Upcoming events
07. November â 10. November 2024
Offprint Paris
Opening:
07. November 2024, 7pm
at:
Pavillon de lâArsenal
21 Bd Morland,
75004 Paris,
France
More information & Programme here
15. November â 17. November 2024
ArtsLibris
MACBA Barcelona
Opening:
15. November 2024, 12pm
at:
Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes,
627, L’Eixample,
08015 Barcelona, Spain
More information & Programme here
29. November â 01. December 2024
Brussels Ass Book Fair
Opening:
29. November 2024, 5pm
at:
K1, Avenue du Port
Havenlaan 1
1000 Brussels
More information & Programme here
12. December â 14. December 2024
Cairo Art Book Fair
Instituting: space-making, refusal, and organizing in the arts and beyond
Edited by Gigi Argyropoulou in cooperation with Olga Schubert and Kostas Tzimoulis
This publication seeks to continue previous trans- formative moments, movements, and encounters, as a call for new densities through visible and invisible plottings. Engaging with ongoing questions of possible infrastructures in situations of brokennessâas Lauren Berlant notes in the opening quoteâthis volume brings together practices, ways of being together, of both fleeing and inhabiting spaces. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten propose âcommitment to the impermanence of form because form is to be used, like an everyday thingâ and that by using it you âdeform it . . . acceding to and enacting its transformation, in and for the everyday.â In this publication, Instituting is discussed as a continuous process that is integral to the everyday, making and tearing apart, using and deforming. In a sense, this book hopes to function as an infrastructure for use. An incomplete composition that has already started in many places.
This publication is the result of the Instituting edition of HKWâs New Alphabet School, Athens, June 2021, realized in cooperation between Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, EIGHT/TO ÎΧΤΊâCritical institute for arts and politics Athens, and Goethe Institut Athens.
GbegbetopiaâMaison Gbegbe: An Art-Based Community and Spiritual Center
Gbegbetopia is an outcome of the artistic research project âMaison Gbegbeâ Exchanges and Invisible Entanglements,â a collaboration between the Union des Cultes Traditionels du Togo (UCTT), LâAfricaine dâarchitecture, LomeĚ, and art&dialogue e.V., Berlin.
Maison Gbegbe is a cultural center in Togo that aims to bring together different cultures, traditions, religions, and knowledge systems, and to create a space for exchange, reconcil- iation, and critical thinking. The project is a collaborative effort involving members of the Union des Cultes Traditionnels du Togo (UCTT) in Agouegan, LâAfricaine dâArchitecture, art&dialogue e.V., and a pre-configuration committee. Maison Gbegbe uses artistic research as a collaborative process to address ecological and social crises and to shift paradigms in the way people engage with knowledge and knowledge transfer. The project proposes to sensitize international audiences to other knowledge systems beyond Western epistemology, and to provide opportunities for locals and others to reconnect with and rediscover traditional African cosmologies along the Togolese coast. Maison Gbegbe is intended to serve as a space for exchange and dialogue with the goal of preserving and transmitting traditional and spiritual knowledge. It hopes to provide a place for returned and restituted West African cultural and spiritual assets to be reintegrated into an appropriate context. This publication provides an overview of the process of and motivations behind its creation.
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I Come from a Long Line of People Who Donât Use Words
Tiziana La Melia
The book I Come from a Long Line of People Who Don’t Use Words is a collection of poems by artist Tiziana La Melia, translated into Italian. It includes a selection of poems from her first two books of poetry and a new body of work titled The Simple Life, which focuses on collective healing through food preparation and magic culinary therapies.
The formation of the book was the result of a dedicated collaboration between the author, the editor Sonia DâAlto, and the contributors Federica Bueti, Claudia Gangemi, and Elisa Ferrari. The editor, in her text, mentions the collaborative process: âBy diluting and postponing work plans and distilling desires into semantic concerns, the roles of editor, translator, author, and proofreader at times eroded, becoming sensitive to the possibilities of multiple voices, reciprocity, and collective decision making.â
The English title of the publication, I Come from a Long Line of People Who Donât Use Words, refers to the authorâs inheritance. This heritage includes experiences of instability, migration, and rural culture in Southern Italy. The author depicts this subaltern condition in both urban and rural settings, specifically Vancouver and the Okanagan Valley, where the poet lives.
La Meliaâs artistic practice is influenced by surrealism, automatism, pop culture, and various forms of mystical counterculture. She follows a lineage of political and spiritual experiments that challenge modern cultural heritage and familial structures. This lineage is related to an aesthetic of psychedelic storytelling, therapies, and ecstatic experiences that help to reimagine reality.
