ books.

at Fifty is the first catalogue dedicated to Stephen Sutcliffe. Both a microcosm and macrocosm of the processes at play in his works, it is also something of an artist’s book, one that, typical of the artist’s critical practice, formally addresses questions about the value of the monologue, the archive, and the status of the artist.

Cable cuts, energetics and gunk: moving back and forth between a group of core subjects, Reflexologies converts the past five years of sculptural work into a 384-page book. It is interrupted throughout by a lagged conversation and three new texts: Martin Herbert reflects on subsea cable stumps and the generative potential of gaps; Jennifer Teets considers flexible pneus and viscous processes; while Robin Watkins tackles a slow real-time collaboration.

The publication developed from the exhibition and research project The Place Is Here (2016–19), which traced the urgent and wide-ranging conversations taking place between black artists, writers, and thinkers in Britain during the 1980s. Within the context of Thatcherism and a racist art establishment, a new generation of black artists and intellectuals produced some of the most compelling ideas and images in recent British cultural history.

Igor Grubić has been active as a multimedia artist from the beginning of the 1990s. His work includes site-specific interventions in public spaces, photography, and film. Grubić’s project for the 58th Venice Biennale, Traces of Disappearing in Three Acts (2006–19), is already thirteen years in the making. It consists of three interrelated photo essays and an animated film, set in a specially designed mise-en-scène.

Jill Johnston—cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon—was renowned as a writer on dance, especially on the developments around Judson Dance and the 1960s downtown New York City scene, and later as the author of the radical-feminist classic Lesbian Nation (1973). This book collects thirty texts by Jill Johnston that were initially published in her weekly column for The Village Voice between 1960 and 1974.

Hardly a gray matter of catching the spirit of our present. From the sun-drenched-ness of the Dubaian atmosphere, to the feathery encounter in a secret printing workshop, words and materials are discreetly—spectrally, outspokenly—put forward: a bunch of residents cruising the seas of nine temporary realities, the result of an ongoing swapping of facts and speculations from the earthly realm.

The publication I can’t nail the days down documents Newby’s eponymous exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien and includes a photo essay by the artist as well as detailing previous projects. Christina Barton, Juliane Bischoff, Chris Kraus, and Nicolaus Schafhausen contribute texts to the book that explore the influences, tools, ethical aspects, and poetics of Newby’s artworks, as well as the personal relationships the artist folds into her projects.

Burial of the White Man is a bildungsroman about the friendship between artist Erik Niedling and writer Ingo Niermann. While in their thirties, they begin collaborating on a series of projects of ever-increasing ambition and scope: a tomb for all humans, a dissident replica of the U.S. Army, a German-Mozambican liberation movement… Each failure is answered with an even more outrageous endeavor.

John C. Welchman’s compelling study reassesses Italian Futurism; the words and images in Dada and Surrealism; affect in the work of Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger; the delirious splits and metaphorical ricochets of Salvador Dalí; the social and philosophical ideas mobilized by René Magritte; “whiteness” in the work of Günter Brus; postwar US–UK exchanges on sculpture; and relations between writing and seeing in the work of Rémy Zaugg.

Steering her analysis from the newspaper obituary in and out of literature and past cinema, Melissa McCarthy investigates a fundamental aspect of the human condition: our state of being between life and death, always in precarious and watery balance. Sharks, Death, Surfers observes how sharks have been depicted over centuries and across cultures, then flips the lens (and dissects the cornea) to consider what sharks see when they look back.

Richard Roe is the fictional memoir of a legal person. The name is one of the oldest used in English law when the real name of someone is withheld, or when a corpse can’t be identified. Divided into seven fragmentary sections, this memoir gives voice to the legal fictions that creep around the margins of selfhood—and that increasingly dictate the terms of economic and political process.

This publication collects writings on the art scene of Kosovo over the past twenty years. In the 1990s Kosovars felt the urgency to shape their own scene: in a search for identity, for nation building, in continuing or ending political conflicts, by trying to find a language to grasp recent social and political developments, or simply by continuing their practice in new, unstable times.

Herewith the Clues continues Boy Vereecken’s research into mass-market literary culture, which began with Signature Strengths (2016). The volume includes two text contributions: a contemporary take on the whodunit novel by Shumon Basar, followed by a tour of the history of the Crime Dossiers by Laura Herman. The book is illustrated with a photo series from Antoine Begon who has unpacked and photographed the pieces of evidence.

How to spell the fight follows a thread that has been running from centuries past till the present day, morphing from the tangible string figures that join our hands in childhood to the more elusive computational algorithms that engage our fingers today. What follows is a conversation about collective agency emerges with the aim of rethinking current paradigms of cognition, education, and power.

Had this book been titled “How to listen” or “How to be all ears,” the title would have been appropriate to the content and directly explained the book’s focus. Why, then, does the title prefer to obscure its subject rather than reveal it, running counter to a title’s traditional function? This book is grounded in the experience of the unseen listener. Speakers are seen when they speak, whereas listeners recede into the background of the scene dominated by speakers.

In 2014, Paul McCarthy installed the massive inflatable sculpture Tree at Place Vendôme in Paris. The sculpture’s shape was at once reminiscent of a sex toy, a Christmas tree, and a Hans Arp artwork. It caused a public outcry, the artist was attacked, and the work vandalized and ultimately removed. This book brings together conversations with scholars, artists, curators, and writers, which reflect on McCarthy’s work.

This Is Television addresses the increasingly obsolete medium of television by way of the medium of the book—by extension commenting on media’s continuous changes of form and format. Through an interplay of theory and artistic research material, the book extends Judy Radul’s ongoing investigation of media with an idiosyncratic perspective on television—while still feeding off collective experience.

How can we feel the realities of war, conflict, and violence? What are the cultural and social implications of war and violence, and how does society respond to war? Giving Voices features four of Erkan Özgen’s video works dealing with war, violence, and trauma—beyond the boundaries of the political, within the dimension of the private and the human. By deciding not to show images of violence and war, Özgen gives a voice to individuals and objects.

The words on the cover of Aslan Gaisumov’s first monograph are names of places no longer inhabited. One of these words, Kayçu-Yuxe or Keicheyuhea, names the birthplace of Zayanu Khasueva, the artist’s maternal grandmother. It is also the title of his film from 2017, in which Khasueva returns to the site of her ancestral village for the first time in seventy-three years.

Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry analyzes modern and contemporary art’s drive to blur with life, and how this is connected to the democratic state’s biologized control of life. Art’s ambition to transform life intersects in striking ways with modern biopower’s aim to normalize, purify, judge, and transform life—rendering it bare. This book finds the answer to the question: How did autonomous art become such an effective tool of the capitalist state?

Translated into English for the first time, The Black City is a portrait of New York written by Hubert Fichte between 1978 and 1980. Fichte researched the city as the center of the African diaspora, conducting interviews and composing essays about syncretism in culture and the arts, material living conditions in the city, and political and individual struggles based on race, class, and sexuality.

How do you tell the story of a friendship? How do you trace the roots of one of the most significant cross-disciplinary unions in fashion today? Artist Sterling Ruby and fashion designer Raf Simons did just that when they sat on stage with curator Jessica Morgan at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. This is a story, and an exchange, that is beyond collaboration.

