Oraib Toukan
Sundry Modernism
Materials for a Study of Palestinian Modernism

With Sundry Modernism, Oraib Toukan presents an informal register of modernist Palestinian architecture—an assemblage of images and stories collected from 2013 to 2015 in the cities of Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Jericho.

€15.00

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Series
A critical spatial practice is a means of rethinking one’s modes of action and codes of conduct. Edited by architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen, this series reinvents its internal structure according to the content of each volume: a toolbox that ranges from single-authored essays to conversations, manifestos, fiction, investigative journalism, historical studies, and artistic interventions, each accompanied by an artist contribution. The series follows the tradition of the discipline of architecture using the publication format as a testing ground for ideas.
Critical Spatial Practice
Founded in 2003 by Isabelle Graw and Daniel Birnbaum, Institut für Kunstkritik is a program that examines art criticism and connected disciplines. As well as single-authored books, this series comprises volumes based on symposia and lecture series, bringing together contributions by art historians, critics, artists, and writers. The goal of the series is to provide insights into current debates on the shifting relationship among criticism, art, and the market.
Institut für Kunstkritik
imagine/otherwise presents critical biographies of underrepresented queer, non-binary, or female-identifying artists. Edited by Dr. Omar Kholeif and presented in collaboration with artPost21, the series emphasizes the concept of “female worlding” with books that serve as field guides into previously unexplored, overlooked, or inaccessible artistic lives. The overall proposition of the series (to “imagine” a world “otherwise”) stems from the desire to find a different way of writing and reading about art. Can art be examined unreservedly, unburdened of the limits imposed by the dominant hand of hegemony? Current editorial advisors for the series include Skye Arundhati Thomas, Zoe Butt, Carla Chammas, Alison Hearst, Sarah Perks and Sofia Victorino.
Imagine Otherwise
News
BOOK LAUNCH_PARIS

Writings and Interviews

To mark the release of Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Writings and Interviews, Shmorevaz is hosting a weekend launch in Paris.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz (1946-2024) was an acclaimed visual artist known for his performances, installations and curatorial flair. He was also a writer. This volume, the first comprehensive collection of writings by the artist, includes seminal interviews, chitchats, jokes, performance reports, insightful statements and letters in essay form, as well as rare documents, such as early surviving leaflets, typewriter handouts and hard-to-find articles. Spanning 1971-2023, the book unlocks the work of an artist considered to be a refreshing role model for a new generation of culture mavens and style savants. Drawing form literature, modernist architecture, interior design, art theory, glam rock and camp culture, the collection reveals the artist’s inner self alongside the art, social flânerie and the goings-on of his time. Entertaining and witty, the texts stand out brilliantly with their early acumen and inclusivity, while setting a new template for an expression of queerness through writing. With access to Chaimowicz’s personal material and photographs, curator and editor Alexis Vaillant is a guide to the artist’s writings. This book presents readers with an in-depth look into Chaimowicz’s quixotic shaping of his written work, which comes to life as a knowing and longing prose for the twenty-first century.

Friday 7 March, 6-9pm
Saturday 8 & Sunday 9 March, 2-6pm
Shmorevaz, Paris 

Free entry and open to the public.

 

 

BOOK LAUNCH_LONDON

Planetary Realism: Art Against Apocalypse

Josephine Berry will be in conversation with Ron Gray and Georgia Perkins, on the occasion of the launch of Planetary Realism: Art Against Apocalypse.

The devastation left in the wake of modernity and globalization is revealing a fragile and unfamiliar planet, and humanity has awakened to a new real. If the old “realist” tools of objectivism have contributed to capitalist society’s divorce from the natural world, how are artists finding new ways to make us really see – and feel- the planet?

Surveying a body of planet-facing art, communal practices, and activism, Josephine Berry investigates art’s power to break with capitalist realism and decarbonize the imagination. With chapters on feeling as world-making, the rupture of petroleum landscapes, artists’ urban exodus, and migration as survival, Planetary Realism delves deeply into art’s necessary reimagining of life on Earth.