The Publication also comprises a graphic design insert of The Simple Life by Roxanne Maillet, the Editorâs Note: How to write a garden, how to eat a syntax, how to read the new moon by Sonia DâAlto, A Secret-Gushing-Cunt-Filled Garden by Allison Grimaldi Donahue and What Gets Through the Gaps of the Grid by Federica Bueti.
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The Forgive Us Our Trespasses / Vergib uns unsere Schuld Reader explores radical and emancipatory significations and fabulations of trespassing, turning towards practices that transgress and reshape the boundaries of, among other dimensions, currency, governance, religion, spirituality, language, and artificial intelligence. Complementing the thematic concerns of the exhibition of the same name, this collection of essays, poems, artistic contributions, and a sermon, conceptually maps the distance between the English word âtrespassesââwith its double meaning of to sin or to physically treadâand the German word âSchuldââreferring to sin and guilt but with etymological proximities to debt (Schulden). Deviating from the line of prayer that lends the project its name, the contributors do not ask for forgiveness for the various trespasses they elucidateâbe they religious, social, class-related, national, sexual, or disciplinary in natureâbut rather assert them as modes of transgression, as forms of rebellion, and as possibilities for transcendence.
Contributions by Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Egidija ÄiricaitÄ, YĂĄsnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, Toussaint M. Kafarhire, Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, Chao Tayiana Maina, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Tavia Nyongâo, Mary Louise Pratt, Josefine Rauch, Deborah A. Thomas, Senthuran Varatharajah, Yuanwen Zhong
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Contested Landscapes
Edited by Sandra Schäfer
Contested Landscapes is dedicated to different rural regionsâtheir landscapes, their producers, and their work. The paths of the family of the artist Sandra Schäfer and those of the famous German photographer August Sander cross in the Westerwald, a rural area in Germany shaped by farming and mining. A hundred years ago, the photographer August Sander captured his series of peasants there including the artistâs relatives. Schäfer’s âhomecomingâ is represented in the book by three works dealing with the changes of the landscape, its farming, and Sanderâs photographs, as well as amateur ones from Schäferâs family. Contributions from Schäferâs interlocutors reflect on how these ghosts from the past appear in her work. Further artists and architects research rural cultivation in Thuringia, southern Sweden, Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Syria, and southern Colombia. In different ways, they deal with the issues of agriculture, feminism, and global economy. The book therefore also takes up the pressing question of how agricultural production could be rethought within capitalism.
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I Speak Radio opens with Bromleyâs eponymous multimedia essay on the feminist appropriation of early radio technology in the 1920s. A Voice Exists in Voicing, the series of radio essays and sonic portraits with which Bromley opened the Manifesta Radio in Prishtina in the summer of 2022, comprises the core of the book. The accompanying visual element to this section is a series of drawings by Michael Fesca. Contextualizing texts by Catherine Nichols and Hedwig Fijen provide an introduction to A Voice Exists in Voicing.
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Text in Public â Zine Performances and Rants is the first monograph of writing by visual artist Emma Wolf-Haugh interconnecting performative works, performance scripts and assemblage texts. The publication gathers together these texts, traversing particular cultural and historical sites, the lived present and imagined futures, incorporating auto-fiction and anecdote as part of a tradition of queer-transfeminist working class vernacular and ethics, promiscuous and adept at working within limitations.
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Die monografische Publikation âHelke Sander: I like chaos, but I donât know, whether chaos likes meâ umfasst Texte aus âFrauen und Filmâ, der ersten feministischen deutschsprachigen Filmzeitschrift, die 1974 von Helke Sander gegrĂźndet und herausgegeben wurde. Die fĂźr die Publikation ausgewählten Texte fokussieren zentrale Fragestellungen der feministischen Filmarbeit, Ăśkonomische sowie recht-liche Bedingungen und vor allem deren strukturelle Bedingtheit in gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen und ihre radikale Kritik daran.
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The publication My Name Is Language (2020) explores the key tenets of artist Nicoline van Harskampâs research and practice, such as the contemporary use and modification of languages, a treatment of names as spoken language rather than spelled identity markers, and the practice of self-naming. In the fictive worlds represented in this book, society is not centralized, not oversized, and self-naming is brought forward as a form of self-empowerment and resistance.
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eBhishâ presents a chorus of voices on notions of Black social life, public communion and humanities of the Indian Ocean. While some contributors respond to the ongoing series eBhishâ others share their critical perspectives and ponder on the intimacy and vastness of being Black at the beach.
