Adama Delphine Fawundu
Praise House

Building on the notion of ‘praise,’ Adama Delphine Fawundu frames this book as a celebration of life. She honors the stories whispered to her by her mother; she adorns her body in her grandmother’s textile work; she elevates the memory of various named and unnamed Black women of the diaspora and documents the iconic small Civil War era styled white wooded praise house on a patch of land off the side of a road in South Carolina not far from Beaufort creating an intimate body of work of color photography of an interconnected history.

This book about female figures—grandmothers, mothers, daughters, artists, caregivers, storytellers, and cooks—explores a range of emotions that consume us about family life and history. It is both an art book and a memoir. Viewing it brings us face to face with known and unknown cultures and introduces us to various art practices shared, taught, and learned through the African diasporic traditions. Fawundu connects to the self through history, joy, and beauty and offers the reader ways to navigate fear based on migration and loss. It is a gift, too, as it allows us to imagine alongside the artist.

read more
cover image of Musafiri reader
The Musafiri: Travellers and Guests reader follows the entwined paths and encounters of those that embark on journeys, traversing the worlds that open up when the confines of familiar surroundings are left. They are musafiri, a word that denotes the traveller as well as the guest in a plethora of languages such as Arabic, Romanian, Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Swahili, Kazakh, and Uygur. This reader addresses questions of departure and arrival, of who is welcome and who is not, of artistic expressions during travels, of the global circulation and transformations of ideas and commodities, of religions and pop culture. The essays, interviews, and artistic contributions in this volume accompany the eponymous exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and introduce the worlds of determined travellers, of individuals and communities displaced in the past, and of migratory movements of today. The spectrum of perspectives presented includes the figure of the hermit in ancient China, whose retreat is understood as a journey into nature and selfhood, the transcultural experiences of Japanese artists in the Latin American diaspora, the mobility networks of Afghan traders in the geographical spaces of the former Silk Road and beyond, or the sÄąla yolu, the transit route to Turkey, on which thousands of people travel every year to visit their old home.
With contributions by Musquiqui Chihying, Cosmin Costinaș, Aïssa Dione, Aboubakar Fofana, Di Liu, Magnus Marsden, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Marie Helene Pereira, Magda Radu, Yudi Rafael, Marian Pastor Roces, Citra Sasmita, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, and Can Sungu & Malve Lippmann
Read more

Like Swarming Maggots: Confronting the Archive of Coloniality across Italy and Libya

Alessandra Ferrini
Like Swarming Maggots: Confronting the Archive of Coloniality across Italy and Libya is Alessandra Ferrini’s first monograph. Featuring the artist’s long-term research on the colonial and neo-colonial relations between Italy and Libya through a critical engagement with the Italian ‘archive of coloniality’ and its structural violence. The book includes documentation of projects developed between 2017 and 2024, reflecting on positionality, censorship, archival research and the erasure of the genocide perpetrated by the Italians in Libya. Building on the artist’s interest in writing, translation, and collaboration as forms of resistance practice, it brings together different voices and visual materials, putting forward a reflection on the ethical and political implications of cultural work.
Read more

Between 1968 and 1988, the Tashkent Festival of Asian, African, and — from 1976 onwards — Latin American Cinema was held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. As an exercise in soft power and a response to anti-colonial movements and the socio-political upheaval of the late 1960s, the festival grew into a unique gathering for film professionals and became an important platform for South-South solidarity that went beyond the cinema halls of Tashkent. In essays and conversations by researchers, film-makers, and organizers of contemporary film festivals, the Destination: Tashkent Reader reappraises the original festival’s programming, while also looking critically at its legacy. From the vantage point of Berlin-based diasporas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the reader also investigates how such practices of encounters and collaboration resonate within the film scenes of these three continents today.

‘For peace, social progress, and the freedom of the peoples’, went the motto of the Tashkent Festival of Asian, African, and Latin American Cinema, which was held between 1968 and 1988 in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, formerly known as the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. With this slogan, the festival’s organizers explicitly referenced the emancipatory promise of ‘Third World’ cinema.

Read more
Contributions by Cana Bilir-Meier, Souleymane Cissé, Pascale Fakhry, Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick, Sophie Genske, Timur Karpov, Ali Khamraev, Valeriya Kim, Carlos Kong, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Maren Niemeyer Jacqueline Nsiah, Furqat Palvan-Zade, Marie Helene Pereira, Elena Razlogova, Aykan Safoğlu, Masha Salazkina, Alex Moussa Sawadogo, Can Sungu, Echo Xuedan Tang, and Sarnt Utamachote.
Scriptings: Political Scenarios Series
The multilingual series Scriptings: Political Scenarios publishes carefully selected scripts and texts by artists that refer neither to academic forms nor to purely literary forms of writing, but rather embed “text” as a fully integral part of contemporary political and visual art practice. The series is published in collaboration with Scriptings and edited by artist Achim Lengerer.

I Speak Radio opens with Bromley’s 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.

 

Read more

Text in Public – 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.

