(Mis)reading Masquerades comprises a selection of theoretical texts drawn from different fields of knowledge that address questions such as transgression, gender identity and subversion, gesture, the carnivalesque, the construction of subjectivity, authorship, mimesis, and alterity. The publication features introductions to each text by the participants of our monthly reading group, newly commissioned essays by writers and curators from the field of contemporary art and contributions by artists from the Dutch Art Institute (Enschede) and Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam).

Published on the occasion of Klapheck’s 1993 exhibtion at Galerie Lelong, Zurich. Includes the essay by Konrad Klapheck Die Supermutter.

Klapheck, who was just 10 when World War II ended, saw in the destroyed cities and ruined buildings all around him a certain beauty or spectacle. After becoming a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Klapheck turned to a different kind of subject matter, creating the first of his many “machine pictures”: the 1955 painting Typewriter. He went on to expand his repertoire to include sewing machines, faucets, telephones, irons, and even a hay-turning machine.

Klapheck, who was just 10 when World War II ended, saw in the destroyed cities and ruined buildings all around him a certain beauty or spectacle. After becoming a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Klapheck turned to a different kind of subject matter, creating the first of his many “machine pictures”: the 1955 painting Typewriter. He went on to expand his repertoire to include sewing machines, faucets, telephones, irons, and even a hay-turning machine.

The Los Angeles based artist Shannon Ebner extends her exploration of photography, sculpture and language in this remarkable book, The Sun as Error. In collaboration with Dexter Sinister (design duo David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey), The Sun as Error re-investigates the meaning and language of photographs, creating both an open-ended reading of her practice and also rethinking the idea of an artist’s monograph. Far from straightforward, the book interweaves her bodies of work, previously unseen one-off pieces, with the language of technical diagrams, optical illusions, and graphic design. One of the persistent motifs through the book’s sequence is an asterisk and, specifically, one imbued with the legacy of the graphic designer Muriel Cooper. As the first design director for MIT Press and the cofounder of the Visible Language Workshop, Cooper’s legacy for reorienting and repositioning the direction of an artist’s monograph is imaginatively explored in the creative partnership of Dexter Sinister and Shannon Ebner.

Los Angeles artist Shannon Ebner extends her exploration of photography, sculpture and language in this remarkable book, The Sun as Error. In collaboration with Dexter Sinister (design duo David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey), The Sun as Error re-investigates the meaning and language of photographs, creating both an open-ended reading of her practice and also rethinking the idea of an artist’s monograph. Far from straightforward, the book interweaves her bodies of work, previously unseen one-off pieces, with the language of technical diagrams, optical illusions, and graphic design. One of the persistent motifs through the book’s sequence is an asterisk and, specifically, one imbued with the legacy of the graphic designer Muriel Cooper. As the first design director for MIT Press and the cofounder of the Visible Language Workshop, Cooper’s legacy for reorienting and repositioning the direction of an artist’s monograph is imaginatively explored in the creative partnership of Dexter Sinister and Shannon Ebner. This 2011 reprinted bootleg version of the original monograph is printed in a black and white paperback book.

In 1992, Dutch artist Job Koelewijn directed a landmark intervention, The cleaning of the Rietveld pavilion, performed by three women of his family dressed in traditional attire.

25 years later, conceptual artist Alina Lupu has updated Koelewijn’s piece to a society reshaped by neoliberalism, and to the working conditions of cleaning personnel within the gig economy. The green-blue color of the publication’s cover references the cleaning platform Helpling. Designed by Till-Michael Hormann after an idea of Job Koelewijn.