Contributions by Thulile Gamedze, Russel Hlongwane, Nomusa Makhubu, Amogelang Maledu, Kopano Maroga, Lindiwe Mngxitama, Maneo Mohale, Vusumzi Nkomo, Julie Nxadi and Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose
Creative Knowledge Resources presents the launch events of eBhishâ an anthology edited by Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose
Friday 12 July
4 pm â 6 pm
Under the Aegis
17 Jamieson St,
Gardens, Cape Town
(as part of the Heat Winter Arts Festival)
With Nomusa Makhubu, Amogelang Maledu, Julie Nxadi, and Vusumzi Nkomo
Conversation moderated by Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose
Saturday 20.07.2024
10 am â 12 pm
KZNSA
166 Bulwer Road
Berea, eThekwini
Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose in conversation with Russel Hlongwane
Saturday 27.07.2024
1 pm â 3 pm
The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember
44 Stanley Braamfontein Werf
Johannesburg
With Thulile Gamedze, Maneo Mohale, Lindiwe Mngxitama and Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose.
This event is supported by Creative Knowledge Resources, an Interdisciplinary project by the National Research Foundation & the University of Cape Town studying socially engaged art in Africa and its diaspora.
No booking is required, but space is limited.
Akinbode Akinbiyi
Sometimes to be lost is to be found and to be found
is to be lost anew
Edited by Christoph Platz-Gallus
for Kunstverein Hannover
With texts by Akinbode Akinbiyi, Tandazani Dhlakama, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Christoph Platz-Gallus
The photographer, the wanderer, glides softly in the crush of the everyday, stepping out onto awkwardly paved sidewalks, weaving through crowds, seeking out moments of quiet serendipity. Itâs in happenstance, coincidence, that the magic becomes immanent, the constantly weaving, liminal threads taking shape, becoming momentarily visible, forming into occurrences that vibrate, are.
âAkinbode Akinbiyi
Film Undone presents contributions introducing unmade and unfinished film projects, film ideas realised in non-filmic media, as well as films that remained unseen in their intended form and at their intended time. These tentative and careful probes dedicated to singular projects reflect the importance of primary materials before and beyond the film. Bringing them together as Elements of a Latent Cinema opens a space to consider cases from various political geographies and historical moments in relation. Latency prompts to think differently about what has remained invisible in cinema than under deficit-centred categories such as failure, loss, or incompletion. It marks a sustained potentiality for things to change their condition, to affect us and set us in motion.
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What does it mean to be a curator who writes, and, more specifically, how can curators write about textiles?
The publication steps outside the framework of the typical exhibition catalogue to occupy âthe space between literature and criticismâ.
The Community of Writers was set up to create time and space to retreat from these outside opinions and demands and to let curiosity and the joy of writing be the driving forces of the writing process.
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Steeped in the living of rupture, the strength and fragmentation of memory, and the layering of life and art-making, Night Heron weaves together two parallel stories of women artists. Twenty-first century Bengali-American artist, Pakhi, floats through the world on a non-quest that takes her to New York City, Berlin, and Bujumbura; nineteenth century Bengali writer, Mrinalini, lives in a joint family home in a declining Lucknow, persistently finding time and space to write. At the heart of the novel is Pakhiâs choice to leave her son, an uneasy decision that is mirrored in Mrinaliniâs ambivalence regarding her own education and what doors are opened and possibly closed for herself and her children as a result of it.
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John Akomfrah
A Space of Empathy
Edited by Julia Grosse
Published by Archive Books and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
John Akomfrah (b. 1957) creates thoughtful video works of haunting audiovisual intensity. He tells of the radical changes and crises of the present and past on characteristic large-format screens. From November 9, 2023 to January 28, 2024, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting for the first time a comprehensive overview of the artistâs work in Germany, featuring a selection of three major multichannel installations from recent years: The Unfinished Conversation (2012), Vertigo Sea (2015), and Akomfrahâs new work, Becoming Wind (2023). A co-founder of the influential London-based Black Audio Film Collective (established in 1982), Akomfrahâs work interweaves newly shot film sequences with archival material to create multilayered, at times associative collages, frequently in the form of simultaneous narrative structures. Akomfrahâs immersive installations critically examine colonial pasts, global migration, and the climate crisis. He addresses one-dimensional historical representations by allowing multiple perspectives to emerge in the narrative, disrupting the notion of linearity and the illusion of a one and only truth.
