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Selim’s time aboard the ‘Tigris’ and subsequent work provides the starting point for this new publication, which brings together a range of artists and thinkers who are developing new frameworks for understanding the region traversed by the Tigris River. The volume also reflects on the global relevance of contemporary Iraq, a country which – as Selim has written – maps out the worst political, social, and environmental fears that threaten us and our planet. Pelin Tan traces the recent histories of political and ecological violence along the Tigris; Rijin Sahakian examines the enduring effects of the American wars in Iraq; Mike Sperlinger examines Heyerdahl’s original expedition as a snapshot of the region in the late 1970s; Simon Starling and Juan Carlos Arratia Esteban explore craft and cultural exchange through Starling's project Houseboat for Ho; Dilip Menon discusses ‘oceanic cosmopolitanism’ and the politics of nostalgia in the return to ancient traditions; and Nora Al-Badri and Zoya Masoud consider technology’s role in recovering and reimagining Mesopotamian cultural heritage.

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The publication contains numerous photographs of the construction process and an essay by Tomás Saraceno tracing the political and personal genealogy of The Sanctuary of Water across two decades of collaboration with the Indigenous communities of the Salinas Grandes. It also includes texts by members of the Red Atacama network writing as lawyers, researchers and activists exploring the cultural, cosmological, ecological, and political dimensions of the project, situating The Sanctuary of Water within the broader history of Indigenous resistance, collective practice, and environmental justice. A travel essay by Andrei Fernandez and Celeste Valero, along with contributions by Sarah Johanna Theurer and Andrea Lissoni, place The Sanctuary of Water within the context of collective practice in art history and in relation to the programme at Haus der Kunst.

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Was, wenn Menschsein kein Zustand ist, sondern ein Verb? „Nicht alle Reisenden folgen Wegen“, schreibt Conceição Evaristo. Dieser Zeile entlehnt Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung den Titel der 36. Bienal de São Paulo und schlägt vor, Menschsein als Praxis, als ein Tun, nicht als Besitzstand zu denken. Die versammelten Stimmen nähern sich dem aus verschiedenen Richtungen: Für Juliana Borges etwa ist das Wandern und Sich-Verlieren eine Technologie des Abweichens; und Abdellatif Laâbis Gedicht „Ich bekunde“ betrachtet Menschlichkeit als ethische Praxis, die jeden Tag aufs Neue gelebt wird.

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What if humanity is not a noun, but a verb? ‘Not all travellers walk roads’, writes Conceição Evaristo. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung borrows this vers for the title of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo and suggests to conceive of humanity as a practice, as an action, rather than as an established entity. The voices gathered here approach this from various directions: for Juliana Borges, wandering or going astray is an ancestral technology of deviation; and Abdellatif Laâbi’s poem ‚I declare‘ approaches humanity as an ethical practice renewed each day. He is asking ‚What will I do today to remain worthy of humanity?’, which resonates closely with the Bienal’s proposition that humanity is a commitment renewed through our daily actions.

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“Sliding down the surface of things” presents text and images from the video installation “Choreography of commodities” (2023) – which investigates the (in)visibility of global economic conditions and the use of metaphors and narratives as their interpretations – and its counterpart “Dancing with the tables” (2025) – which tells of the existence at the end of the global supply chains and the relationships of a model human being to the things that surround him. In their construction of an artificial yet seemingly natural social reality, both works reflect on the global system of capitalism, behind whose surface the acting subjects seem to disappear

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How Did We Get Here: Reading Vasıf Kortun features an in-depth interview by Sezin Romi (Salt), examining Kortun’s impact as a curator, writer, and educator. The publication, designed by Esen Karol, includes contributions from Manuel Borja-Villel, Céline Condorelli, Joshua Decter, Charles Esche, Kathy Halbreich, Defne Koryürek, Prem Krishnamurthy, and November Paynter. It traces Kortun’s journey from his university years in New York through his early experiences in the Turkish art scene, his tenure at Bard College, and his later work in Türkiye.