Selected Writings, 1998–2015 is a collection of texts by Babette Mangolte in which she reflects on her practice as a photographer and filmmaker and her collaborative work with filmmakers, artists, dancers, and choreographers. She provides insights into the techniques and methods she created as well as her relationships with notable collaborators such as Marina Abramović, Chantal Akerman, Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the two group exhibitions “The only performances that make it all the way…” and “Yes, but is it performable? Investigations on the Performative Paradox” which were shown at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien in 2013 and 2016.

Contemporary Research Intensive was an event organized in the context of the 57th Venice Art Biennale to investigate the concept of “contemporaneity.” The book is both part and result of the intensive sharing of ideas to produce something that captures the spirit of both discussions at that time and the publication process as a temporal form.

This publication accompanies two exhibitions of recent sculptural work by the artist Magali Reus: “Hot Cottons” (2017–18) at Bergen Kunsthall and “As mist, description,” (2018) at the South London Gallery. Featuring an essay by writer and curator Laura Mclean-Ferris and a poetic response by writer and poet Quinn Latimer as well as a fully illustrated overview of Reus’s work, this catalogue provides an in-depth exploration of the artist’s recent sculptural practice.

Gilbert & George never cook and always eat out. Back in 1969, however, the artist duo hosted The Meal, an elaborate dinner party that included thirteen guests, Princess Margaret’s butler, a chef who prepared a meal from a Victorian cookery manual, and the guest of honor, artist David Hockney. Birnbaum took a trip to London to visit the immaculately dressed pair to discuss The Meal and other curious projects from their fifty-year collaboration.

The Tamam Shud narrative emerged through a series of episodic performances and an exhibition by Alex Cecchetti at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. For two years the writing process and the artistic process were interwoven, feeding each other as they evolved. The art project and the artist’s novel are linked together as much as the life of the victim is connected to the piece of paper found in his pocket.

The practice of Su-Mei Tse involves issues such as time, memory, musicality, and language. Like her exhibition, “Nested,” this publication was conceived to be like a notebook: a form that brings together impressions that have occurred in everyday life—be they visual, sound, or memory related—and blends them in a subjective and intuitive way, allowing a whole network of echoes and correspondences to be deployed.

In the body of work documented here, Pryde combines a series of color photographs of hands touching objects with a scale-model freight train and track, replete with miniaturized graffiti, that took visitors in a short ride through the exhibition. Through photography and sculpture, Pryde pays close attention to the nature of image making and the conditions display, subtly reworking codes and conventions to alter our cultural perception.

Profit over Peace in Western Sahara examines the role of natural resources in the occupation of the Western Sahara, a territory considered by the United Nations to still be awaiting decolonization. Its liberation from colonial rule has come to a standstill due to Morocco’s continued military occupation of a part of the territory. Meanwhile, the EU has ignored basic principles of international law in the region due.

The way we see the world has changed drastically since NASA released the “blue marble” image of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. No longer a placid slow-moving orb, the world is now perceived as a hothouse of activity and hyper-connectivity that cannot keep up with its inhabitants.

Merlin Carpenter considers how “The Outside Can’t Go Outside” has been inserted into contemporary art theory following the financial crisis of 2007/8. The book focuses on the idea that the value of art is located in unpaid mental, educational, and communicational labor that is gradually accrued and then exploited according to the logic of Marx’s central thesis on exploitation.

How do artists work today? Has the pluralism of art given way to a pluralism of roles that artists may occupy? What are the contemporary conditions of labour producing this new state of affairs, and what re-skilling does it ask of artists? These are some of the questions addressed in The Artist As.

Myths of the Marble documents a group exhibition that took place in 2017 at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Curated by Alex Klein and Milena Hoegsberg, the exhibition reflects upon how the “virtual” has been engaged by contemporary artists as a way to consider the world as a site of possibility and limitation that both permeates physical space and online experience.

The Museum of Rhythm is a speculative institution that engages rhythm as a tool for interrogating the foundations of modernity and the sensual complex of time in daily experience. This book, and the exhibition upon which it is based, is an outcome of durational research that sees art as one of the means by which the ideologies of rhythm are implemented.

The choreographic turn in the visual arts from 1958 to 1965 can be identified by the sudden emergence of works created by different visual artists around the world. Dedicated to the renewed encounter between dance and performance and the institutions of global contemporary art, this publication proposes that a “new performance turn” has emerged in the second decade of the century.

What Is Different? is the title of 2017’s edition of the Jahresring, guest-edited and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans. Circling around contemporary issues of newly resurfaced right-wing populism, the phenomenon of fake news, and the backfire effect, Tillmans, rather than analyzing the status quo, focuses on what has changed in the past ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. Why are societal consensus and institutions now under attack?

Walking, that most basic of human actions, was transformed in the twentieth century by Surrealism, the Situationist International, and Fluxus into a tactic for revolutionizing everyday life. Each group chose locations in the urban landscape as sites—from the flea markets and bars of Paris to the sidewalks of New York—and ambulation as the essential gesture.

The “economization of art” began to take shape in the wake of the crisis of capital in 2009. In this book, first delivered as a lecture at Kunsthalle Bern in April 2016, Diedrich Diederichsen follows Marx’s labor theory of value and counters the symbolic economies dominating the art field, as well as economic exceptionalism or calculation, with systems of recording and reading out.

This book is the first survey of the art and practice of Art+Positive, a significant affinity group of ACT UP New York during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Staging self-initiated actions, and also participating in larger demonstrations organized by ACT UP, Art+Positive practiced an improvisational approach to activism at the intersection of the AIDS crisis and the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Armen Avanessian chronicles his stay in Miami as an experiment in writing about our times of individual optimization and digitization. An inventory of the self in the second person—and a philosopher’s reflections in the infinity pool of the art world—this book reckons with a new time complex as well as the aesthetics and infrastructures of the contemporary.

In 1987, Peter G. Rowe published his pioneering book Design Thinking. In it, he interrogated conceptual approaches to design in terms of both process and form. Thirty years later, in a lecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Rowe offered a reappraisal of his earlier work, describing ways in which the capacities of the digital age have changed the way we perceive and understand creative problem-solving in architectural design.

SSS: How to imitate the sound of the shore using two hands and a carpet is, at first glance, exactly what it claims to be: an in-depth manual for staging a private (or public) performance, in which one uses both hands and a carpet to imitate the sounds of water making contact with land. Istanbul-based artist Cevdet Erek’s book also addresses theoretical and methodological issues related to the representation of nature.

The exhibition “The Promise of Total Automation” investigated our relationship to a world of machines, technological objects, and electronic devices. The prospect of a fully automated future—while acutely reshaping the notions of work, production, and value creation—also feeds emancipatory scenarios ultimately leading to the end of labor. Total automation is upon us but its liberating promise is yet to be claimed.

This book is an adaptation of Annika Bender’s lecture “Jump! You Fuckers!” which was presented at Kunsthalle Bern in the context of a series on overproduction and ambivalence in contemporary art. Annika Bender was one of the pseudonyms of artists Dominic Osterried and Steffen Zillig, who wrote the blog Donnerstag (now discontinued) under her name.

