Adrian Piper: Performing Objects I Have Been, 1972–2018 is a collection of documents from, or potentially relevant to Adrian Piper’s performance Some Reflective Surfaces (1975–76) edited by art historian and curator Rhea Anastas. In this early live piece, Piper dances under spotlights to Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’, additionally staging video feedback and filmed images of herself dancing, and two sound recordings—‘Respect’ itself, and a voice-over narrative. Some Reflective Surfaces was produced in New York in the Fine Arts Building, New York University in 1975 and then at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976. The performance has not been staged since. The documents of Some Reflective Surfaces include writings by, and audio transcripts of Piper. The publication is illustrated with photographs of Piper’s performances and other works.

Edited by Rhea Anastas with contributions by RoseLee Goldberg and Adrian Piper. Designed by Will Holder.

Drafting futures, remembering a building explores, connects and recalls the many lives of one building in Amsterdam Nieuw-West over the span of more than sixty years. From when it was first built as ‘CSG Pascal’, a hypermodern school building; through its near demise when it was reformed as ‘Calvijn College’; then, its designation as a refugee shelter; and to its current, temporary status as a creative ‘hub’, known as ‘Broedplaats Lely’ and home to de Appel. Plans for the future are constantly made and unmade – what will this place become? How does this building help to understand the ideologies behind city planning, segregation and gentrification? How does this building reveal the different guises of the ‘politics of forgetting’ and how to work against them?

Edited by Hannah Cheney. Designed by Bardhi Haliti & Zuzana Kostelanská.

This thesis explores what it means to be human guided by Sylvia Wynter’s thought provoking trajectory “Towards the Human, after Man” and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s encompassing book Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007); and argues that at the core of contemporary humanness lies a struggle defined by a racialized order of human existence. This struggle informs not only those racialized Others but to varying degrees impacts all human beings on a global scale. As a form of tentacular thinking this thesis contributes in troubling the colonial category of the human by introducing the figure of the human adoptee of color in relation to a decolonial ethics of care and healing.

Designed by Christoph Clarijs.

Exhibition guide produced on the occasion of the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany dedicated to Vincent Fecteau, at Fridericianum, Kassel, 3 April–5 September, 2021. Encompassing more than sixty selected works created between 1993 and 2020, the show provided a comprehensive overview of Fecteau’s oeuvre.

With texts by Elizabeth Bronfen, Gioia Dal Molin, Quinn Latimer, Thomas Schmutz.

Hannah Villiger lived and worked as a resident artist at Istituto Svizzero in Rome from 1974 to 1976. There she realized her early artistic ideas and developed the sculptural approach to photography that would shape all of her later work—namely large-format photographs of her own body arranged into blocks of several images, which show close-ups of sometimes fragmented and abstracted body parts. Villiger viewed herself as a sculptor rather than a photographer, and these Roman years were decisive in shaping her artistic practice. In her studio and in the garden of Villa Maraini, she first developed simple objects inspired by the materials of Arte Povera, then gradually shifted to photography, perceiving it as a more sculptural method.

You can find more on her work here.

Invitation card produced on the occasion of the exhibition Jef Geys at Kunsthalle Bern, 29 May–25 July, 2021.