Contributions by Manuela Ammer, Julie Ault, Monika Baer, Nairy Baghramian, Gerry Bibby, Jennifer Bornstein, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Dragana Bulut, Katarina Burin, Françoise Cactus, Leidy Churchman, Ann Cotten, Juan Davila, Dominic Eichler, Elmgreen & Dragset, Yusuf Etiman, Isa Genzken, Susanne Ghez, Margaret Harrison, Daniel Herleth, Annette Kelm, Janette Laverrière, Adam Linder, Lee Lozano, Charlie Le Mindu, Shahryar Nashat, Gina D’Orio, Stephen Prina, Dean Spade, Ming Wong.

The Jahresring series is one of the longest continually published annual journals for contemporary art in Germany. The 61st edition is a reader and visual sampler with contributions from visual artists, writers, poets, musicians, choreographers, and designers. Bringing together a discursive array of forms and timbres, it takes an intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to exploring some contemporary cultural resonances with respect to gender and sexuality. In this sense, a “PS” or postscript might be understood as a place where relations or realities not explicitly stated in the main body of any given text, but nevertheless underpinning them, are revealed. A “PS” is a place of interpersonal agency; a compelling textual gesture that might add a “by the way” and an “also” and a “you know what we’re really talking about.” By its nature, a “PS” is contextualized and contextualizing. Though it may parade as the last word, it never is.

The Jahresring is published annually on behalf of Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V.

James R. Murphy, a math teacher in La Guardia, New York, regarded mathematics as the most powerful and manipulable abstract language available to humans. To acquaint students who don’t “like” math with abstract and systematical thinking, he put a piece of string in their hands and taught them to make string figures.

How to spell the fight follows a thread that has been running through our fingers from centuries past till the present day, morphing from the tangible string figures that join our hands in childhood to the more elusive computational algorithms that engage our fingers today. Following this line of inquiry through various twists and turns, a conversation about collective agency emerges with the aim of rethinking current paradigms of cognition, education, and power.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian is an artist living in Berlin. Her research-based practice encompasses a variety of forms and formats, among them video, performance, installations, text, and sound. She tries to learn how to make string figures.

This is the fifth book in the Kayfa ta series, a publishing initiative of Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis. Each book in the series is a monographic essay commissioned in the style of how-to manuals that situation themselves in the space between the technical and the reflective, the everyday and the speculative, the instructional and the intuitive, and the factual and the fictional.

If this book had been titled something like “How to listen” or “How to be all ears,” the title would have been appropriate to the content and directly explained the book’s focus. Why, then, does the title prefer to obscure its subject rather than reveal it, running counter to a title’s traditional function? The reason is that this book is grounded in the experience of the unseen listener. Speakers are seen when they speak, whereas listeners recede into the background of the scene dominated by speakers. Listeners spend a long time listening to that around them, and hope to maintain their wall-flower position when they speak—their speech having no need to take front row or appear in the spotlight. The title of this book conceals its subject in a desire to protect the listener from returning to the spotlight once he or she has left it.

Haytham El-Wardany is an Egyptian writer currently residing in Berlin. He recently published Kitab Al-Nawm (The Book of Sleep).

This is the first book in the Kayfa ta series, a publishing initiative of Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis. Each book in the series is a monographic essay commissioned in the style of how-to manuals that situation themselves in the space between the technical and the reflective, the everyday and the speculative, the instructional and the intuitive, and the factual and the fictional. Design by Julie Peeters.

Iman Mersal intricately weaves a new narrative of motherhood, moving between interior and exterior scapes, diaries, readings, and photographic representations of motherhood to question old and current representations of motherhood and the related space of unconditional love, guilt, personal goals, and traditional expectations. What is hidden in narratives of motherhood in fictional and nonfictional texts as well as in photographs?

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet and associate professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.

This is the fourth book in the Kayfa ta series, a publishing initiative of Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis. Each book in the series is a monographic essay commissioned in the style of how-to manuals that situation themselves in the space between the technical and the reflective, the everyday and the speculative, the instructional and the intuitive, and the factual and the fictional. Design by Julie Peeters.

Iman Mersal intricately weaves a new narrative of motherhood, moving between interior and exterior scapes, diaries, readings, and photographic representations of motherhood to question old and current representations of motherhood and the related space of unconditional love, guilt, personal goals, and traditional expectations. What is hidden in narratives of motherhood in fictional and nonfictional texts as well as in photographs?

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian poet and associate professor of Arabic Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.

This is the fourth book in the Kayfa ta series, a publishing initiative of Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis. Each book in the series is a monographic essay commissioned in the style of how-to manuals that situation themselves in the space between the technical and the reflective, the everyday and the speculative, the instructional and the intuitive, and the factual and the fictional. Design by Julie Peeters.

Produced on the occasion of Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre of Cluny, 5 July–28 September, 2003.

Born in 1947, Paris, Marc Camille Chaimowicz lives and works in London. Chaimowicz’s continuous negotiation of two cultures and languages quietly reverberates throughout his pluralistic practice. He embraces both the fine and applied arts and challenges the categorical divisions between masculine and feminine, public and private, past and present.