Initiated by Swedish artist Anna Lundh, Visions of the Now is a reconsideration of the 1966 Stockholm festival Visioner av Nuet (Visions of the Present), which aimed to examine the impact of technology on humanity, society, and art; half a century later, we are immersed in the technology that was still “new” in 1966.

Rethinking Density considers new perspectives related to the category of density, which for a long time has been part of urban-planning discourses and is now regaining the attention of artists and practitioners from a number of different disciplines. In an interplay of models, this publication combines research from cultural studies, artistic research, sound studies as well as architectural and urban theory.

Drawing together discourses on contemporaneity and new materialisms, this book examines a material conception of temporality that makes it possible to develop a critique of the philosophical discourse on presence. Claiming that “there is no now,” Ebeling develops an archaeology of contemporaneity according to which the traces of the contemporary can only be secured through visual or material operations, not historical ones.

People have used honey, dates, and fruits to sweeten their dishes since time immemorial, but with the introduction of sugar—“white gold”—into cooking and baking, a whole array of delightful flavors and culinary possibilities was unearthed. In Bon! Bon!, Charlotte Birnbaum uncovers the wonderful world of all things sugary through surprising anecdotes and historical accounts, each accompanied by delectable recipes that are sure to satisfy any sweet tooth.

Craig Kalpakjian engages with both historical art discourses and contemporary issues. Intelligence considers the ideas of artificial intelligence exhibited by machines, as seen in the Sony AIBO robotic dog, and human intelligence, like that which is gathered through interpersonal contact by the US military in accordance with the “US Army Field Guides Manual on Interrogation” a guide that prohibits abusive techniques of torture.

Unlike a number of artists who have begun to use negation, detachment, and inaccessibility as tools to reflect upon and problematize the narratives mapped onto them as members of diasporic or immigrant communities, Michael Tedja plays the other extreme. His work seems to exceed and absorb the institutions that attempt to codify him one way or another.

In the slipstream of conceptual art, the intimate interweaving of meaning and materialization in art and design came to be discredited in the second half of the twentieth century. The master’s program Material Utopias at the Sandberg Instituut put an end to this tradition by abolishing the unproductive hierarchy separating “concept” and “making,” “content” and “process.”

Systemics brings together a collection of new writing and curatorial projects that unfolded at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark, over a two-year period from 2013 to 2014. Contained here are its various parts: details of the four core exhibitions and related events, two commissioned exhibitions, and four essays, together comprising the Systemics series program as a whole.

The School of Missing Studies started in 2003 as an initiative of artists and architects who recognized “the missing” as a matter of urgency. Investigating what culture(s) laid the foundations for the loss we are experiencing from modernization and how this loss can talk back to us as a potential site of learning, the School of Missing Studies is calling for a space to turn existing knowledge against itself to affect our capacity to see things otherwise.

It is often said that we no longer have an addressee for our political demands. But that’s not true. We have each other. What we can no longer get from the state, the party, the union, the boss, we ask for from one another. And we provide. Let’s see how need and care and desire and admiration have been cross-examined, called as witness, put on parole, and made the subject of caring inquiry by e-flux journal authors since 2009.

This publication documents the first iteration of Belgian artist David Claerbout’s project Olympia, a digital simulation of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. Conceived to last one thousand years, Claerbout’s simulation uses real-time weather data to present the slow decay of the stadium over the coming millennium. Olympia aims to exceed the human ability to imagine time, thus radically surpassing our own experience of the world.

Blake Rayne’s approach to painting stems from the duplicity of words like script, folder, application, and screen. These operative terms situate his work between forms of linguistic description and the history of reflexive material practices in art. He begins from an orientation that considers the terms painter and painting as fictions with no stable material definition. Rather, they are shaped by always-evolving social, institutional, and physical relations.

There are eight million stories of the origins of the digital in architecture, and this book brings together fourteen of them. The arguments address specific changes in ways of thinking about architecture, building, and cities, as well as the shifts in technology that resulted from these changes, marking both a capstone of Archaeology of the Digital and the start of an investigation into other beginnings of the digital in architecture.

Three interconnected palimpsest essays recount (1) the backstory of a “meta” font recently updated by Dexter Sinister and used to typeset the Contemporary Condition book series, (2) a broad history of the rationalization of letterforms that considers the same typeface from “a higher point of disinterest,” and (3) a pending proposal for a sundial designed to operate in parallel physical and digital realms. Notes on the Time, Time, Letters & Spirits is the sixth volume of the Contemporary Condition.

Searching for the present is a bit like deep sea diving. How to dive without drowning in the turbulent waters of now? When to surface and how to ride a strong current? These are some of the questions that Raqs Media Collective address in their account of contemporaneity, guided by a motley collection of figures lost and found in the turbulence of their practice.

Recollection is the presence of the past in the here and now; it shapes our understanding of our places and lives, their histories and changes. As experience becomes fact, the past turns into objective matter. Leonard Qylafi’s artistic practice takes such material records as books, films, or photos as points of departure for examining this process of change.

Imagined as a residency that would result in no material production, the Site Residency was conceptually grounded in theories and practices of withdrawal and in the critical questioning of creation, materiality, and objectified artistic output, paying tribute to the artistic strategies from the 1960s and ’70s. This publication presents various visual and textual materials of the residency’s three participating artists.

This publication comprises a series of interviews with contemporary artists, musicians, and writers who are in dialogue with Beirut and Cairo. While not purporting to be an overview of the art scenes in these cities, this book begins to draw a picture of how artists think about what it means to be active in the contexts of these cities. It offers insight into the circumstances that structured these artists’ stories.

Uchronia is a project initiated by the artists Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet (les gens d’Uterpan) in 2014, which emanates from the analysis of individual or collective attitudes and behaviors produced in the public space of a given city. The two artists call upon citizens to become uchronists, to infiltrate public life with physical modules coming from daily behaviors, synchronized and adjusted according to context.

The Long Road to Xico, 1991–2015 is the first monograph of Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves. It gathers more than twenty projects realized between 1991 and 2015. This publication also collects a selection of Alves’s writings and contextualizes her work in the political and cultural debates from the 1980s, when she became an activist and an early participant in discourses around “postcolonialism” and “ecology.”

Over the past four years, the art magazine Contemporary And (C&) has called attention to exhibitions, artists, and curators from diverse African perspectives while boosting new areas of debate. I am built inside you, C&’s first book, is a compilation of eighteen pieces published since the magazine was launched in 2013.

Merlin Carpenter’s exhibition “MIDCAREER PAINTINGS” filled Kunsthalle Bern’s rooms with transit blankets stretched over identically scaled frames, each named after one of the artist’s seven galleries and marked “not for sale.” This publication documents these “paintings,” how the works thematize the limbo of the “midcareer” artist, as well as the circulation of the artwork as a commodity that signifies material wealth or value.

Titled “Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium,” the eighth Contour Biennale in Mechelen, Belgium, addresses the nation-state system and the realm of justice today. The editorial approach of its accompanying reader, Hearings, borrows from the juridicial and musical spheres. Launched as the online journal of the biennial, the reader pairs texts or image-based contributions, allowing for a sense of tension and affinity to develop in the feedback loop of the two voices.

It is difficult to imagine making claims for human rights without using images. For better or worse, images of protest, evidence, and assertion are the lingua franca of struggles for justice today. The Flood of Rights examines the pathways through which these images and ideas circulate—routes that do not merely enable, but actually shape human-rights claims and their conceptual background.

