Between December 2022 and March 2023, Vivian Suter shared hundreds of photos, all taken with her mobile phone, with the designer and editor of this book. A selection of these snapshots, condensed, juxtaposed, complementing each other, now forms a kind of photographic journal. It offers insights into Suter’s work on her art and everyday life, which are inextricably interwoven: Photos of canvases and paint pots in the thicket of her jungle-like garden and in the studio, of her dogs, of the house with its characteristic aquamarine green and purplish-red walls, of family pictures, of the play of light and shadow in nature and architecture. Among the many photos, one occasionally finds images of watercolours on (coloured) paper, which the artist made especially for the book. Designed by Sabo Day.

Sherrie Levine rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists based in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s whose work examined the structures of signification underlying mass-circulated images, and, in many cases, directly appropriated these images in order to imbue them with new, critically inflected meaning. Since then, Levine has created a singular and complex body of work in a variety of media that often explicitly reproduces artworks and motifs from the Western art-historical canon as well as non-Western cultures.

Wolfgang Tillmans’ truth study centre became a fixed part of his exhibitions since he first showed a version of the multi-part tabletop installation in 2005. Often arising from local circumstances and current issues at the time of their creation, the “truth study centre” works mark an endeavour to create a clear view in ever more confusing times.

Far exceeding his original and main medium of photography, he juxtaposes a variety of contrary opinions, statements and comparisons on recurring table formats. The dimensions of the wooden tables, which he designed himself, are not arbitrary: they are built using standard British door panels, 198 cm long, and with one of four different standard widths. This book gives an overview, through lavish reproductions, of this new form of collage, in which picture, text and object “are only kept in place by their own weight.” An essay by Thomas McDonough, Professor for Art History at Birmingham University, New York, places Tillmans’ project within the context of twentieth-century collage, from Hannah Höch to Robert Rauschenberg.

In 1997, during a symposium at Centre Pompidou, Leo Bersani presented a prescient critique of the assimilative tendencies that made ‘gays melt into the very culture they like to think of themselves as undermining.’ Mired in micropolitics, for Bersani, queer activism had relinquished the radical task of reconfiguring the horizon of the possible. Later published as ‘Gay Betrayals’, Bersani’s intervention champions a truly disruptive vision of homosexuality, one that betrays the relational, identitarian and communitarian foundations of bourgeois heterosexual respectability through ‘antimonogamous promiscuity’. Building on extensive artistic research into the politics of queer spaces and culture some 20 years later, artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings revisit Bersani’s polemic with a response in three acts. Through a kaleidoscopic array of drawings, preparatory sketches and egg tempera paintings, a narrative of everyday (homo)sociality comes into view. A series of statuesque figures are caught as they feel the outlines of existing power structures, try out new strategies of inclusivity and, ultimately, wrestle with the blurred lineaments of identity and community.

Produced on the occasion of Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings’ exhibition at the Tate Britain, London 24 September 2022–7 May 2023 as part of the Art Now series.

Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings use the traditional medium of fresco painting to depict street scenes showing groups of people portraying various power dynamics, class and social relations and positions of authority. Their collaborative work is linked to their ongoing research and exploration into the relationship between public space, architecture, state infrastructure, gender and sexual identity, asking viewers to question what public space looks like.

“…Almost anyone could be an artist
They could put the art on the wall
All you got to do is know someone
With a wall, that’s all…”

Taking it’s clue from Escape-ism song Almost No One (Can Have My Love) this new publication adapts the catalogue format in order to publish a series of works which are to be hung on the wall.