CHARLOIS IS CHARLOIS is the first English translation of poems by Rieneke Minderman-Grobben (Rotterdam, 1944–2018) published on the occasion of Charlois Speciaal by Action Publishing Collective, Rotterdam. Edited by Quenton Miller & Ilke Gers. Translation by Johanna Monk. Designed by Ilke Gers.

With contributions by Tal Adler/Osama Zatar, Asma Agbarieh-Zahalka, Maayan Amir/Ruti Sela, Ariella Azoulay, Yael Bartana/Sebastian Cichocki, Raji Bathish, Itzhak Benyamini, Sari Hanafi, Sandi Hilal/Alessandro Petti/Eyal Weizman, Yazan Khalili, Ohad Meromi/Joshua Simon, Norma Musih, Ingo Niermann, Noam Yuran

Solution 196–213: United States of Palestine-Israel is an anthology of texts proposing a doable solution for the region. With contributors based in Ramallah and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Beirut and Jerusalem, New York and Bethlehem, Nazareth and Warsaw, the book offers solutions that will make life better, and proposes ways to do it.

Unlike previous books in the Solution series, this book invited several writers from the region to suggest specific and doable solutions for today. This is mainly since it seems absurd to present a one-man master plan for Palestine-Israel. In many senses, such master plans (whether they take a colonial, Zionist or other meta-narrative lead) have been the mold of the problem in the region for at least the last 150 years.

The idea is therefore to rethink the different antagonisms that structure our ways of resistance and compliance: to rethink Semitism and 1948, rethink identity and territory, rethink resistance and memory, rethink democracy and state, rethink Zionism and decolonization, rethink refugee and property, rethink religion and solution.

Solution Series edited by Ingo Niermann. Designed by ZAK Group.

Solution 186–195: Dubai Democracy is the fifth book in the Solution series. Using Dubai as a sort of modernist blank slate for urban and social renewal, author Ingo Niermann confronts today’s most relevant cultural and technological developments with analytical elixirs that are as pertinent as they are unbelievable. Niermann’s Dubai will become as specialized as housing the global center for treating diabetes—called Sugar World—and as universal as offering non-confrontational public spaces where both a state of total advertising and compulsive kindness, or what he calls a “personal humaneness account,” co-exist.

Translation from the German by Gerrit Jackson. Design by ZAK Group.

The publication unfolds and draws an open-ended connection between individual and collective struggles and (emotional) conflicts intertwined with the colonial and decolonizing histories of Indonesia and the Netherlands by taking two film works by artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh, No False Echoes (2008) and Instruction (2009), as points of departure. Both films take up rarely spoken fragments of the Dutch colonial past, particularly related to Indonesia, that are dormant but still affective in contemporary Dutch society. With the participation of different historical and contemporary stakeholders set against specific built environments, these two films are presented in the form of photo-novels. The film No False Echoes introduces one of the major historical sources cited in full in the publication, that is, a 1913 essay on national freedom by Soewardi Soeryaningrat, an Indonesian nationalist—or “revolutionary”—whose radical position manifested in the essay is widely known in Indonesia. The reprint of this essay is accompanied by two contemporary responses by Lizzy van Leeuwen and Nuraini Juliastuti, which in turn open another text written in 1935 by Soeryaningrat under a different name, Ki Hajar Dewantara, concerning national education in Indonesia. The latter text indicates the shift in political strategies, which, instead of fearless resistance, moves forward toward gradual building of counter-institutions of “upbringing” of new independent subjects. Designed by Julia Born.

To coincide with the 350th birthday of the philosopher, mathematician, lawyer and political writer Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (born 1646 in Leipzig), Hanne Darboven’s Evolution Leibniz was publicly exhibited for the first time in the Sprengel Museum Hannover. This complex work is divided into three extensive topics: Encyclopedia, image documentation and daily bills. Hanne Darboven combines Leibniz’s biography with her and our immediate present.

Gerd Arntz was a German Modernist artist renowned for his black and white woodcuts. A core member of the Cologne Progressives he was also a council communist. The Cologne Progressives participated in the revolutionary unions AAUD (KAPD) and its offshoot the AAUE in the 1920s. In 1928 Arntz contributed prints to the AAUE paper Die Proletarische Revolution, calling for workers to abandon parliament and form and participate in worker’s councils.