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.

Various artistic trends originating in Europe after World War 1, such as Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus in Germany and Surrealism in France, left a strong impression on Japanese art and photography in the Taisho and the early Showa periods. In photography in particular, the Western influence brought a new movement called Shinko Shashin (New Photography) in the early Showa period. This exhibition was an attempt at reexamining the visual expression in the period from the perspective of the photographic work of artists from fields other than photography, focusing on the work of Koshiro Onchi, Osamu Shiihara and Ei-Q.

Street Talk is the record of a project by conceptual artist Stephen Willats in which he filmed (unbeknownst to them) passers-by walking down two streets in Amsterdam. The captioned film stills in Street Talk document both the endless streams of interactions that inform ‘daily life’ and the fleeting connections with friends or strangers that interrupt these streams. As Willats writes, ‘the act of walking together, side by side, is fundamental to acts of sociability; it introduces fluidity and transience in the coding of language in a relationship when perceived by an external observer.’ Between documentary observation and poetic essay, Street Talk provides an effective introduction to Willats’ recent work, where urban spaces are deconstructed in order to expose underlying ‘bandwidths’ of visual, textual and aural information. This edition comes with a foldout map of Amsterdam.

Produced on the occasion of Richard Tuttle’s 1985 exhibition at the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, 22 September–24 November, 1985.

Richard Tuttle’s work exists in the space between painting, sculpture, poetry, assemblage, and drawing. He draws beauty out of humble materials, reflecting the fragility of the world in his poetic works. Without a specific reference point, his investigations of line, volume, color, texture, shape, and form are imbued with a sense of spirituality and informed by a deep intellectual curiosity. Language, spatial relationship, and scale are also central concerns for the artist, who maintains an acute awareness for the viewer’s aesthetic experience.

Poster produced on the occasion of Guy Mees: The Weather is Quiet, Cool and Soft at MuZEE, Oostende, 24 November, 2018–10 March, 2019. The Weather is Quiet, Cool and Soft presented works from different stages in the career of the Belgium artist Guy Mees (1935–2003) to shed light on his intuitive and conceptual approach. The selected works ranged from early lace pieces generically entitled Lost Space to the films and the photographs of the series of portraits Difference of Levels, never before shown structuralist works from the 1970s, pastel on paper series from the mid-1970s and paper cut-outs from the 1980s. Together, these allow a study of Mees’s practice and his ideas of mutability, fragility, porosity and the expansion of pictorial space into social space. The title of the exhibition (taken from a note by the artist) is a reference to the atmospheric impermanence in Mees’s work and his relativist poetical approach.