Saturday 1 March, 4-6pm
FormaHQ
London

Find out more about the event here.   

Free entry. RSVP is required: rsvp@forma.org.uk 

BOOK LAUNCH_BRUSSELS

A Moratorium on New Construction

Join Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and Lara Almarcegui on the occasion of the launch of A Moratorium on New Construction. The event will be moderated by Nikolaus Hirsch.

To build is to destroy, writes Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. From steel bolts to concrete blocks to wood flooring to polyester insulation panels, every single component of the built environment is the product of extractive processes. Driven by greedy economies, the global enterprise of space production expands, impacting climate, earth, water, humans, and non-humans everywhere. However housing is both a human right and the mandate of design disciplines: How to navigate the need for housing versus the destructive practice of construction?

Engaging with unsettling questions, A Moratorium on New Construction envisions a massive value shift for our existing stock. From housing redistribution to reinviting value generation, from anti-extractive measures to profound structural changes, from curricula reforms to purging the exploitative culture of the office, an entire rewiring of design processes and construction lays ahead. Somewhere between a thought experiment and a call for action, A Moratorium on New Construction is a leap of faith to envision a less extractive future, made of what we have: Not demolishing, not building new, but building less, building with what exists, inhabiting it differently, and caring for it.

Thursday 6 March, 7pm
CIVA
Brussels 

Find out more about the event here.  

This is a ticketed event. Please book your ticket here. 

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Denise Ferreira da Silva
Unpayable Debt

Unpayable Debt offers a black feminist reading of the political architecture of the global present. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, the concept of the unpayable debt relates post-Enlightenment versions of ethical and economic value to colonial and racial subjugation.

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Valerie Solanas
Up Your Ass

Valerie Solanas’s rarely published, legendary play explodes social and sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces them through her signature irreverence and wit, incisiveness and camp.

€12.00
Martin Herbert
Tell Them I Said No

This collection of essays by Martin Herbert considers various artists who have withdrawn from the art world or adopted an antagonistic position toward its mechanisms. Providing a counterargument to this concept of self-marketing, Herbert examines the nature of retreat, whether in protest, as a deliberate conceptual act, or out of necessity.

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T. J. Demos
Decolonizing Nature
Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology

By engaging artists’ widespread aesthetic and political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the globe—looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural developments in the Global South and North—Decolonizing Nature offers a significant and original contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics.

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e-flux journal
Navigation Beyond Vision

For Farocki, the computer-animated, navigable images that constitute the twenty-first century’s “ruling class of images” call for new tools of analysis, prompting him to ask: How does the shift from montage to navigation alter the way images—and art—operate as models of political action and modes of political intervention?

€18.00
Beatrice von Bismarck
The Curatorial Condition

In The Curatorial Condition, Beatrice von Bismarck considers the field of activity and knowledge that relates to the exhibiting of art and culture. The curatorial, in her analysis, is a domain of practice and meaning with its own conditions, rules, and procedures.

€22.00
Alexandra Midal
Design by Accident
For a New History of Design

In Design by Accident, Alexandra Midal declares the autonomy of design—in and on its own terms. This meticulously researched work proposes not only a counterhistory but a new historiography of design, shedding light on overlooked historical landmarks and figures while reevaluating the legacies of design’s established luminaries from the nineteenth century to the present.

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Nicolas Bourriaud
Inclusions
Aesthetics of the Capitalocene

The current ecological crisis brings about a new relational landscape: an unprecedented collapse of distances creates interspecies promiscuities and a crisis of the human scale. In his latest book, Inclusions, Nicolas Bourriaud proposes that artists are the anthropologists of this new era.

€20.00
Ina Blom
Houses to Die In
And Other Essays on Art

The essays assembled in this volume were all written during the past twenty years or so—a period in which Ina Blom pursued art critical writing alongside more academic work and when the boundaries between the two genres were at times deliberately blurred.

€22.00
€16.50
Isabelle Graw
Three Cases of Value Reflection
Ponge, Whitten, Banksy

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.

€12.00
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