Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Jochen Lempert at the Museum Ludwig, Köln, 23 April–13 June, 2010.

Jochen Lempert photographs the animal world in the most diverse contexts: from their natural habitat to the museum of natural history, from the zoo to the urban environment, in remote places or banal settings and situations. Lempert compiles his findings in a vast archive of images covering an ample spectrum, from common everyday views, to compositions that tend towards abstraction. This interest in the natural world as a subject has been further complemented by his exploration of the properties and materiality of the photographic image. Analogue, black and white, hand-printed in the darkroom, his photographs resist categorization and confront the canons of today’s aesthetic.

Produced on the occasion of Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s exhibition Nothing for Eternity at Kunstmuseum Basel, 15 October, 2016–17 April, 2017.

Many of Tuerlinckx’s works originate in the artist’s gigantic archive. In addition to her own drawings, collages, photographs, and texts, it also contains objets trouvés, newspaper photographs, and the bric-a-brac of everyday life. Employing artistic approaches that Tuerlinckx, who was born in Brussels in 1958, describes in a dedicated “lexicon,” she alters the materials, dimensions, and appearance of these objects, transforming their reality and purport.

Sweat brings together images of sweat forms taken by Alex Farrar and collated from Instagram, celebrity websites and photo libraries. Stock and staged imagery are displayed alongside paparazzi shots and documentary images. The suggestion of a figure builds accumulatively as we flick through the pages, our eyes grow accustomed to seeing a body that is never fully explicated. Why sweat?’ Hand numbered in an edition of 150.

Produced on the occasion of …(illegible)…, an exhibition that explored queer abstraction as a contemporary conceptual methodology. The term ‘queer abstraction’ describes the potential of an artwork to communicate something of lived queer experience(s) through seemingly non-referential, abstract visual language. This position makes space for a critique of the notion that artworks should present as explicitly, legibly queer according to signs or qualities allocated to the art-historical category of Queer Art.

Curated by Andrew Atchison and including artists Briony Galligan, Mathew Jones, Paul McKenzie, John Meade, Fiona Macdonald and Scott Redford.

Designed by Paul Mylecharane.

The early work of Mladen Stilinović was marked by his involvment in poetry and experimental film. His interest soon evolved in the relationship between visual symbols and words, leading to the creation of a series of collages, hundreds of artist’s books, paintings, installations, and videos. Stilinovic’s artwork is characterized by the use of everyday materials, simplicity, social criticism and questioning the role of art.

With an introductory text by by Branka Stipančić. You can see Stilinović interviewed about his artists books here.

In Francis McKee’s first novel, observations of séances, scientific advances, group education outings, Kurdish protests for the ‘disappeared’, become mixed with his own Tarot influenced visions: a haunting spirit appears; the relation between political resistance and Spiritualism is cast as an insurrectionary force and a millenarian energy, celebrating the ecstatic moment. Histories of isolated early Christians and twentieth century mystics affect the psyche, all of this documented through journal entries that move from Scottish islands to Puerto Rico. Influenced by forms of 1960s new journalism, McKee pushes language to match the raw material of the stories, which become more erratic, signalling the looming fate of the text and its author.

Francis McKee is an Irish writer and curator working in Glasgow. He is Director since 2006 of the CCA, Glasgow, and a lecturer and research fellow at Glasgow School of Art.

You can hear the author discuss the book here.