Appropriation, storytelling, reenactment, and reportage are some of the strategies that Mario García Torres deploys to highlight the limitations of factual evidence and the agency of historical records and objects. An Arrival Tale detaches the Mexican artist’s works from their original contexts and offers them as a collection of narratives and artistic experiments open for reinscription in order to address the conditions and urgencies of our contemporary societies.

This collection of more than thirty texts, which were originally published between 1790 and the present day, explores man’s rich relationship with material things. Devised largely in response to the gradual breakdown of the divide between art and design that began over a century ago, this book sheds light on the ways that the concept of the thing as idea has been considered over time.

In the ancient art of alchemy, some elements can change to other states of matter while others cannot. At least not without magic. And a touch of trickery. For some time now, Goldin+Senneby have been interested in a utopian alchemist named August Nordenskiöld (1754–1792) who sought to create enough gold from inferior metals to permanently abolish its value, and the tyranny of money with it.

Over the past quarter century, artists have made powerful interventions in debates around globalization, addressing various dimensions of cross-border exchange, from mass migration to the dynamics of translation, and devising new ways of conceptualizing them. Marcus Verhagen’s Flows and Counterflows tells the story of those interventions, dwelling on projects that draw out both the dangers and the tangible or imaginable benefits of global exchange.

This book offers a first report on the activities of the Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise (CATPC), an association based in Lusanga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. CATPC brings together a unique gathering of individuals—along with its members and partner institutions that are engaged in dialogue with it—and attempts to rethink postcolonial power relations within the global art world.

This collection of art and theory analyzes today’s post-digital conditions for critical media practices—across and beyond the analog and the digital, the human and the nonhuman. The contributions also look across and beyond the field of media art, staking out new paths for understanding and working in the transversal territories between theory, technology, and art.

How did art escape the deadlock of the Situationists’ anti-art refusal? Did the relational artists, with their repetitions of Situationist slogans and techniques, outline a sustainable, micro-political alternative to Guy Debord’s dream of surpassing art and realizing philosophy? Looking back at some of the Situationists’ confrontations with the museum, this book traces a path beyond the tragedy of negativity and the litany of recuperation.

This reader is the result of Joanna Warsza’s course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. It examines four recent cases of boycotts, presenting their political, ideological, and economic contexts, timelines, statements, as well as interviews with parties involved. It reflects on how certain biennials became the place where the power of art is renegotiated and why one simply “can’t work like this.”

The applied research project and publication The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict deals with archival practice and its spatial repercussions. Inquiring whether any accumulation and organization of knowledge is productive—to the effect that it generates a narrative and/or history—the project focuses specifically on archives becoming productive due to their spatial framework.

A “politics of listening” is an intervention into and a reorganization of forms that listening takes rather than a call for free speech or for a platform for voices to be heard. Listening is a political act, a pedagogical process, and an activity that can lead to the development of an organized protocol for engagement. In his art and research, Beirut-based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan explores the perception of language, sound, and listening.

For her first institutional solo Darja Bajagić turns to the murky terrain where real and staged violence bleed into each other with an ease both unsettling and alluring. Following the lure of the fringes, the artist culls her imagery from fan-gore magazines, true-crime TV shows, fetish websites, obscure online forums, and hidden chat rooms tucked away in the darker reaches of the Web.

Inhalt concentrates on Eberhard Havekost’s painting from the past ten years, focusing on work first exhibited at KINDL, Berlin, in 2016/17. The work’s heterogeneity is evident in the selection of subjects, as well as the styles employed. This extreme range characterizes Havekost’s artistic work as a whole. The artist situates his paintings in complex interrelationships, where connections and relevancies are constantly reconfigured.

Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday is the outcome of a research project pursued by a group of artists, architects, and social theorists. In the face of an exhilarating politics of accumulation and dispossession, the group explores commoning as the subject as well as the means of its study.

Nathalie Du Pasquier was one of the founding members of Memphis, the groundbreaking Milanese design and architecture collective. Since 1987, however, her main focus and passion has been painting. The title of this publication describes the main focus of her work: the still life. It consists of an artist’s book by Du Pasquier with drawings, photographs, and reproductions of her paintings.

This publication accompanies Australian multidisciplinary artist Nicholas Mangan’s survey exhibition “Limits to Growth.” The works in the show tackle narratives from his own geographical region—Asia Pacific, in which his home country of Australia plays a colonial role—and weaves them into a bigger picture to take into account the global economy, resource extraction, and the ultimate power of the sun.

Gordon Bennett: Be Polite follows the exhibition of largely unseen works on paper by one of Australia’s most visionary and critical artists, Gordon Bennett (1955–2014). The exhibition and publication are the first to present the work of Bennett since his death. Though rarely seen in exhibition contexts, Bennett’s drawing and writing formed the foundation of his practice.

With delicate lyricism, Karina Mendreczky creates fictional landscapes using light and shadow. As one of two recipients of the 2015 Kunsthalle Wien Prize, she created the installation Thin Dream at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz. Silhouettes of acrylic trees, whose details were hand-carved with an etching needle, were projected onto the back wall of the gallery to create the impression of actual large-format drawings.

This collection of essays does not aim to illustrate a prefabricated theory of art, but rather follows the impulses given by artworks themselves. Philosopher and art critic Boris Groys writes about significant artists and artworks of the last century that have pushed his thinking and writing in a new direction.

Marxist geographer David Harvey opened his lecture with a fact: between 2011 and 2013 China consumed 50 percent more cement than the United States had in the entire twentieth century. In Abstract from the Concrete, he asks why. Spiraling outward—geographically and materially—Harvey travels from the building industry in China to the foreclosed housing market in the United States to the automobile industry in São Paolo and back again.

What do we mean when we say that something is contemporary? And what should the designator “contemporary art” refer to? An immediate response would be that contemporary art is an art of the present, that it somehow addresses and expresses the present. But what is this present? This first book in the Contemporary Condition series introduces some of the key issues concerning contemporaneity as a defining condition of our historical present.

A 13-volume set of Marcel Proust’s collected works was published in Yugoslavia in 1967. During the Bosnian civil war, these Proust sets fetched up to the equivalent of a full year’s salary in the Belgrade black markets. The set exhibited in Irena Haiduk’s “Seductive Exacting Realism” was seized by local police from Belgrade Kalenć Market in 1995. It was acquired at a public auction in 2014. It is missing volume number 12.

An incomplete guide for life. Each person written about is represented by a letter, and when an object turns into a subject it is marked in bold. This book was written from the middle. The contents of these pages have been modified numerous times. Notes were taken, ideas were rewritten—the ones that survived bare the most essential guidelines and wisdom for life.

Traction argues that contemporary art is defined by a moral economy of indeterminacy that allows curators and artists to imagine themselves on the other side of power. This self-positioning, in turn, leaves us politically bankrupt, intellectually stagnant, and aesthetically predictable. In his memoir-polemic, curator and writer Tirdad Zolghadr candidly reflects on his own experiences and the work of others.

With The Proposal Magid attempts to bring together architect Luis Barragán’s professional and personal archives by probing the architect’s official and private selves, and the interests of various individuals and governmental and corporate entities who have become the archives’ guardians. Magid, with permission of the Barragán family, commissioned a small amount of Barragán’s cremated remains to be transformed into a diamond.

