A comprehensive exhibition guide for The scene in which I find myself / Or, where does my body belong at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, curated by Ruth Buchanan.

Presenting the largest number of collection works ever shown at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, including treasured highlights, the project seeks to break (open) the mechanisms of collecting and challenges the role and success of the museum. If a collection is meant to reflect the society that creates it, there are problems with the methodologies if amongst this highly regarded collection, so few perspectives are captured.

This conflict in motion is made visible through the lens of a gallery collection, and provides a crucial course alteration for the future. Here, the collection becomes the scene, and the body in attendance is dynamically addressed, and each of us – the institution, the visitor, and the artist herself are implicated in what these future procedures may be.

A PDF of the publication can be downloaded here.

A single poster contribution from the original publication On Taking a Normal Situation and Retranslating it Into Overlapping and Multiple Readings of Conditions Past and present.

An exhibition devised by Yves Aupetitallot, Iwona Blazwick and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev within the framework of ANTWERP 93. Its title was inspired by Gordon Matta Clark who made one of his final works in the city, and which in turn led to the foundation of M HKA. In some ways the subject of this exhibition was ‘the exhibition’. What it proposed, however, was a new relation between structure, location, context, artist and audience.

Diagrammatic Writing is a poetic demonstration of the capacity of format to produce meaning. The articulation of the codex, as a space of semantically generative relations, has rarely (if ever) been subject to so highly focused and detailed a study. The text and graphical presentation are fully integrated, co-dependent, and mutually self-reflexive.

This small book work should be of interest to writers, bibliographers, designers, conceptual artists, and anyone interested in the meta-language of diagrammatic thought in graphic form.

Johanna Drucker is a writer and book artist known for her work in experimental typography. She has published and lectured widely on topics related to the history of the book, contemporary art, graphic design, and digital aesthetics. She is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Information Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Poets, activists, writers and artists respond to what it means to be lonely in 2017. Contributors include porn actor Colby Keller, writer Olivia Laing, artist Marc Hundley, librettist Alice Goodman, poet Timothy Thornton, anti-drag performer David Hoyle & many more. Curated by Richard Dodwell.

Eva Olthof’s book takes as it’s starting point the American Memorial Library in Berlin (Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek), which opened in 1954, and two books, which were returned after 50 years, accompanied by a handwritten personal letter. The library was a gift from the American people to the population of West Berlin after enduring the Berlin Blockade, promoting the “illimitable freedom of the human mind”, as it reads in a quote on the library’s wall from US President Thomas.

The book brings together the charged political history of this library, and the recent events connected to the revelations of NSA files by Edward Snowden.

Contributions by Doreen Mende, Eva Olthof, Eben Moglen

With texts by Federica Bueti, Malak Helmy, Francis Mckee, Haytham El Wardany, Brian Kuan Wood.

Five essays that take an intimate look at what language’s role is in moments of dramatic change, and how to find meaning for artistic practices in these transformative conditions. Taking its cue from the aftermath of the events of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, Final Vocabulary doesn’t provide answers as much as it captures the spirit of the moment of searching in which the writers find themselves. The book was developed out of a live conversation at an event called “The Informal Meeting” that took place in Leuven in January 2015, where participants were asked: Our histories and references are often in a different language (abstract or actual) than we use ourselves, what tools do you think are or might be useful to help you trust your own memories and narratives? What, if anything, do you think we might borrow from art to experiment with language in different situations? In English and Arabic.