Amateur is the first comprehensive publication about Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s moving image works, and their accompanying installations. Developed over the past ten years of her practice, these works explore communication and interaction between individuals, often against the backdrop of a unique public location, in order to cast attention on repressed, incomplete, and unresolved histories. Through the staging of these encounters on film, van Oldenborgh enables multiple perspectives and voices to coexist, and brings to light political, social, and cultural relationships and how they are manifested through social interactions. The publication is generously illustrated and brings together a wealth of texts by artists, curators, and writers who have been key interlocutors with van Oldenborgh, and who each offer in-depth observations and reflections on a work from her oeuvre. These authors include Nana Adusei-Poku, Ricardo Basbaum, Frédérique Bergholtz, Eric de Bruyn, Binna Choi, David Dibosa, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Avery F. Gordon, Tom Holert, Nataša Ilić, Charl Landvreugd, Sven Lütticken, Anna Manubens, Ruth Noack, and Grant Watson. Amateur is published in conjunction with the Heineken Prize for Art, which van Oldenborgh received in 2014 and is supported by the Mondriaan Fund. Copublished with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, and The Showroom ↑ ↓ ↓

Published together with the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, this reference book and catalogue raisonné surveys the history of the independent publishing house Beau Geste Press (BGP) through the books published by its founding members Felipe Ehrenberg, Martha Hellion and David Mayor from 1971 to 1976. ↑ ↓ ↓

The Long Road to Xico, 1991–2015 is the first monograph of Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves, and the outcome of her solo show at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville in 2015. It gathers more than twenty projects realized between 1991 and 2015, including rarely viewed early works that help us see her most recent production from a new perspective. 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—in the United States and Brazil—and an early participant in discourses around “postcolonialism” and “ecology.” Together with these materials, the book contains essays by the editor, Pedro de Llano, and T. J. Demos, professor of art and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016). Containing an exhibition history and bibliography with a record of Alves’s activities in art, literature, and politics since the late 1970s as well, The Long Road to Xico, 1991–2015 establishes itself as the main publication on the artist’s work to date. ↑ ↓ ↓

In the style of a catalogue raisonné, Reto Pulfer’s comprehensive monograph, Zustandskatalog: Catalog of States and Conditions, follows the artist’s work over the past fifteen years. Excerpts from the artist’s novels as well as insightful texts by Anselm Franke and Benoît Maire are juxtaposed with 475 documentary photographs of Pulfer’s technical drawings, one-off exhibitions, large-scale installations, and performances. Categories such as living ceramics, food advice, ghostology, synesthesia, and transformation are woven throughout the book, giving unique insight into the ideas and imagination that are part of the work itself. ↑ ↓ ↓

Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Born in New York, she had her first poem published while still at school and her last the year she died of cancer. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. This edition brings Lorde’s essential poetry, speeches and essays, including ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, together in one volume for the first time. ↑ ↓ ↓

This book is considerad a classic in Middle East vernacular architecture. This work, published in 1981 by the MIT Press, shows up in a new revised and extended edition. The content remains a necessary reference,dueto its extraordinary documentary value, that includes the content of the first edition and completes it with material collected in 2006, giving now a global vision of the unified Yemen territory. ↑ ↓ ↓

The box set publication No more racing in circles – just pacing within lines of a rectangle is Tris Vonna-Michell’s reflection on the impact of performing several narrations during a concentrated timespan over a number of years. The package contains forty-four sheets printed on a Heidelberg offset press, while the accompanying colophon introduces each sheet in the box set; together they represent the performative aspect of Vonna-Michell´s practice in the form of score and transcription. No more racing in circles – just pacing within lines of a rectangle addresses several time markers in Vonna-Michell’s practice as well as the durational aspect of writing and performing. Limited edition artist’s box set of 200 copies containing forty-four loose pages ↑ ↓ ↓

A new wave of artistic activism has emerged in recent years in response to the ever-increasing dominance of authoritarian neoliberalism. Activist practices in the art field, however, have been around much longer. As Oliver Marchart claims, there has always been an activist undercurrent in art. In this book he traces trajectories of artistic activism in theater, dance, performance, and public art, and investigates the political potential of urbanism, curating, and “biennials of resistance.” What emerges is a conflictual aesthetics that does not conform with traditional approaches to the field and that activates the political potential of artistic practice. Oliver Marchart is a political theorist and philosopher. He is currently professor of political theory at the University of Vienna. His books include Post-foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (2007), Thinking Antagonism: Political Ontology after Laclau (2018), and the forthcoming Post-foundational Theories of Democracy: Reclaiming Freedom, Equality, Solidarity. ↑ ↓ ↓