What exactly is a behavioral object? How can it be analyzed, understood, theorized, experienced, and how can we conceive of works that possess the faculty of action and reaction to their environment and public? Examining three works by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, this book tackles these questions and defines a new field of research and practice.

Although the format of the rehearsal is used across a number of disciplines—film and theater as well as fine arts—it has been scarcely considered in historical and contemporary art discourses. With this in mind, Putting Rehearsals to the Test investigates the role and function of the rehearsal as a methodology, modus operandi, medium, site of representation, and reflection on processes of artistic production.

“New Ways of Doing Nothing,” a group exhibition that took place at Kunsthalle Wien in 2014, devoted itself to artistic production that opposes activity and instead gives an affirmative slant to forms of doing nothing or refraining. The book presents the displayed works and artists, but also continues the process that led to the exhibition.

Dysfunctional Comedy documents a series of public events, performances, and workshops conceptualized by German-American artist Olav Westphalen and organized with different partners, mainly in Sweden, between 2012 and 2015. An intersection of practices, ideas, and images, this artist’s book/catalogue engages with representatives of different traditions and genres in comedic and cartoonist practices to reflect on the rich history of stand-up comedy and political satire.

Through her videos, exhibitions, and photographic works, Kate Cooper explores the role of gender and what agency images might possess in and of themselves. Producing images becomes akin to building infrastructure; her computer-generated bodies are imbued with power and put to work. Cooper returns to the CGI models in her exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, to create a new series of works within the fictional space of the lookbook.

From 2012 to 2016, Foreign Affairs, the international performing arts festival of Berliner Festspiele, and the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) have been investigating the relations between the performing and visual arts. This book is both a question and a manual, collecting ideas, knowledge and experiences that stem from the theory and practices developed over the past few years.

Intersubjectivity, a two-volume collection of essays, is concerned with a new account of our ideas of what subjects are, and what it means for them to meet. The project explores these concepts in the context of the interaction of non-sentient beings, attempting to move beyond anthropomorphic theories of objectivity and materiality, as well as subjects whose boundaries resist definition.

The Silent University, initiated by artist Ahmet Öğüt in 2012, is an autonomous platform for academics who cannot share their knowledge due to their status of residence, because their degrees are not recognized or regaining access to academia is blocked for other reasons. It is a solidary school by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who contribute to the program as lecturers, consultants and researchers.

Brutalist Readings is a significant intervention into recent debates on the place of literature and writing in the context of contemporary art. Featuring essays on the highs and lows of the conceptual turn in poetics, avant-garde literary genealogies, and monographic pieces on Paul B. Preciado, Chris Kraus, and Pierre Guyotat, among others, Brutalist Readings explores the radical histories of writing, as well as its potential now.

Cave is a series of publications featuring commissioned and republished explorations, anecdotes, research, documents, case studies, essays, and scenarios on how to think and practice contemporary collecting. The first issue of Cave looks into the territory of the public collection considering it both a semantic ground for institutional collecting as well as political and cultural infrastructure.

Duskdust is an artist book by Susanne Kriemann. It takes as its starting point the former industrial site of limestone mining at Furilden peninsula on the northeastern coast of Gotland, Sweden’s biggest island. It is informed by the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with photography, labor, and archaeology and includes photographs taken during her residencies and site visits, archival material as well as text contributions by invited authors.

In her innovative take on early video art, Ina Blom considers the widespread notion that video technology was endowed with lifelike memory and agency. Blom documents, among other things, video’s emergence through the framework of painting, its identification with biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its construction of new realms of labor and collaboration.

This double publication offers further investigation into the work of the recipients and shortlisted artists of ninth installment of The Abraaj Group Art Prize. Syntax and Society, the first volume, reflects on the exhibition premise that considered the structure and meaning of language and the role it plays in society, while the second volume, Oh Shining Star Testify, focuses on the work of artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.

What does it mean to publish today? How the traditional publishing framework has been cast adrift, and which opportunities are surfacing in its stead, is discussed here by artists, publishers, and scholars through the examination of recent publishing concepts emerging from the experimental literature and art scene, where publishing is often part of an encompassing artistic practice.

Photographs, books, and knickknacks: artists collect a variety of objects. Individual Stories considers the collection as a portrait of its collector and also as an artistic method—as a process rather than an end result. This catalogue is a compilation of individual collections that could not be more different.

This publication is devoted to the phenomenon of the artist novel, and whether it can be considered to be a medium in its own right within the visual arts. Thanks to the contributions of a selected group of artists, writers, curators, and scholars this publication strives to demonstrate that literature, when treated by visual artists, can take place well beyond the space of the book.

Since the late 1980s, Tom Burr has been reusing appropriation strategies in his art. Not confined to his photographic and sculptural works, they also lend momentum to many of his writings. The artist creates assemblages of personal writings and sources, differing in nature and style, which he has used as both conceptual and aesthetic materials. Thirty-seven texts—works, poems, autobiographical texts, and portraits—have been compiled for the first time in this publication. Written over a period of twenty-four years, they are presented chronologically, enabling us to fully appreciate the conceptual and visual coherence and richness of Burr’s writings.

Kamran Sadeghi, New York-based musician and member of the Soundwalk Collective, contributed the musical score for Mario Pfeifer’s video installation Approximation in the digital age for a humanity condemned to disappear (2014). For his digital compositions Sadeghi, in dialogue with Pfeifer, took the field recordings made by missionary and anthropologist Martin Gusinde in 1923 of Yaghan chants in Bahia Mejillones as point of departure and reference.

The question of life has always been one of modernity’s main preoccupations, but it was the advent of the camera—with its ability to record moving creatures—that initiated a new phase in the human investigation of animal behavior. In the world of contemporary art, animals now occupy center stage. This volume brings together theory and art, showing how both turned to animals to find new ways of problematizing “life.”

When Marcos Lutyens arrived in Kassel in the summer of 2012, he didn’t know he would end up staying for the entire 100 days of documenta 13 to perform 340 hypnotic sessions with the audience. He also didn’t know that he would write a book about it: Memoirs of a Hypnotist: 100 Days, an intimate and hardly qualifiable document.

Having furnished solutions for Germany and Dubai, Ingo Niermann takes a new look at what nationhood can mean and accomplish today, finding inspiration, of all places, in North Korea. Now that the promise of global prosperity and abundance can technically be fulfilled, the time has come for a minimalist rethink of society.

Five essays that take an intimate look at what language’s role is in moments of dramatic change, and how to find meaning for artistic practices in these transformative conditions. Taking its cue from the aftermath of the events of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, Final Vocabulary doesn’t provide answers as much as it captures the spirit of the moment of searching in which the writers find themselves.

This unique publication, filled with annotated images, presents an inventory of design, furniture, and textiles produced for Fogo Island Inn. Each piece is a collaborative effort between artisans and craftspeople living on the island and designers from various parts of the world who were invited to engage with the history and communities of Fogo Island and Change Islands in Newfoundland, Canada.

