The story of Helen Khal, the woman at the center of a significant group of artists who altered the course of modern and contemporary art in the Middle East and beyond.

Newly commissioned texts frame extensive visual documentation of a series of exhibition episodes drawing on the legacy of the Eastern European neo-avantgarde and the work of artist Mladen Stilinović.

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. 

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.

In Playing the City: Interviews, Matthias Ulrich, curator of the Schirn project, asks fifty-one of the involved artists ten central questions about the participatory and collaborative art context. Their answers and comments provide a telling picture of the multiple forms of interactive, cooperative, and interdisciplinary practices in contemporary art.