Impossible Dreams was Pati Hill’s last published novel, released in 1976 after it was partially published two years earlier in the Carolina Quarterly under the title “An Angry French Housewife.” Hill tells the story of Geneviève, a middle-aged woman whose life is turned upside down when she unexpectedly falls in love with her neighbour, Dolly. Mixing anecdotes with existential thoughts, the novel describes the gradual disruption of the heroine’s daily life. Almost every chapter (the length of which varies from a single sentence to no more than three pages) is accompanied by a xerograph of a photograph, selected by Hill with permission from its maker. The resulting combination of text and image constitutes her most ambitious attempt to produce a work in which “the two elements fuse to become something other than either.”

A facsimile copy of the article Xenophobia and Kantian Rationalism written by Adrian Piper that originally appeared in The Philosophical Forum, Volume XXIV, No. 1-3, Fall-Spring 1992-93. An online version can be found here.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Park McArthur: Contact M bringing together, for the first time, artworks made between the 2010s and 2020s. These artworks and the forms they take are guided by personal and social meanings of disability, delay, and dependency.

Co-organized by Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach and mumok in Vienna, the exhibition is a collaboration between both institutions and will be presented simultaneously at both locations. Questions of simultaneous experience and access to art and culture shape this project’s format and purpose.

Here, in a new work by the author of The Dark Object, a series of tense and violent short stories are intertwined to form a narrative whole – a collection, with a twisted narrative structure, that parodies the form of a novel.

When the protagonist, the dysfunctional Reality Flickers, meets the psychotic Heart Beast (aka the fucker), death, sex and sculpture collide in the stories that form The Fabricator’s Tale.

Palmer’s misanthropic characters are embedded within their own obsession with objects, exposure, voyeurism, and the sexualised abuse of power. They appear to exist in a highly dysfunctional world, that parodies, and replicates both the conditions of art, and its place in contemporary society.

Black Slit documents a process whereby Katrina Palmer learned to throw a knife, using vibrantly painted clay objects as her targets. The setting is a studio/office/classroom/bedsit at night – a multi-purpose space which must be prepared for the action. We see a sofa-bed being made in low light, a knife laid on a table before it flies through the air, and then the focus shifts to the targets themselves. The clay was still wet and unstable when struck by the blade, resulting in unpredictable radical disruptions to the colour and shape of these hand-crafted forms. Alongside filming and editing footage of the knife throwing, Palmer practised drawing lines, to make a series of works on paper which are also reproduced in this book.

An artist is invited to take up residency in a gallery filled with historical paintings. They are meticulously crafted, maintained, and revered. She begins to make an audit of the paintings, outlining the depictions of violence, subjugation and physical tension on public display. Eleven arrows in a torso, someone’s hair cut as they sleep, a man nailed to a cross. Horses, decapitations, memorable lobsters. Written in sparse, urgent fragments that invite closer reading, The Touch Report, turns the reader’s gaze into the dark, to question our notions of ‘civilisation’.