From 2008 to 2014 Sabine Folie was the director of the Generali Foundation—more than twenty-years after (plus que 20 ans après) the collection and exhibition venue formed in 1988. This survey publication, richly illustrated with photographs and source materials, indexes and contextualizes the works acquired for this definitive collection during Folie’s tenure, along with giving insight into how the corresponding exhibitions were curated.

Published in conjunction with Flaka Haliti’s solo presentation conceived for the Kosovo Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, this book continues the artist’s invitation to encounter a visual field in which territorial boundaries are referenced and mediated by the sensory. Through the use of a saturated blue color altered by light and demarcated by architectural forms, the installation at the Venice Biennale reflects on the salient concept of the border.

Theater of Exhibitions analyzes “art after the end of art,” questioning whether inherited frameworks of making, theorizing, and exhibiting art still apply to contemporary practice. Drawing from his formation in theater and his own curatorial work, Hoffmann reflects on the spaces of contemporary art and ultimately positions the discipline of curating in the context of a larger cultural sphere shaped by the political, social, and economic conditions of its time.

Jaanus Samma’s exhibition “Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman’s Tale,” conceived for the Estonian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, tells the story of the former collective farm chairman Juhan Ojaste (1921–1990), a war hero and family man, who was declared “not suitable for work.” He was found guilty after being subjected to humiliating criminal trials in the 1960s for his involvement in homosexual acts in Soviet Estonia.

Two Days after Forever is not an exhibition catalogue, but rather an alternate temporal manifestation of the themes of the pavilion itself—in 2015, realized by artist Christodoulos Panayiotou and curated by Omar Kholeif. Adopting a variety of modes of address, this book acts as a kind of theater for considering the questions: How does one choreograph a history that is constantly being re-imagined? And, how do we speak of an anthropology of movement?

Textiles examines the referential and analytical qualities of textiles through both contemporary and historical works. The contributions in this book reflect on the complex interplay between the various functions and connotations of textiles, as well as the attendant conflicts and antagonisms that articulate relations of power and value and of the interaction of artistic processes with their overarching contexts.

Before History catalogues the exhibition for the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2015, which includes a new body of work by Yto Barrada, the winner of the prize, and existing work by shortlisted artists Sarnath Banerjee, Setareh Shahbazi, and Mounira Al Solh. The exhibition explores the layering of time through historical artifice. History here is considered as a constructed sphere, constantly in flux, simultaneously being buried and excavated.

Turning Inward comprises a selection of texts by international artists, critics, and curators, which aims to renegotiate the relationship between centers and peripheries in contemporary art worlds. If we are to turn our attention away from geographical—that is, horizontal—relations, we can conceive of the central and peripheral as vertical phenomena that can coexist spatially in the shapes of social constructions, genealogies, or epistemic formations.

Olaf Holzapfel explores the interstices between craft and art, and consequently, between orality and literacy. Much of his work presented in this catalogue—framework installations, hay images, and straw images are displayed in this book—was made together with farmers and craftspeople; by transforming age-old handiwork into contemporary art, Holzapfel unsettles the division between nature and culture, and tradition and modernity.

After the infamous split in the Situationist International in 1962, the Danish artist J. V. Martin was unexpectedly put in charge of the group’s Scandinavian section. This book is the first presentation of Martin’s strange trajectory within the SI, in which he would remain a member until the group’s dissolution in 1972.

This issue is smaller than large and larger than small: *medium*. Produced under the auspices of the exhibition “Transmitting Andy Warhol” at Tate Liverpool, it includes a history of the relations between drugs and groups by Ian Svenonius, an e-mail exchange between Paul Elliman and pioneer of voice synthesis Richard T. Gagnon, and a collage of voices that conjure Warhol’s aura by Michael Bracewell.

A deserted campsite, a car with no one inside … Is anybody home? What has happened here? Evolving from his graduation project at the University of Applied Arts Vienna entitled The Creator Has a Master Plan, which was awarded the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2014, Leander Schönweger developed an installation at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz that indicates mysteries, rather than offers solutions.

Michael Tedja’s Aquaholism is an exhibition catalogue, a published oeuvre, an artistic treatise, a poetry collection, a visual essay, an artist’s book. It is a polyphonic collage of text and image. More than seventeen years of artistic output unfold between the first and last pages. With its thoroughness, density, and associative power, the book embodies Tedja’s artistic essence: voluminous, interrelated, and in continuous motion.

Often referred to as the “narrative turn,” an explosion of interest in narrative practices at the end of the twentieth century was predicated on the notion that life itself is storied, or—as Jacques Ranciére put it—that the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought. Postmodernism itself was described as a “narrative turn” in which a rekindled interest in the fictive, the chronicle, and the anecdotal upstaged the symbolic unity of high modernism.

A catalogue as puzzling and conceptually elaborate as the exhibition it accompanies. This fully circular publication has no beginning or end, allowing for multiple points of entry and unconventional ways of reading—both from left to right and vice versa, as well as upside down and right-side up—seeking to interrupt learned behaviors and soliciting the reader’s active engagement.

Assign & Arrange: Methodologies of Presentation in Art and Dance aims to map the exchanges and transgressions between art and dance that characterize the manifold variety of relations between art and dance that can be observed today: dance performances taking place in art galleries or public spaces, for example, or visual artists developing specific presentational formats or exhibition displays that generate dimensions of dramaturgy and choreography for their visitors.

A symbolic interruption of everyday life, Yael Bartana’s Two Minutes of Standstill was a political act, social sculpture, and collective performance. This catalogue reveals the ideas behind the work and the process that led to its realization. The book includes several essays that discuss possible interpretations and consequences of the artwork, questioning the role of history and commemoration in Germany today.

One of the few things we have in common in contemporary society is the future of our children. But it seems that even the “we” of childhood has turned into a common ground for instrumentalization and competition. What happened to the reform pedagogy of the twentieth century? What is the status of childhood in the era of the consuming child and the playing adult? These are some of the questions addressed by this book.

This book is published on occasion of Ulrike Grossarth’s eponymous retrospective at the Generali Foundation in Vienna. Both the book and the exhibition trace the evolution of Gossarth’s practice, with a particular emphasis on her training as a dancer in the 1970s, to draw connections between the early years with her sculptural settings and actions and her most recent work, which engages with history more generally.

Vladimir’s Night is the chimerical final work by Maxim Komar-Myshkin, one of the most elusive and tragic figures in Israeli-Russian art. Part children’s book, part gory political assault and part erotic farce involving elaborately detailed paintings that draw from the most disparate sources, the work is not only Komar-Myshkin’s magnum opus, but an instrument of psycho-aesthetic retaliation against Vladimir Putin, whom the artist believed had a personal vendetta against him.

Ion Grigorescu’s diaries from the crucial years of 1970 to 1975 are a small literary and art-historical sensation. It not only corrects the facile reading of Grigorescu’s practice in the context of Conceptual art and performance, but provides insight into the artist’s multifocal thinking, which incorporates an original critique of modernism, the dystopian effects of an instrumentalized idea of reason and rationality, and an analysis of subjectivity.

This new volume brings together a selection of Jan Verwoert’s most recent writings. COOKIE! is a sequel to Verwoert’s Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want (edited by Vanessa Ohlraun, 2010), and third in a series of books published with the Piet Zwart Institute.

