The Place Is Here
The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain
Published by Sternberg Press, Berlin and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2019, 431 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 19 × 25 cm, English
Price: €30

Contributions by Nick Aikens, Sonia Boyce, Laura Castagnini, Deborah Cherry, Alice Correia, Chandra Frank, June Givanni, Sunil Gupta, Evan Ifekoya, Claudette Johnson, Raisa Kabir, Gail Lewis, Amna Malik, Samia Malik, Priyesh Mistry, Dorothy Price, susan pui san lok, Raju Rage, Elizabeth Robles, Ashwani Sharma, Marlene Smith, Leon Wainwright, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Rehana Zaman.

The publication developed from the exhibition and research project The Place Is Here (2016–19), which traced the urgent and wide-ranging conversations taking place between black artists, writers, and thinkers in Britain during the 1980s. Within the context of Thatcherism and a racist art establishment, a new generation of black artists and intellectuals produced some of the most compelling ideas and images in recent British cultural history. Across four exhibitions, The Place Is Here brought together over one hundred works by forty artists and collectives, spanning painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and expanded archival displays. Richly illustrated, the book includes thematic essays, close readings of works, and a series of panel discussions bringing together key scholarly, critical, and artistic voices foundational to art in Britain in the 1980s. The result is an intergenerational dialogue around pressing intellectual, political, and aesthetic debates, highlighting the significance of the work of these artists for the present.

#2019 #nickaikens #sternbergpress #vanabbemuseum
The Disintegration of a Critic
Jill Johnston
Published by Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2019, 224 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 10.8 × 18 cm, English
Price: €16 (Out of stock)

Jill Johnston—cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon—was renowned as a writer on dance, especially on the developments around Judson Dance and the 1960s downtown New York City scene, and later as the author of the radical-feminist classic Lesbian Nation (1973). This book collects thirty texts by Jill Johnston that were initially published in her weekly column for The Village Voice between 1960 and 1974. The column provided a format in which Johnston could dissolve distinctions between the personal, the critical, and the political. Her writing took turns and loops, reflecting its times and contexts, and set a stage for the emergence of Johnston as a public figure and self-proclaimed radical lesbian that defied any prescribed position.

Johnston’s original texts are accompanied by three new contributions by Ingrid Nyeboe, Bruce Hainley, and Jennifer Krasinski, as well as an appendix with archival material related to a panel Johnston organized in 1969, titled The Disintegration of a Critic: An Analysis of Jill Johnston. Edited by Fiona McGovern, Megan Francis Sullivan, Axel Wieder. Designed by HIT.

You can read more on Jill Johnston in Jennifer Krasinski’s Art in America article here.

#2019 #axelwieder #brucehainley #hit #jilljohnston #meganfrancissullivan #sternbergpress #theory
Phillip Lai
Published by The Showroom, London, 1997, 24 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 21 × 21 cm, English
Price: €18 (Out of stock)

Produced on the occasion of Phillip Lai’s exhibtion at The Showroom, London, 26 February–30 March, 1997. With an essay by Francis McKee and an interview by Karina Daskalov.

Phillip Lai’s work at The Showroom involved the construction of objects and images which addressed ‘fluid’ states; the transformation via a soy-sauce fermentation unit, of solids to liquid and the absurd fusion, through biro drawn directly onto the gallery wall, of automatic drawing and the ‘letting’, or exhumation, of a consciousness.

More information on the exhibition can be found here.

#1997 #francismckee #philliplai #theshowroom
May 25 is now October 1
Bardhi Haliti
Published by cpress, Zurich, 2019, 662 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 16.5 × 23.3 cm, English
Price: €28

With more autonomy in 1974, Kosovo saw an upsurge in urban planning and architectural freedom, enabled by modernism and in turn expressed through competitive sports and a shift away from ethnic particularities, which signalled a shift West. May 25 is now October 1 is an extensive research across Kosovar newspapers published between 1974 and 2018. The book documents sports activities that took place in seven identical sports halls in seven cities of Kosovo. The images have been cropped, zoomed in on, and paired together by similarity. The choreography is not meant to render them jewels or treasures, but rather to help find their meaning beyond their meaning within the now unfashionable sports halls. Through repetition, the images and texts reveal the multifunctional nature of community space in which larger sociopolitical and cultural cycles are reflected.

#2019 #bardhihaliti
VOL. XVI
Haris Epaminonda
Published by Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite, Berlin, 2019, 120 pages (colour & b/w ill.) with five paper inserts, 23.5 × 29.5 cm, English, French
Price: €27 (Temporarily out of stock)

The publication is a collaborative project bewtween Frac Île-de-France, the Cypriot artist Haris Epaminonda, and the Berlin designers Santiago da Silva and Simon Steinberger.

It recounts and translates the experience of the exhibition VOL. XVI, presented at Le Plateau in 2015, for which the artist had created a global environment. Through a series of parallel actions the whole exhibition was connecting the interior and exterior with the presence of an old Japanese man “living” in the exhibition and with two young women dressed in traditional Japanese costumes who were walking in the des Buttes-Chaumont Park in Paris.

With texts by Philippe Artières, Chris Sharp and Aurélie Verdier.

#2019 #bomdiaboatardeboanoite #chrissharp #harisepaminonda
Katinka Bock
Radio Piombino
Published by The Common Guild, Glasgow, 2018, 16 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 14.5 × 23 cm, English
Price: €14

Produced to accompany Katinka Bock’s exhibition Radio Piombino with text by art critic and curator Anne Bonnin. Designed by graphic design collective Åbäke, the publication includes a selection of black and white photographs by Katinka Bock alongside installation images by Ruth Clark, two of which appear as gloss colour stickers. Printed on recycled matt paper and bound with red staples.

#2018 #katinkabock #thecommonguild