Tormented Hope is a book about mind and body, fear and hope, illness and imagination. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And in an intimate investigation of those nine lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body, by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Brian Dillon, whose brilliant debut In the Dark Room established him as an uncommonly intelligent and fluent explorer of the realm where ideas and emotions overlap, looks at nine prominent hypochondriacs—James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol—and what their lives tell us about the way the mind works with, and against, the body. His findings are stimulating and surprising, and the stories he tells are often moving, sometimes hilarious, and always gripping.

You can read a review of the book here.

Produced as part of the three part exhibition Hier-vanaf-elders (Here-from-elsewhere) by Daniel Buren held concurrently over three different museums. Each museum was assigned a part of the overall title: hier in the Stedelijk Amsterdam, vanaf in the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller and elders in the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven. Buren created a geographical triangle that connected the museums. In each museum, he marked a point of the triangle in the exhibition space using the striped awning canvas that is so characteristic for him. and each museum was given its own colour.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition RED, curated by Robert Nickas at Isa Brachot Gallery, Brussels, 27 June–29 September 1990.

Including artists John Armleder, Barry X Ball, Robert Barry, Félix González-Torres, Marcia Hafif, Peter Halley, Donald Judd, Yves Klein, Imi Kneobel, Bertrand Lavier, Ken Lum, Olivier Mosset, Chuck Nanney, Steven Parrino, Laurie Parsons, Alan Uglow, Franz Erhard Walther, Lawrence Weiner amongst others.

Designed by Luc Derycke.

Sven Stilinović was still a schoolboy when he started exhibiting with the Group of Six Artists on the streets of Zagreb in 1975. Photographic enlargements of small collages in which he recycled fragments of older photographs and tiny objects, as well as series where photographs of garbage interchange in a photographic sequence with photographs of cluttered shops raise the issue of photographic motif, while in “Comparison of the development of painting and non-development of photography” (1975) he concludes that that which is offered as a history of photography does not lead to its openness and creativity.

With texts from Ivana Bago, Branko Cerovac, Suzana Marjanić, Vlado Martek, Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Branka Stipančić, Raša Todosijević, Goran Trbuljak.

A selection of works on paper by Swiss visionary outsider artist and healer Emma Kunz, close to geometric abstraction, produced on the occasion of the exhibition Cosmos Emma Kunz at Aargauer Kunsthaus in 2021.

Kunz is said to have become aware of her special clairvoyant and radiaesthetic [radiation- reading] abilities at an early age. She began to heal her first patients and to work with the divining pendulum that she would use in her drawings from 1938 onwards. Until a few years before her death she produced some 500 characteristic drawings on graph paper, which she used as a tool for her healing activity. She also worked with numerology, researched in the field of herbalism and achieved a legendary series of healing successes. At this time she began to ask her acquaintances to call her “Penta”. In 1942 Emma Kunz is said to have discovered Aion A, the healing rock that is still available from Swiss pharmacies, in a quarry in Würenlos that had been used since Roman times—and is known today as the Emma Kunz Grotto.

Confidences/Baseline plays with the vampire novel like a dollhouse. Charac­ters who variously believe in the power of theatre and performance become entangled with grief, desire, and the un­known. What does a rehearsal come to mean when a vampire lives forever?

The performances of Ivan Cheng are incomplete, failing, desperate, and riddled with absence. They use his variously trained performing body, incanting texts that foreground subjectivity in monologues and dialogues. Identities of other interlocutors become embedded through rehearsal, dialogue, and entrustment. Without deluded presupposition of being for everyone, Cheng’s practice is invested in questions around publics and accessibility.

Designed by Sabo Day.