Those who feel the truth of 14th century German theologian Meister Eckhart’s words, “When the soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it,” might do well to consider Franck André Jamme’s latest book, Tantra Song: Tantric Painting from Rajasthan from this point of view. It is an evocation of the image as a threshold leading to new dimensions of meaning, a revelatory understanding that some images are more than mere data; they are instead vital seeds, living carriers of possibility. ↑ ↓ ↓

This book, the first critical study of Jean-Luc Moulène's work, brings together leading scholars to examine the artist's diverse aesthetic strategies and interests in the relationships between social and political arenas and systems and orders, including geometry, mathematics, social sciences, and human behavior. Featured essays also examine Moulène's theoretical and playful inquiries into the plasticity of materials and the ways we see and understand both still and moving images. ↑ ↓ ↓

Die Hexe ist tot, ermordet – aber hat sie’s nicht genau so gewollt? Sprachgewaltig, schmutzig und mit der Sogkraft eines Wirbelsturms schreibt Fernanda Melchor, eine der wichtigsten jungen Stimmen Lateinamerikas, über die viel zu alltägliche Gewalt gegen Frauen. La Matosa, eine gottverlassene Gegend in der mexikanischen Provinz. In der brütenden Hitze bewegt sich eine Gruppe von Kindern durchs Zuckerrohrdickicht. Zwischen Plastiktüten und Schilf stoßen sie auf eine Tote, ihr Gesicht ist zu einer grausig lächelnden Grimasse entstellt: La Bruja, die Hexe, eine von den Dorfbewohnern so gefürchtete wie fasziniert umkreiste Heilerin. Manche sagen, in ihrer schwefligen Küche braue sie Tränke gegen Krankheit und Leid, andere sagen, die Alte treibe es mit dem Teufel. An Mordmotiven fehlt es nicht: Eifersucht, Drogenhandel, Leidenschaften, die besser nicht ruchbar werden – und hat die Hexe nicht doch einen Schatz versteckt? Selbst die Polizei sucht nach dem Geld … »Saison der Wirbelstürme« ist die Chronik dieses unvermeidlichen Todes und zugleich die schwindelerregende Reise ins finstere Herz eines Landes, das bis in den letzten Winkel von Gewalt durchdrungen ist – vor allem gegen Frauen. Fernanda Melchor schafft eine brodelnde Atmosphäre, in der jede Geste der Zärtlichkeit im nächsten Augenblick in Brutalität umschlagen kann, gegen die kein Kraut, kein Zauberspruch mehr hilft. ↑ ↓ ↓

Iman Mersal intricately weaves a new narrative of motherhood, moving between interior and exterior scapes, diaries, readings, and photographic representations of motherhood to question old and current representations of motherhood and the related space of unconditional love, guilt, personal goals, and traditional expectations. What is hidden in narratives of motherhood in fictional and nonfictional texts as well as in photographs? This is the fourth book in the Kayfa ta series, a publishing initiative of Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis. Each book in the series is a monographic essay commissioned in the style of how-to manuals that situation themselves in the space between the technical and the reflective, the everyday and the speculative, the instructional and the intuitive, and the factual and the fictional. Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet and associate professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. ↑ ↓ ↓

The Memory of The Archive: Christoforos Savva in the 1954–1968 Cypriot Press & Literary Periodicals is published on the occasion of the survey exhibition project Untimely on Time: Christoforos Savva (1924–1968), co-organised by the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture, Cultural Services and Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia and presented at the State Gallery of Contemporary Art – SPEL, Nocosia, Cyprus, between 31 January and 31 March 2019. The book is a compilation and an archive of press cuttings, consisting of more than two hundred articles, commentaries, reports, and advertisements that appeared in the mainstream Cypriot press and literary periodicals between 1954 and 1968 and relate to the Christoforos Savva. The press cuttings are treated as objects with a story, a narrative worth telling with the goal of shedding new light on the artist’s life and career. ↑ ↓ ↓