Stephanie Kloss’s photographs capture the mythos and utopianism of architecture in locations as diverse as Athens, Berlin, the United States, and Japan. Yet it is the commonality of modernist architectural form rather than the peculiarities of place, nation, or time that attracts her lens. Embedded in Kloss’s photographs, as the absorbing essays in this catalogue reveal, are invisible histories of human enterprise, idealism, and trauma.

Not Now! Now! engages with the politics of time in art: historical narratives and memory, the unforeseen rhythms of time, and the challenge of visualizing time. The book connects the postcolonial and queer debate around chronopolitics with artistic strategies that introduce breaks, stutter time, use citations and anachronisms, and introduce deferrals and collapses between time and meaning.

In this monograph the Swiss and Danish duo give us a deeper look into the emblematic and enigmatic, imaginative and often humorous works that the artists are known for. Bling blang, ching chang, give me some of that yin yang is the first survey of Yarisal & Kublitz’s works from 2010 to 2014.

The Imagines is based on the texts of four writers that each engage with a recent project by Ines Lechleitner. In response to each critical contribution, Lechleitner develops a visual section where elements and fragments of the selected projects build up their own narrative in relation to the specific space of this book.

Focusing on the startling increase of nationalism across Europe—made palpable in manifestations of fascist tendencies and the cult of heritage—this project points to the possibility and power of art to imagine futures that are not irrevocably determined by the present, but are invested with struggles fought here and now.

Slow Narration Moving Still takes Florian Zeyfang’s eponymous exhibition at the Bildmuseet Umeå as its starting point and ends with the artist’s newest works, shown at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. The arrested film, the silent video still, the rhythm of the slide projector—along the lines laid out by the experimental film, Zeyfang’s works express, in the language of the “minor medium,” a politics of form.

Cluster is a network of eight contemporary visual arts organizations each located in on the peripheries of European cities. Each organization is focused on commissioning, producing, and presenting contemporary art, and the nature of the work is often experimental, process-driven, involves research, is based on working with international and local artists, and often engages with diverse publics on a local level.

Ken Okiishi’s artwork has explored the subject in between digital and continuous space, the changing nature of authorship, memory, and perception, and the indeterminacy of consciousness as it clashes with the strictures of technology. This book is the first instance of considering Okiishi’s work from the last fifteen years as a heterogeneous whole.

We Are Living on a Star takes its title from a tapestry by Hannah Ryggen that hung in a government building known in Oslo until July 22, 2011. The events of July 22 transformed normality as we knew it and, consequently, the predictable as well. The artists and writers participating in We Are Living on a Star (the book and the exhibition it accompanies) contend with a range of issues relating to history, contemporaneity, normality, and expression.

Since his arrival in New York in 1969, the French artist Michel Auder has authored more than five hundred video works that chart five decades of the medium’s history. Employing new video formats as they become available, Auder has prolifically produced short and feature films as well as video installations and photography that transgress genres, gleaning the fields of art history, literature, commercial television, and experimental cinema.

Hu Fang’s Dear Navigator is a collection of ten short stories that takes us on a journey across time and space. Performance artists, astronauts, an airplane, Zen masters, and hunger artists are some of the companions of this exploration into hidden realities. Hu draws on the experience of everyday life, the past, and the future to create otherworldly stories where reality turns into fiction and science fiction becomes reality.

Performativity explores the in-between space when bodies or objects are left to perform. The fact that we are living more and more in an “immaterial” world, dominated by mediatization (which some call spectacle), the impact of globalization, the increasing tendency to think of politics as biopolitics—these different factors enhance performance over materiality, or object making.

This collection of essays and conversations is the quirky and exhilarating outcome of the collaborative endeavor to interrogate the very conditions of the current upsurge of the art/research articulation—the genealogical and political implications of the ways in which research rhetorics and policies are currently incorporated into the fields of contemporary art and art education.

Performing the Sentence brings into dialogue the ways that “performative thinking” has developed in different national and institutional contexts, within different disciplines in the arts, and the conditions under which it has developed in experimental art schools. This anthology is a collection of twenty-one essays and conversations that weave in and out of the two key areas of research and teaching within performative fine arts.

Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics takes the possibility of concrete truth as a working hypothesis and looks for direct action and concrete knowledge: for an art that not only represents and documents, but engages in specific political and social situations—and for an activism that not only acts for the sake of acting but searches for intelligent, creative means of self-empowerment.

Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. This second edition of a collection of his essays whirls around the appearance of the unworldly in art, culture, history, and the present.

In the third book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Beatriz Colomina traces the history of the modern architecture manifesto, with particular focus on Mies van der Rohe, and the play between the written and built work. This essay propels the manifesto form into the future, into an age where electronic media are the primary sites of debate, suggesting that new forms of manifesto are surely emerging along with new kinds of authorship, statement, exhibition, and debate.

No Is Not an Answer is the largest presentation of Marie-Louise Ekman’s art ever featured in the form of a book. As one of the most influential artists in Sweden in the postwar period, Ekman was both part of Swedish pop and the rebellious underground in the ’60s and ’70s.

This publication was created as part of the solo exhibitions “Cold Time” at the Kunstverein Braunschweig and “Modelling (Construction School)” at Arnolfini in Bristol. Even if the exhibitions were organized entirely independently of one another, the joint effort in producing this catalogue made it possible to go beyond simple exhibition documentation and provide a more in-depth view into the work of Kriemann.

“If I don’t trust this evidence why should I trust any evidence?,” Wittgenstein asked himself in “On Certainty.” Dénes Farkas’s work is haunted by a drama of not delivering a trust to a singular evidence of this world: a world as he found it. Hysterically reproduced paper maquettes of choreographed architecture, imprisoned within a clumsy, photographic frame, are abstract shelters for imagined and unspoken texts. Words are characters in performance of a world as a text.

The Human Snapshot draws upon a 2011 conference of the same name. The conference contributions and subsequent essays examine contemporary forms of humanism and universalism as they circulate and are produced in art and photography. The look toward these two terms stems from theorist Ariella Azoulay’s research on the seminal exhibition “The Family of Man,” first installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955.

The work of art has often been a battleground—its decorative and formal aspects positioned against its nature as an embodiment of cognitive acts. Leonardo da Vinci’s claim that art be a “cosa mentale” is winning at last: recent debates around art schools and their methods, of which this book is a vast survey, demonstrate that, now more than ever, art is considered the result of a thinking process.

Over the past decade Gardar Eide Einarsson’s exhibition practice has followed a highly consistent thematic trajectory, continuously tracing out what one could call an “iconography of resistance.” The signs and symbols we can read out of Einarsson’s works often refer to fundamental conflictual structures between a society of control following September 11, 2001, and the individual’s rebellion against and threat to central power.

Since the so-called dematerialization of currencies and art practices in the late 1960s and early 1970, we have witnessed a move into what Joshua Simon calls an economy of neomaterialism. With this, several shifts have occurred: the focus of labor has moved from production to consumption, the commodity has become the historical subject, and symbols now behave like materials.

Once described as “Italy gone Marxist,” Georgia, located in both an advantageous and vulnerable geopolitical position between the Black Sea, Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, enjoys a Mediterranean climate and viniculture in combination with a community-oriented and self-determined spirit. This guidebook maps the social, urban, and art discourses of the country’s post-Soviet years as seen from its hilly capital of Tbilisi.

