The Renaissance Society presents a major commission by Los Angeles-based artist Mathias Poledna. For this exhibition, Poledna has created an installation that juxtaposes a new moving image work with a comprehensive reimagining of the venue’s setting.

Poledna’s art most commonly takes the form of highly concentrated film works that unfold a complex tension between the visuals and their critical and cultural implications. His work, as Michael Bracewell writes, suggests “a form of conceptualism, philosophical in basis, which attempts to engage with paradox as a means of enquiry.” In Poledna’s films and the rigorously formal environments he creates for them, salient beauty and visual restraint collude in a viewing experience that encompasses both affect and detachment.

Poledna’s concise presentations underscore a mode of production in which he frequently involves specialist collaborators in order to articulate a highly specific frame of vision. The films draw on the artist’s panoramic range of interests, from the music of post-punk and a rainforest in Papua New Guinea to 1930s style animation, as in his seminal 2013 film, Imitation of Life. Although invariably newly produced, they often create the impression of having been found as they are, seemingly extricated from present-day or historic collective imaginaries.

Edited by Yvonne Rainer, this selection of texts and images by Rainer and various authors, offers a retrospective portrait of her work, focusing on some of her most notable performances and projects from both the late 1960s (Trio A, The Mind Is a Muscle) and since her return to dance with the White Oak Dance Project in 2000.

Rainer is known for her challengingly experimental and sometimes minimalist work as a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, which spearheaded the rise of postmodern dance. An essay by Rainer frames things from the perspective of an ageing dancer who is aware of her physical limitations. With a conversation between Rainer and dancer Trisha Brown.

Composed in the space between the page and live performance, Latimer’s recent essays and poems collected here examine issues of genealogy and influence, the poverty and privilege of place, architecture’s relationship to language, and feminist economies of writing, reading, and art making. Shifting between written language and live address, between the needs of the internal and the external voice, Like a Woman retrieves the refrain, the litany, and the chorus, exploring their serial ecstasies and political possibilities.

Dictionary Dressings is an ongoing research project by Femke de Vries that uses the nature of the dictionary definition as a “zero condition” for a piece of clothing to decode clothes and explore an alternative fashion vocabulary.

The book contains an introductory conversation by the editor/artist/researcher Femke de Vries with Ruby Hoette, text contributions by Joke Robaard and Barbara Brownie and visual contributions by BLESS, Conny Groenewegen, Elisa van Joolen and Students from the HKU (University of the Arts Utrecht) 2015/16.