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On the occasion of UEFA EURO 2024, hosted in Germany from 14 Juneâ14 July 2024, HKW dedicates its entire space and programme to deliberations on football in the framework of the project Ballet of the MassesâOn Football and Catharsis. As a pluri-disciplinary institution that encourages and lends space to the practices of visual and performative arts, sonicity and music, literature and oralture, as well as scientific and cultural discursive formats, HKW opens up its doors to football as a practice and concept at the intersection of/with different formats in the quotidian.
With contributions from Aziza Ahmad, Stina Ă kerfors, Romaisa Baddar, Aysun Bademsoy, Julia BĂźki, Ntone Edjabe, Romeo Roxmann Gatt, Daniel Gerhardt, Kabelo Kungwane, Sharon Lam, Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Musa Okwonga, Fadumo Olow, Eric Otieno Sumba, Can Sungu, TuÄba Tekkal, Rachel Yankey
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With contributions from Santiago CalderĂłn, Emiliano Chaimite, Laura Coll, Lama El Khatib, Lucia Engombe, Francisca GarcĂa, Paz Guevara, Kadriye KarcÄą, Samirah Kenawi, David Lufuankenda, Dejan MarkoviÄ, Doreen Mende, Luamba Muinga, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Peggy Piesche, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Rasha Salti, Alina Simmelbauer, Eva Stein, Eric Otieno Sumba, Sarnt Utamachote, Aliza Yanes, Kais al-Zubaidi
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This reader, published on the occasion of the project O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies, brings the themes of the eponymous group exhibition to those interested in wider conceptual explorations around its multifaceted curatorial threads: insurgence, resistance, liberation, spirituality, ecstasy, new cultural forms and aesthetic paradigms, quilombo as queering, and the reimagination of collectivity. Anchored by newly translated historical texts, poetry, essays, and conversations, the publication engages with the founding figures and initial conceptual articulations of quilombismo in detail, but also explores how it has found resonance in disparate practices globally.
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Farkhondeh Shahroudi
wir sind die feder in des schreibers hand,
wohin wir gehen, ist uns nicht bekannt
This is the first monographic overview publication of the work of Farkhondeh Shahroudi. containing a selection of the artist’s works from 1990 to 2022. The focus of the selection is on the works in which poetry and language interact. Her artworks are scripted with drawings and stitched three-dimensional collages, which are transformed into textile, collage-like morphs floating in space. They donât appear chronologically, but rather in dialogue with the works themselves and following the writings, scoping out various aspects of her oeuvre.
For the last thirty years, Farkhondeh Shahroudi has been working with different artistic formsâpoetry / automatic writing / onomatopoeia, drawings, installations, soft sculpture, performance, and photography. During these years, she has gradually separated herself from the two-dimensional canvas and delved into the spatial exploration of heterotopias, only to recently return to large-scale drawings that evoke her fantastical world of imagination, composed of small black felt pen strokes. In all these forms, language and writing are present on all levels up to the performative.
Bonaventure Son Bejeng Ndikung
An Ongoing- Offcoming Tale
Ruminations on Art, Culture, Politics and Us/Others
An Ongoing-Offcoming Tale comprises abstractions, subversions and poetic ruminations, housed within essays that engage with the lives and practices of over 30 artists. It opens with the question: If only some leaves could speak? And in the journey that follows, we encounter many such possibilities â that leave us asking questions of the boundaries we place around the things we are allowed to think, the knowledge we call knowledge, and the questions we permit ourselves to ask. The book is an exercise in learning to reimagine: bodies, land, knowledge, memory, song. Ndikung allows us to step into the visions and the lived forms of knowledge that inform his curatorial practice.
As we collectively emerge from a stillness that made it impossible to look away from the harm caused by social infrastructures we once deemed necessary, these essays are more urgent than ever. They give us tools to think with about the âcontemporaryâ in meaningful ways, enabling us to ask important questions of culture and power.
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Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia
Published by Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory (Ljubljana) and Archive Books (Berlin)
Support: ERSTE Foundation
IZA Editions
The publication presents a comprehensive overview of the vast production of monuments in socialist Yugoslavia (1945â91) dedicated to the antifascist People’s Liberation Struggle in the Second World War and the socialist revolution. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, these monuments have been subject to various fates, from neglect and physical destruction to global fame generated by the high-modernist visual appeal of a number of them. But the full scope, wide-ranging diversity, and complex context of Yugoslav monument-making, including its various contradictions, have remained largely unexplored.
