Jochen Lempert photographs the animal world in the most diverse contexts: from their natural habitat to the museum of natural history, from the zoo to the urban environment, in remote places or banal settings and situations. Lempert compiles his findings in a vast archive of images covering an ample spectrum, from common everyday views, to compositions that tend towards abstraction. This interest in the natural world as a subject has been further complemented by his exploration of the properties and materiality of the photographic image. Analogue, black and white, hand-printed in the darkroom, his photographs resist categorization and confront the canons of today’s aesthetic.

In his presentations, Lempert uses groupings and scale to respond to the exhibition space. He places and selects the photographs thoughtfully, always looking for cross-references and associations, uncovering subtle correspondences. Lempert’s arrangements give us new insights into our own place within the patterns, the structures and even the randomness or the order of the natural world.

Produced on the occasion of Inhuman, 29 March–14 June, 2015. Curated by Susanne Pfeffer. Artists include: Julieta Aranda, Dora Budor, Andrea Crespo, Nicolas Deshayes, Aleksandra Domanović, David Douard, Jana Euler, Cécile B. Evans, Melanie Gilligan, Oliver Laric, Johannes Paul Raether, Pamela Rosenkranz, Stewart Uoo, Lu Yang, Anicka Yi.

The artists participating in the exhibition “Inhuman” offer visions of the human being as a socially trained yet resistant body, transcending biologically or socially determined gender classifications, as a digitally immortal entity, or as a constantly evolving self. They visualize the constructs that define what is human and shift existing perspectives on human subjectivity and the body, thereby questioning the primacy of the human being at a fundamental level.

Designed by ZAK Group.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE” (1969) was a major intervention in feminist performance practices and public art. The proposal argued for an intimate relationship between creative production in the public sphere and domestic labor—a relationship whose intricacies Ukeles has been unraveling ever since. In 1977, she became the unsalaried Artist-in-Residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation, a position that enables her to introduce radical public art into an urban municipal infrastructure.

Through archival research, this monographic publication focuses on Ukeles’s work ballets—a series of seven grand-scale collaborative performances involving workers, trucks, barges, and hundreds of tons of recyclables and steel—which took place between 1983 and 2012 in New York, Pittsburgh, Givors, Rotterdam, and Tokamachi. Over the past four decades, Ukeles has pioneered how we perceive and ultimately engage in maintenance activities. The work ballets derive from her engagement in civic operations in order to reveal how they work though monumental coordination and cooperation. Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Seven Work Ballets is the first monograph on Ukeles’s seminal practice, and is as much an artist’s book as an art-historical publication.

Edited by Kari Conte. Contributions by Kari Conte, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Mierle Laderman Ukeles; conversation with Tom Finkelpearl, Shannon Jackson, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Designed by Marc Hollenstein.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition The Retraction of Things curated by Lukas Töpfer at KW Berlin. Edition 350.

Noelle Kocot is the author of six books of poetry, most recently, Soul In Space (Wave Books, 2013). Kocot also translated Tristan Corbiere’s poems from French which appear in a book called Poet By Default (Wave 2011). She is the recipient of numerous awards for her poems, including The American Poetry Review, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Literary Foundation, The Fund for Poetry and The Academy of American Poets. Kocot’s work has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Poetry 2001, 2012 and 2013 and Postmodern Poetry: A Norton Anthology.

Published by Fivehundred places, founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His Poetry collection, Far District: Poems (2010), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. Other honours include a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner Journal and the Academy of American Poets’ Larry Levis Prize. He is the Meringoff Sesquicentennial Fellow Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University and a contributing editor to the literary journal, Toungue: A Journal of Writing & Art.

Published by Fivehundred places, founded in 2012 by Jason Dodge. On the cover of each book is a dead scissor by Paul Elliman.