From February 12 to March 6, 2022, Pure Fiction presented an exhibition and performance program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne titled Shifting Theater: Sibyl’s Mouths. The starting point was a collective reading of Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, in which the narrator discovers a collection of scribbled oak leaves scattered in a cave outside Naples.

Contributions by Rosa Aiello, Gerry Bibby, Coleman Collins, Ayanna Dozier, Annie Ernaux, Amelia Groom, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Ellen Yeon Kim, Bitsy Knox, Dan Kwon, Erika Landström, Enad Marouf, Katrin Mayer, Aislinn McNamara, Kamila & Jasmina Metwaly, Luzie Meyer, Vera Palme, Theresa Patzschke, Georgia Sagri, Mahsa Saloor, Elif Saydam, Mark von Schlegell, Simon Speiser, Elaine Tam, C.S. Tolan, Mikhail Wassmer, Anna Zacharoff.

A new revised version of the notebook of the legendary American dancer, artist and choreographer Simone Forti in which she shares her poetry as well as her thoughts on dance, the body, writing, the state of the world. A collection of experimental texts, imagined dialogues, news animations and poetic thoughts on life and politics. The book contains an afterword by Fred Dewey and a postscript by Jackson Mac Low.

Texts by Tina Barouti, Anne-Grit Becker, Natalie Dupêcher. Photographs by Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.

In the fall of 1952, Cy Twombly receives a traveling scholarship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and leaves New York for his first trip to Europe and North Africa. He meets up with Robert Rauschenberg in Casablanca, and the two of them travel to Marrakech and the Atlas Mountains, and then to Tangier. They pay a visit to Paul Bowles in Tétouan and go on day trips with him to nearby villages and Roman ruins. Twombly conducts his first and last archaeological excavation there. Upon their return to Rome in February 1953, Twombly studies and sketches the ethnographic objects and tribal artifacts he sees on display in the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini. These sketches survive in the form of the North African Sketchbooks. Much of the surviving work from this trip consists of photographs taken with a Rolleiflex shared by the artists and sketches made by them, preserved in the archives of the Cy Twombly Foundation and Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio; they provide a unique perspective on Twombly’s lesser-known affinity for Africa’s Mediterranean shores.

A both intimate and political account of the links between artistic practices and activism during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s in France and the United States—featuring monographic texts, interviews, and thematic essays.

This essay, written in the first person, is built around a series of monographic texts, interviews, and thematic essays, which constitutes an elective cosmology of a period of artistic and activist creativity in both France and the United States. Historian and art critic Elisabeth Lebovici discusses a variety of artists, protest organizations, artworks, and direct actions: ACT UP, “phone trees”, Richard Baquié, Gregg Bordowitz, Alain Buffard, Douglas Crimp, “political burials”, General Idea, Nan Goldin, Félix González-Torres, Gran Fury, L’Hiver de l’amour, Roni Horn, G. B. Jones, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Zoe Leonard, Mark Morrisroe, William Ollander, “The Patchwork of Names”, The Real Estate Show, Lionel Soukaz, Philippe Thomas, Georges Tony Stoll, Paul Vecchiali, David Wojnarowicz, Dana Wyse, zaps…

Illustrated with numerous archives and ephemera that emphasize the importance of graphic works in the fight against AIDS, Ce que le sida m’a fait (What AIDS has done to me) is a necessary work to understand the “AIDS years”.

Artist’s book published on the occasion of Gintaras Didžiapetris’ solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius 5 April–19 May, 2013, as well as different versions of the exhibition which were on view at Objectif Exhibitions in Antwerp, and Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art in Genoa. Designed by Goda Budvytytė.

The Classic of In Passing consists of three micro-books containing images from Taipei and Tokyo from 2017–2019. This publication extends 2015’s House, an artist’s book published by the Bordeaux Museum of Contemporary Art (CAPC). Produced by Inesa Brašiškė.

The multifarious practice of Vilnius-based artist Gintaras Didžiapetris (b 1985) thrives on paradox, and the navigation between past and present. Didžiapetris often uses memory as a springboard from which to articulate, question, or proliferate meaning. And while the base elements of logic or myth are perhaps insufficient ways to form narrative paths through the artists’ work, the unlikely collision of both go some way in describing Didžiapetris’ conceptual challenges.