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The work Zevallos unfolded during his residency in Villa Romana is an ongoing study of the artist on discourses of current politics as a sentimental/violent territory. Through the processing of speech and voice, everything becomes sensualized, the anatomy returns to organic live. The resulting vocal compositions are then tools of a subversive language: the speech as a failed doctrine, the narrative as emotional subject, and the spell as a form of resistance.

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Rubén D'Hers works with sound, installation, and painting. His work is also a resonating reflection about the possibility of re-weaponising and repurposing the domestic as a space of imagi- nation. As an artistic meditation, his research is an invitation to relearn touching the fabric of listening. A listening that is both introspective and material.

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The installation that Monai de Paula Antunes' presented it was a sound and radio piece, and an installation - developed in collaboration with Niko De Paula Lefort -, that weaved together personal stories and utterances, and that conversed with her social media performance The Ascension of Uli Schwarz. The piece was composed with transmitters, receivers, and copper threads or filaments, and while moving across the room we could perceive it as an unstable sound architecture.

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Ongopolo Foroman: Phase I Copper Foreman. Koper Voorman. Oforomana. Yo Ngpolo.
Tuli Mekondjo points to the entanglements of history and mends together a personal and collective srchive of affects and trauma that she feels tasked to bring together and investigate further. Her artistic practice is a labour of restitution to her community.

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Samuel Baah Kortey’s installations and sound pieces weave archival materials, spiritual invocations, and per- sonal histories into an immersive landscape of memory and resistance. His artistic research reminds us that the archive is not only a place of storage but of reanimation. These works inhabited the Villa like spirits; and they continue to do after the exhibitions in which they were shown: they linger, return, and reconfigure the house’s resonant frequencies.

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Diana Ejaita’s visual world, rich in symbolic references and cultural entanglements, offers an aesthetic of resistance through grace. Her graphic explorations reclaim the lan- guage of pattern and repetition, grounding identity in beauty and resilience.

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Pinar Öğrenci´s films stretch the walls of the house into geographies of migration and memory, from snow-covered streets to the multilayered lifeworlds of the village of Miks. Her cinematic language attends to the rhythms of daily life as much as to the tremors of history. In Her work, the house becomes a portal nor only to elsewhere, but to otherwise.

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Sustaining the Otherwise is a collaborative research and artistic project about restitution, reparation and transformation taking place in multiple locations over several years. Initiated and conceptualized by researchers and curators Amal Alhaag & Selene Wendt, it offers a space for artists, activists, scholars and writers to be in dialogue and to explore the topic of restitution in relation to both material and immaterial culture, through a program that frames restitution within the context of contemporary art practice.

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We Lost Control Again recounts the twentieth-century attempt to construct an international political and aesthetic order in the wake of war, and what remains of that Babelian architecture today. This book surveys the questions raised by the work of artist Rikke Luther between 2015 and 2025. Luther explores the long-range effects of this era of collapse, and the effect on social orders and the stability of the Earth system.

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Mud … and the Earth System explores groundbreaking research in Earth system sciences and highlights the challenges of communicating these findings to the public. As once-stable “mudscapes” transform, they become both symptoms and symbols of a rapidly warming planet. This book delves into humanity’s connection to these changes through the study of ancient organic and inorganic compounds that have come alive after millennia. It poses essential questions about what these evolving ‘mud’ compounds reveal about Earth’s deep past and our imminent future.

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Things Bigger Than What Can Be Seen is a collection of Oraib Toukan’s essays, translated to Arabic for the first time. In close dialogue with Palestinian pedagogue Munir Fasheh on the topic of turbeh (local soil in Arabic), Toukan crafts a haptic perspective on images from what she terms their ‘soil grain’.

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Forest Encounters invites you into the forest and its many meanings. It brings together voices from different disciplines, geographies, and cultures. Artists, foresters, art historians, philosophers, anthropologists, wildlife researchers, landscape architects, and writers all participate in this collective reflection on the diverse meanings, challenges, and perspectives related to the forest. The forest is a living demonstration that strength arises from diversity and resilience from interconnection. Thus, this book invites you to explore the forest as a space with which we can learn otherwise.