Produced on the occasion of the exhibition John Knight WORKS IN SITU, A WORK IN SITU at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich, 19 April–17 May, 2008.

This artist’s book gathers the 67 photographs that make up the contact sheet #234 of the photographs taken by Jef Geys during the 1969 Tour de France, the year of Eddy Merckx’s first victory and the same day as the man’s first step on the moon.

Published following the touring exhibition Le Tour de France 1969 d’Eddy Merckx at Cneai, Pantin; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; Bains-Douches d’Alençon; Centre d’art contemporain Passages, Troyes; IAC, Villeurbanne; and galerie Air de Paris between 2016 and 2018.

Over the course of approximately one year, The Registry of Promise consisted of four autonomous, interrelated exhibitions, which can be read as individual chapters in a book. In this series, Chris Sharp reflects on our increasingly fraught relationship with what the future may or may not hold, and the work engages with and plays upon the various readings and mutability of “promise”, along with the inevitability of what may come, whether positive or negative. Such polyvalence is particularly topical, as we have shifted from the anthropocentric promise of modernity to a negative faith in the post-human.

Including artists Becky Beasley, Patrick Bernatchez, Juliette Blightman, Peter Buggenhout, Nina Canell, Michael Dean, Alexander Gutke, Jochen Lempert, Jean-Luc Moulène, Marlie Mul, Matt Mullican, Rosalind Nashashibi, Antoine Nessi, Jean-Marie Perdrix, Reto Pulfer, Mandla Reuter, Hans Schabus, Lucy Skaer, Michael E. Smith, Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli, Francisco Tropa, Andy Warhol, Anicka Yi.

From the mid-1970s until her death at age 31 in 1982, Korean-born artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha created a rich body of conceptual art that explored displacement and loss. Her works included artists’ books, mail art, performance, audio, video, film, and installation. Although grounded in French psychoanalytic film theory, her art is also informed by far-ranging cultural and symbolic references, from shamanism to Confucianism and Catholicism. Her collage-like book Dictée, which was published posthumously in 1982, is recognized as an influential investigation of identity in the context of history, ethnicity and gender.

With texts by Jean-François Chevrier & Mike Kelley.

Queer Formalism: The Return expands upon William J. Simmons’s original, influential essay Notes on Queer Formalism from 2013, offering novel ways of thinking about queer-feminist art outside of the critical-complicit and abstract-representational binaries that continue to haunt contemporary queer art. It therefore proposes a new kind of queer art writing, one that skirts the limits imposed by normative histories of art and film.

Artists addressed in Queer Formalism: The Return include: Sally Mann, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Math Bass, Lorna Simpson, Laurie Simmons, Alex Prager, Lana Del Rey, Jessica Lange, and Louise Lawler, among others.