Publications - Archive Books

Echoes of the Brother Countries Reader

—

The Echoes of the Brother Countries Reader embarks on a rigorous reappraisal of the historical exchanges between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and its so-called Bruderländer (brother countries). Published on the occasion of the eponymous research and exhibition project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), this reader considers the echo as a fulcrum to examine the resonant aesthetic, social, and political implications of an era from the perspectives of those who were deeply affected by the GDR’s state and labour policies, yet gravely overlooked in its histories.

Echos der Bruderländer Reader

—

Der Reader zum Projekt Echos der Bruderländer versucht eine Aufarbeitung des historischen Austauschs zwischen der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (DDR) und ihren sogenannten ‚Bruderländern‘. Die Publikation, die anlässlich des gleichnamigen Forschungs- und Ausstellungsprojekts im Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) erscheint, versteht den Begriff des Echos als Dreh- und Angelpunkt, um die ästhetischen, sozialen und politischen Implikationen einer Epoche aus der Perspektive derjenigen zu untersuchen, die von der Staats- und Arbeitspolitik der DDR zutiefst betroffen waren, aber in der Geschichte der DDR kaum wahrgenommen werden.

Togetherward

—

Togetherward is a volume assembling new and existing documents that revisit, mix and remix moments in the work of artist Christian Nyampeta. The volume is composed of material that exceed singular authorship, in the form of texts, images, film stills, footnotes, photographs, poetry, and translations.

Encounters – Embodied Practices

—

What potential do embodied practices offer for emancipatory movements? How can community be created through these practices, and what responsibilities does this entail? What role does the body play in the preservation and transmission of knowledge?

John Akomfrah

Toward A Transindividual Self

—

Toward a Transindividual Self is an ambitious and capacious effort to theorize a new way to approach collectivity for political purposes through the lens of performance. Convinced that the current neoliberal conjuncture has only heightened a form of capitalist individualism that blocks notions of the social, the authors aim to show that a “transindividual formation of the self can bring about different courses of action and a more socially driven imagination.”

O Quilombismo Album

—

Beyond thinking with quilombismo as a metaphor, O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies. deliberated on the intellectual and political implications of a philosophy and ideology based on the quilombos, mapping the spaces that they have made and continue to make possible today. Featuring over 100 full colour images and installation views, the O Quilombismo Album is a visual record of these acts of opening again, a celebration of conviviality.

O Quilombismo Handbook

—

The O Quilombismo Handbook is an indispensable companion to the eponymous exhibition. It includes background information on and numerous images of all exhibited works, texts providing further insight into the practice of the participating artists, as well as floor plans and sketches of the exhibition spaces. Two introductory essays provide context for the philosophy of quilombismo and the conceptual framework of the exhibition.

O Quilombismo Handbuch

—

Das O Quilombismo Handbuch ist die unentbehrliche Begleitpublikation zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung. Darin finden sich Werkinformationen und Abbildungen aller gezeigten Arbeiten, vertiefende Informationen zu den beitragenden Künstler*innen sowie Lagepläne und Skizzen der Ausstellungsräume. Zwei einleitende Essays führen in die Philosophie des Quilombismo und das Konzept der Ausstellung ein.

K̶-Artists

—

There has been a recent surge of global interest in Korean arts and popular culture, as evidenced by neologisms such as K-pop, K-drama and K-classic. Korean contemporary art has also captured the attention of a growing number of international biennales, exhibitions and fairs, attracting an international audience to Korea’s local artists and the scene they comprise. This is where our questions begin: despite a growing sense of nationalism in the global political stage, through a post-postmodernist lens, national categorization appears anachronistic. Is the prefix ‘K’ then a mere political ploy and capitalist commodity? If ‘K’ were to be removed, on the other hand, how else might we attempt at providing a portrait of the changing currents in Korea’s art scene? Is collective categorization or generalization ever worthwhile, and if so, to what extent can it be done without reducing or marginalizing individuals?

Fraitaxtsēs sores tsîn ge ra≠gâ / Ondjembo yo Null Vier

—

Genocide in Namibia is an especially sensitive matter—its history has at times been ignored, underestimated, or even denied outright.

In the artistic documentary Fraitaxtsēs sores tsîn ge ra≠gâ - Ondjembo yo Null Vier, Ixmucané Aguilar has worked in close collaboration with Nama and OvaHerero people who vividly evoke memories and rituals of mourning caused by human loss and land dispossession under Imperial Germany’s violent occupation.

O Quilombismo Reader (DE)

—

Der Reader zum Projekt O Quilombismo: Von Widerstand und Beharren. Von Flucht als Angriff. Von alternativen demokratisch-egalitären politischen Philosophien, wendet sich an Leser*innen mit Interesse an den konzeptionellen Hintergründen und den kuratorischen Linien der Ausstellung: Auflehnung, Befreiung, Spiritualität, Ekstase, neue kulturelle Formen und ästhetische Paradigmen, Interpretationen von Kollektivität und Quilombo als Queering.

O Quilombismo Reader (EN)

—

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.

Shaping Revolutionary Memory: The Production of Monuments in Socialist Yugoslavia

—

The publication presents a comprehensive overview of the vast production of monuments in socialist Yugoslavia (1945–91) 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.

DNCB – A History of Irritation

—

Part visual essay, oral history and artist book, DNCB - A History of Irritation is a companion to the multi-channel installation DNCB by Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger. The book plays with contrasting paper formats and materials, using glossy colourful video stills and distorted archival imagery to achieve a similar effect to the film, video and audio tracks in the installation. It gives more room to the informative and deeply touching interviews the artists did with AIDS activists and long-term survivors, and collects the archival research on DNCB for the first time in a publication.