Ulf Linde is without doubt one of the world’s most important interpreters of Marcel Duchamp’s art. For more than half a century, he has pursued intense studies of Duchamp’s entire oeuvre and has made perfect replicas of all his major works. His as-yet unpublished manuscript scrutinizing the mathematical principles behind Duchamp’s art reveals what Linde claims to be the key to Duchamp’s poetic universe.

The contemporary art world has become more inhospitable to “serious” intellectual activity in recent years. Set against this context, Gavin Butt and Irit Rogoff raise the question of “seriousness” in art and culture. What is seriousness exactly, and where does it reside? Is it a desirable value in contemporary culture?

This publication explores themes of the exhibition through its terms—not, however, to confine into isolated conceptual categories, but to interconnect. These terms characterize exhibiting, and emphasize a “between-ness.” Examining a term lays bare its ruptures, shifts, or recreations, as well as social, societal, and cultural changes that have the power to structure through historical conjecture.

At a moment when narrating experiences seems more important than having them, Peter Wächtler’s writing foregrounds different narrative techniques and traditions as means of rationalizing one’s place in the world, of grappling with and giving meaning to one’s existence. Here, the social totality creeps into the picture. Come On compiles ten texts written between 2011 and 2013.

In his influential 1986 text, now translated into English for the first time, Swiss artist Rémy Zaugg (1943–2005) laid out fundamental ideas on the art museum. For him, the museum is an everyday tool that enables the encounter between viewer and work—raising the question of the kind of architecture appropriate for such a space.

The book is dedicated to Romanian artist Geta Bratescu, one of the most remarkable personalities of the Eastern European postwar avant-garde. The main part of the publication comprises visual materials and texts written by the artist that span several decades of her activity, outlining the exceptional manner in which she has appropriated the lesson of modernism and interrelated it with conceptual challenges.

The artist’s house is a prism through which to view not only the artistic practice of its inhabitant, but also to apprehend broader developments in sculpture and contemporary art in relation to domestic architecture and interior space. Based on a series of interviews and site visits with living artists about the role of their home in relation to their work, Kirsty Bell looks at the house as receptacle, vehicle, model, theater, or dream space.

The 60th Jahresring takes the form of a compilation of artist interviews and offers a snapshot of a highly active art scene that stretches from Berlin, as a new international center for art. Nicolaus Schafhausen put a series of questions to thirty-one art practitioners, less geared toward the artists’ respective praxis and more toward the conditions under which it arises.

A fundamental reordering of artistic production and a transformation of the art field are about to take place. Independent education programs, self-organized urban planning, and artistic practices in the field of scientific research, among other initiatives, have unfolded over the last few years. This publication addresses this wide field, focusing on theoretical reflections and insights into alternative artistic working models.

Walter Benjamin’s views on color, E. H. Gombrich’s theory of perception, Mel Bochner’s and Liz Kotz’s narratives of Conceptualism, and Sarah Thornton’s peregrinations in the “art world” are but a few of the topics explored in this volume of essays. In an era of hyper-specialization and rigid academic protocols, Barry Schwabsky revives a form of criticism one imagined barely existed—a criticism of varied interests and passionate opinions.

This catalogue accompanies Taylor’s exhibition “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter 5)” at Fogo Island Gallery, which follows his two-part residency with Fogo Island Arts in 2010 and 2012. Featuring essays by Zoë Gray and Saelan Twerdy, and Taylor in conversation with Patrick Staff and Robin Simpson, the book also presents the artist’s portfolio An Index Describing the Individual 19 Thoughts about Stripes and Dots Arranged on a Vitrine Made of Brass and Glass.

In the last two hundred years, “art” has become one of the most fetishized concepts in Western civilization. The idea according to which certain people—also known as artists—would provide the world with their inner vision is a modern myth, but has proved to be a contemporary reality. Since so much art now considers itself as cultural production, mystical creation has been turned into a minority paradigm.

Monday Begins on Saturday is the title of a fantasy novel from the 1960s about a magical research institute in the Soviet Union, written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It is also the title of the first edition of Bergen Assembly, a new triennial of contemporary art.

The moving image has irrevocably redefined our experience and construction of history. In the contemporary economy of time, history has become an image in motion, a series of events animated and performed through various media. Analyzing a variety of films, video pieces, and performances, Sven Lütticken evaluates the impact that our changing experience of time has had on the actualization of history in the present.

In Kate Newby’s site-responsive installations, handcrafted and found objects are often combined with words or phrases to form artworks that engage with the particularities of place. The New Zealand artist’s intimate engagement with materials and nonhierarchical involvement with space exhibit a sophisticated understanding of the role that architecture plays in the shaping of thought and perception, our sense of self in the body and in community.

Archaeology of the Digital delves into the genesis and establishment of digital tools for design conceptualization, visualization, and production at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Conceived as an object-based investigation of four pivotal projects that established distinct directions in architecture’s use of digital tools, the book highlights the dialogue between computer sciences, architecture and engineering that was at the core of these experiments.

“The work of Lene Berg probes questions about the difference between truth and falsehood, between reality and fantasy, between veracity and mendacity. Berg crafts short, witty, incisive, and often humorous filmic stories, using lo-fi means such as drawing, photocopies, collage, and her own as well as found footage, to interrogate the question of history and historiography.”—Katerina Gregos.

Tecoh is a sprawling series of buildings designed by the artist Jorge Pardo deep in the Yucatán jungle. Taking over six years to fabricate, and engaging existing ruins of a nineteenth-century hacienda, the project is by far the artist’s most ambitious work to date. This book offers the only available glimpse of the project, as it was primarily conceived as a private residence.

Invalid Format is an archive of the widespread publishing activities of Triple Canopy, the editorial collective and online magazine based in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin. The book explores how works produced for the screen might be transposed to the codex in a way that recalls that former context while also fully inhabiting the page.

In a Manner of Reading Design features different texts and artistic contributions meant to create a space in which debate can unfold, a debate that considers the impossibility of an unbiased position and as such reminds us of our dependence on the other in any conception—and any project design might aspire to.

Beyond the lunatic fringe views regarding the end of the world, a more constructive reading of the phenomenon is found in new age circles claiming that 2012 might be the beginning of a higher consciousness in humanity, coming to the realization that, in fact, Western systems have not brought prosperity and fulfillment to everybody as once imagined.

The New York gallery American Fine Arts, Co.—whose name today is largely synonymous with that of its gallerist, Colin de Land (1955–2003)—represents a gallery practice in which a decided deviation from conventional models overlaps with successful activities within the framework of the art market. Faced with the obvious risk of romanticization, it appears all the more important to pursue an understanding of how American Fine Arts, Co. functioned as a gallery.

What is “work” today and what is its relation to art? What is the position of the artist if “creativity” has become a commodity? How can the artist’s conditions of production be described, and what role can art and architecture play in societal change?

Although Marianne Heier abandons traditional exhibition spaces in connection with her projects, Art with a capital A is still always measured against other social constructs. At this point of intersection, Heier looks at the typical features of the various economies or values of given fields and how they overlap and collide. This project renders visible societal structures and consequences of such structures.

Because the curatorial has clear performative sides, ones that seek to challenge the status quo, it also includes elements of choreography, orchestration, and administrative logistics—like all pract