Edited by Susan Gibb and Becket MWN.

Event and Duration is a collection of texts that offer various perspectives on the notions of ‘event and duration’, and suggest ways that time can be thought and measured otherwise. The selection of texts are drawn from the field of performance studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, science fiction and the visual arts among others, all of which were read in If I Can’t Dance’s reading groups in Amsterdam, São Paulo and Toronto as part of the artistic programme VI: Event and Duration (2015–16).

Contributors: Octavia E. Butler, Paul Chan, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Elizabeth Freeman, Amelia Groom, The Invisible Committee, R.D. Laing, Henri Lefebvre, Jota Mombaça, José Esteban Muñoz, Peter Pál Pelbart, Paul B. Preciado; and artist pages by Becket MWN.

Edited by Anik Fournier.

This publication documents and shares the trajectory of If I Can’t Dance’s engagement with ‘Social Movement’ as the field of inquiry for its seventh biannual programme (2017–18). Social Movement: Through the Lens of Performance and Performativity investigates how performance ontologies around bodily experience, affect and the relational better one’s understanding of social movement – and in turn how that understanding expands performance vocabularies.

Contributors: Giorgio Agamben, Selçuk Balamir, Anne Boyer, Judith Butler, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Nell Donkers, Pascale Gatzen, Édouard Glissant, Ayesha Hameed, Sands Joseph Horwitz-Dijks Murray-Wassink, Shannon Jackson, Rudolf Laban, Gregory Lennon, Audre Lorde, Ros Murray, AnnaMaria Pinaka, Tina Reden, Marjan Sax, Rebecca Schneider, Taka Taka, Simone Weil, Nagaré Willemsen; and postcard insert by Reza Mirabi.

The book is the complete collection of Simone Forti’s News Animations, one of the works that best reveal her artistic practice. The news and, more broadly, the most pressing issues of the global socio-political situation, are used to explore the potential of language, its dimensions, and its combination with dance, movements, words, images, and music. Simone Forti has always “danced” the news, it’s the way she tells them. But, above all, it’s the way she internalizes them, feels them, and processes them. Through a stream of consciousness, the artist grants voice and body to thoughts about the world, its conflicts, war, injustices, and inequalities.

The volume collects Simone Forti’s News Animations from 1980 to 2018—through the transcriptions of the performances, images, and drawings—seeking to capture their spirit, their poetic stance and, mostly, understand how they manage to describe the society and the world we live in.

In 2020, CMMC (Céline Mathieu and Myrthe van der Mark) were invited by organisers NICC Lodgers to perform at M HKA in Antwerp in response to art subsidy cuts in Flanders. Their contribution, The Writing Performance, was an attempt to write a novella each in three days, during the museum’s opening hours and in full sight of visitors. Throughout The Writing Performance, CMMC subsisted on water and sugar. Printed in an edition of 120 copies.

Produced on the occasion of Hugo Canoilas being awarded the Kapsch Contemporary Art prize 2020, and the resulting exhibition at MUMOK, Vienna.

Canoilas’s combination of painting with strategies of installation and performance is evidence of an expanded concept of painting based on an awareness of contemporary social and political developments and of the appertaining philosophical and art-historical discourses. These take a critical view of our world order shaped by humanism, with its hierarchical structures of values, and they advocate an empathetic approach to nature and all creatures and animals.

You can see a video on the exhibition here.

This first monograph on Ei Arakawa allows a profound understanding of Arakawas complex artistic practice in general: on behalf of Illustrations, performance scripts, notes, and sketches it unfolds a kind of archive along the performances as well as the performance people the artist has worked with over the past ten years.

With texts from Ei Arakawa, Eva Birkenstock, Sarah Chow, John Kelsey, Jutta Koether, Erika Lindström & Reiko Tomii. Reiko Tomii’s talk on Ei Arakawa can be seen here.

Designed by Hit Studio.