 

Read more

Die monografische Publikation „Helke Sander: I like chaos, but I don’t know, whether chaos likes me“ umfasst Texte aus „Frauen und Film“, der ersten feministischen deutschsprachigen Filmzeitschrift, die 1974 von Helke Sander gegründet und herausgegeben wurde. Die für die Publikation ausgewählten Texte fokussieren zentrale Fragestellungen der feministischen Filmarbeit, ökonomische sowie recht-liche Bedingungen und vor allem deren strukturelle Bedingtheit in gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen und ihre radikale Kritik daran.

 

Read more

The publication My Name Is Language (2020) explores the key tenets of artist Nicoline van Harskamp’s 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.

 

Read more

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. It’s in happenstance, coincidence, that the magic becomes immanent, the constantly weaving, liminal threads taking shape, becoming momentarily visible, forming into occurrences that vibrate, are.

—Akinbode Akinbiyi

Read more

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 AIF—its most iconic one—and 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 (1921–2002) and his brother Angelo (1917–2003) opened a studio in the living room of the family home. Angelo Studio commenced by catering to stage artists—theater actors, cabaret performers, dancers…—entertaining the Allied troops stationed in Egypt during the Second World War.

 

Read more

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 – reframing, hand-coloring, special effects, photomontage…

 

Read more

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. 

 

Read more

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 Contemporary’s project Ultrasanity. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry, and Resistance, an exhibition and research project on the elasticity of sanity.

 

Read more

We Have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal — Of, Towards, On, For Julius Eastman is a collection of essays, librettos, lyrics, memories, photos, personal anecdotes by musicians, visual artists, researchers and archivers that pays homage to the work and life of African-American composer, musician, performer, activist Julius Eastman.

 

Read more

The unlikely seemed possible in the summer of 2015, as thousands of immigrants from mostly Syria made their way to Germany and Angela Merkel made the statement “Wir schaffen das” (We can do it/ we can cope with it). A German’s venture into open hospitality was being witnessed as the country celebrated its newfound “Willkommenskultur.”

A series with and around
Med Hondo

A pioneer of African cinema and author of an uncompromising oeuvre, we have come to know Med Hondo over the decades as one who simultaneously gazes, belligerently and attentively, sharply, passionately and ironically, deep into the past, precisely at the present, but also far into the future. This three-part publication dedicated to his cinema and legacy. 1970—2018 Interviews with Med Hondo, On the Run, Perspective on the Cinema of Med Hondo and Das Kino von Med Hondo / Le cinéma de Med Hondo was published in the frame of the film research, festival and exhibition project Cours, cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi—Run, comrade, run, the old world is behind you—The Cinema of Med Hondo. To read Med Hondo opens us up to many perspectives: to his work and its time-historical contexts, to his interests and obsessions, to his standpoint with regard to the intertwining of politics, economics, and culture.

 

We are running into a great danger, my brothers, if we are not careful, this precious and cultural instrument of information, enjoyment, struggle represented by the cinema is slipping through our fingers forever.

—Abid Med Hondo, Les bicots nègres vos voisins, Prologue, 1978

On the Run, Perspectives on the Cinema of Med Hondo, features contributions that pay tribute to Med Hondo’s films in highly contrasting ways. It is published as part of Cours, cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi—Run, comrade, run, the old world is behind you—The Cinema of Med Hondo. ‎
This publication consists of twenty-two essays and interviews in French and German, the texts are part of 1970—2018 Interviews with Med Hondo and On the Run and appears in this volume in their original language. This assemblage of voices portrays Med Hondo’s uncompromising and groundbreaking production.
1970—2018 Interviews with Med Hondo, the first volume in a three-part publication, brings together seventeen interviews conducted with Med Hondo over a period of almost half a century, most of the interviews originally published in French were translated into English. The book originated in the long-term project Cours, cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi—Run, comrade, run, the old world is behind you—The Cinema of Med Hondo.
Rehearsing Hospitalities connects artists, curators and practitioners in the field of contemporary art and beyond, to build up and mediate new practices, understandings, and engagements with hospitalities. It fosters critical discourse, pluralistic sharing and collaboration between divergent (artistic) practitioners in contemporary societies and supports the emergence of new paradigms and methods of political and cultural hospitality.
Now more than ever we need to be consciously (re)considering diverse forms of hospitalities and ways of being together. In these disconnected times marked by global crises, this edition of the Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion series turns towards questions of hospitality and access. Looking beyond normative and institutionalised understandings of access, this publication considers access from a manifold of approaches, perceptions and relations.
Hospitality, care, safety and security are matters intrinsically entangled, not simply through their definitions and overlapping meanings but as acts, practices, institutions, industries, infrastructures and systems of power. But for whom and what is security offered in arts and culture? As cultural workers could we/should we become more hospitable and caring towards matters of security and safety? Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 3 is a site for meeting around matters of security, safety and care.
Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 4 asks what the possibilities and limitations of hospitality are. Should we instead be turning towards “rehearsing” redistribution? This publication points towards the vast ways our lives and worlds could be organised through less hierarchical, extractive, and exploitative practices: with more love afforded to ourselves, one another, and our more-than-human kin. It doesn’t provide all the answers, or a blueprint for a new world, but illustrates how people are doing this work now. Here redistribution is treated as a verb: a doing.