The book offers a thorough and interdisciplinary exploration of this phenomenon and a rich visual material to examine its key characteristics and specificities: What memorial practices and commemorative traditions preceded the development of monument-making in socialism? Who commissioned these monuments and how did Yugoslav cultural and memory politics influence their production? Who were their authors and what defined their formal and typological features? How was Yugoslav monument production related to comparative efforts abroad? What commemorative practices developed around monuments? How is this legacy evaluated and received today, both in the post-Yugoslav successor states and internationally?
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“Love is more than just empathy, a consequence of subjectivity; it is solidarity in active commitment.”
Abdias Nascimento (1914-2011) was a storyteller whose mediums of expression embraced as many forms as they could, borrowing the paths at hand to communicate ideas and reflect on the urgencies of his time and place. Nascimentoâs art was sophisticated, politically and socially engaged, while making a point to remain accessible for those willing to be initiated. Repetition for Nascimento was to be found elsewhere, in the recalling of history and the sharing of original myths, in that which was snatched away from a people to whom he dedicated his entire life.
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ââTake the line for a ⌠walk,â suggests Paul Klee. Imran Mir has accomplished more than that. He has accompanied it far and further without parking or straitjacketing it.â â Iqbal Geoffrey
Imran Mir’s (1950-2014) oeuvre can be interpreted as a constant refusal to provide comprehensive elaboration beyond what one experiences. The act of contemplation is a guiding principle to interpreting Imran Mirâs work, an approach that reverberates into a practice that grew out of conversations with a community of artists, activists, poets, relatives, and other thinkers in Karachi.
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“The logical explanation is the relationship between painting and music, both of which live in me and my work as a spiritual intermediary.”
Sedje HĂŠmon (1923-2011) dedicated her life to showing the common origin and intersectionality of all arts and sciences, culminating in the development of a theory for the âintegration of the arts.â HĂŠmonâs multifaceted approach grew out of the urgency of her time and the need for creative expressions that she developed in the face of political ostracization and physical disability.
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An Archaeology of Listening Series
A Slightly Curving Place asks what it means to listen to the past and its absence which remains. It responds to the practice of Manthravadi, who has been building ambisonic microphones since the 1990s to measure the acoustic properties of premodern performance spaces. Comprising a range of perspectives in which his propositions reverberate, the publication attends to what he does, and to the political and performative potential of the past that he opens up.
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Coming to Know asks how listening to the past together might transform our sense of the knowledge held in common. It sets aside the visual techniques of the archaeological site, the museum, and the larger project of colonial modernity, and instead constitutes itself as a resonant structureâa future-oriented monument to historically situated listening bodies as well as a dwelling place for community now.
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Arab Image Foundation series
Becoming Van Leo is a study of the life and times of the late Armenian-Egyptian photographer. Born in 1921, Leon Boyadjian would come to be known as Van Leo, one of the most singular twentieth-century studio photographers in the Arab world. Van Leo left behind him a 60-year body of portraiture and self-portraiture work, as well as professional and personal documents. Drawing on this abundant archive from the collections of the AIFâits most iconic oneâand the American University in Cairo, in addition to accounts of people who knew him, the publication intricately narrates the story of the photographer and the man, contemplates the complex practice of commemoration, and reflects on the task of the archivist, the curator, the designer, and the author at large.
In 1941, Leon Boyadjian (1921â2002) and his brother Angelo (1917â2003) opened a studio in the living room of the family home. Angelo Studio commenced by catering to stage artistsâtheater actors, cabaret performers, dancersâŚâentertaining the Allied troops stationed in Egypt during the Second World War.
From 1937 to 1995, Leon Boyadjian took hundreds of self-portraits. A fascinating body of work unveiled here in its near entirety: 410 shots and 82variations â reframing, hand-coloring, special effects, photomontage…
Leon Boyadjian was a hoarder. Besides a vast body of work, he purposely left behind him professional and personal documents: books, periodicals, press clippings, certificates, letters, notes, lists, and assorted ephemera. With such a plethora of material, something had to be done.Â
SAVVY Books series
The publications in this series reflect, expand, and document the activities of the research, discursive, performative, and curatorial projects of S A V V Y Contemporary. By acknowledging the limits and faults of academic disciplines and advocating for processes of unlearning, our effort is thus to create a platform which encourages extra-disciplinary knowledges and promotes the thinking and writing of authors, artists, philosophers, scientists, and activists whose practices challenge Western epistemologies: looking towards epistemic systems from Africa and the African diaspora, Asia-Pacific, the Middle-East and Latin America.
This publication unfolds as a collection of words, works, and images that informed, incited, and embodied SAVVY Contemporaryâs project Ultrasanity. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry, and Resistance, an exhibition and research project on the elasticity of sanity.