Awkward Archives

—

Awkward Archives proposes a manual for academic teaching and learning contexts. An ethnographic research approach is confronted with the demands of archival research as both disciplines challenge their inner logics and epistemologies. Through fieldwork and ethnographic tools and methods, both analogue and digital, the editors take various contemporary archival sites in Berlin as case studies to elaborate on controversial concepts in Western thought. Presenting as such a modular curriculum on archives in their awkwardness—with the tensions, discomfort and antagonisms they pose.

Archives on Show

—

Archives on Show brings the potential of reformulating the social and political relevance of archives by curatorial means into focus. Based on the specific properties, faculties and methods of curation, the volume highlights those techniques and strategies that deal with archives not only to make their genesis and history apparent but also to open them up for the future.

Industry / Matrices, threads and sounds

—

Industry / Matrices, threads and sounds is a publication that operates A project by Lorenzo Sandoval and Tono Vizcaíno as a reader in the project of the same name, and brings together a selection of texts and images of the people and entities that have collaborated in the process.

Maa Ka Maaya Ka Ca A Yere Kono

—

L’imposition des notions de singularité – comme celles des êtres singuliers et immuables, des identités uniques et inaltérables, des plans ou des espaces uniques et fixes, dans lesquels nous nous trouvons et naviguons, des cultures singulières et figées, des divinités jalouses avec des structures de croyance singulières, d’histoire de politique ou de structure politique unique – semble être un des concepts dont il est le plus difficile de se débarrasser dans cette période de post indépendance et libération des forces qui ont imposé leur domination sur une grande partie du monde pendant trop longtemps. À nous avoir fait avaler ces concepts de force, cela a entraîné une perte de la multiplicité et des fragmentations, une perte des points d’intersection des différentes façons d’être et finalement une perte de la complexité des notions d’humanité et des récits.

The Wall Between Us

—

When the outer world tells you who you are, who to be, and those in your immediate, unchosen community tell you to be another, how do we understand who we truly want to be? Away from prescribed imaginaries, how can we find our own reality? Should we even find an identity? Do we have a choice? Does it require asking humbly for allowance? When we receive recognition, does it risk furthering agendas that keep us in our "place"? Together, these poems, letters, anecdotes, interviews and stories demonstrate that living as a "member of the Asian diaspora" can never be presented as a singular expression. Moving through our world is a process of being emergent, sometimes in conflict, other times in collaboration, with a diasporic identity that continues to be ever more complex. Here we hope to find an opportunity to practice our own becoming.

Text in Public – Zine Performances and Rants

—

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.

Panorama

—

Navina Sundaram is sitting in the editing room in Hamburg. She has managed to reduce the complexity of the Kemal Altun case to the required 2 minutes and 40 seconds for the political magazine; a journalistic feat considering the legal terminology and the international political situation, which must be presented in simple terms. She places her interview with the judge at the back. The audience therefore first gets an impression of perhaps the best-known deportation prisoner of the republic on trial here.

Archives & Crime

—

To enter a collective archive is to carry an anonymous corpse on your shoulders. You are not investigating how this corpse met its death so much as feeling impelled, somehow, to fill in the gaps that render it anonymous. Whether or not you are hoping to tell the story and share it with others, you might be able to give this corpse a name and lend a meaning to its life. The corpse is the researcher’s question.

An Ongoing-Offcoming Tale

—

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 – 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.

Earnestly

—

In honest, crystallizing language, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju reckons with her changing Body and the afterlife of trauma within the tangle of race relations, sexual politics, and family history. Earnestly collages texts from the artist’s transdisciplinary practice, modeling different lenses through which to navigate the social and emotional dimensions of Body dysmorphia, girlhood, and longing.

SCROLL Part 3: Language is Migrant

—

Cecilia Vicuña’s liberatory text Language is Migrant interrogates the capacity of language within and through our wounded oral cultures and lexical histories. With her in mind, and emanating from the 2022 edition of Colomboscope festival, SCROLL also engages with the idea of language as a complex translator and migratory force, via the medium of print.

SCROLL Part 2: It is Not the Seas that Scare Me

—

SCROLL's second issue ‘It is Not the Seas that Scare of Me’ is created in collaboration with Colomboscope 2019. For this issue, the oceanic frontier becomes a jumping off point for artists and writers to examine concerns around trade & exchange, economy & colonization and sexuality & the surreal.

Glossary of Cognitive Activism (Third Edition)

—

Written by Warren Neidich, Glossary of Cognitive Activism (For a Not so Distant Future) articulates key concepts central to the essays published in the three-volume series The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism. The series attempts to broaden the definition of cognitive capitalism in terms of the scope of its material relations, especially as it relates to the conditions of mind and brain in our new world of advanced telecommunication, data mining and social relations.

An Activist Neuroaesthetics Reader

—

Activist neuroaesthetics attempts to make the processes of digital dominion and governmentalization—which are becoming more and more prominent in late-stage cognitive capitalism (or neural capitalism)—opaque, visible, and known.

How to Die – Inopiné

—

How to Die - Inopiné is a performance and a practice. It thinks through, in an embodied manner, the prevailing contemporary moods of ecological grief, cultural panic, and collapse. As a performance in a theater or outdoors, an audience encounters five dancers who are constantly building, unbuilding, and rebuilding. Afterwards, stories are told around a bonfire. As a practice in the studio, school, or street, a group of dancers, artists, writers, and architects meet for a year of residencies between Oslo and Umeå.

Load More Books