Homework by Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks & Astrid Lorange) collects twenty-seven texts written over the course of 2016–2020. Homework considers the manifold ways that embodied life (birth, death, love, friendship, solidarity, race, gender, sexuality, citizenship) are conditioned by a world that appears both ruinous and full of potential. Snack Syndicate asks how to read ruins and how to read the prophecy of hope that threads together a long history of survival and struggle. The book offers a guide for this reading, taking study to be a lifelong practice. It suggests a model for homework as the promise we make to each other through study and to the ghosts who carry us forward.

Introduction by Tom Melick and designed by Robert Milne.

Produced on the occasion of Remco Torenbosch’s exhibition of Growth, 2019 at Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen for which Toren­bosch ap­pro­pri­ated a med­i­ta­tion video that he found cir­cu­lating on an in­ternet forum for stock traders. The video shows a mon­tage with a va­riety of flower fields, com­posed in such a way as to glo­rify the beauty of na­ture and ef­fec­tuate re­laxation through dig­ital de­vices. The piece ex­plores how the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of na­ture is cap­i­tal­ized on by the med­i­ta­tion in­dustry, in order to pro­mote better per­for­mance in the work­place.

The vir­tual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of flowers and na­ture and the video’s orig­inal place of cir­cu­la­tion also un­der­line the eternal con­nec­tion be­tween the nat­ural and the fi­nan­cial world: from the very first spec­u­la­tive bubble caused by tulip bulbs in the 17th cen­tury, to dis­aster in­vestors who are cashing in on the eco­log­ical cat­a­stro­phes of the fu­ture.

With a text by Sven Lütticken.

A poem written by the artist for the space of the book composed only of punctuation marks. For about twenty years, Olaf Nicolai (born 1962 in Halle, East Germany, lives and works in Berlin) has been producing conceptual artworks influenced by a philosophical background inherited from its formative years in East Germany, questioning the deadlocks of romanticism and Marxism. Alternating between photography, sculpture, publishing, design, installation and performance, Nicolai creates artistic situations whose purpose is to hijack the production patterns of the industrial world as well as its cultural, financial and social representations.

This publication brings together photographs taken by Marion Scemama during a trip through the American desert with David Wojnarowicz, shortly before his death. It features documents from Scemama’s personal archives and notes from Wojnarowicz’s diary, along with texts by Thibault Boulvain and Elisabeth Lebovici.

Queer Formalism: The Return expands upon William J. Simmons’s original, influential essay Notes on Queer Formalism from 2013, offering novel ways of thinking about queer-feminist art outside of the critical-complicit and abstract-representational binaries that continue to haunt contemporary queer art. It therefore proposes a new kind of queer art writing, one that skirts the limits imposed by normative histories of art and film.

Artists addressed in Queer Formalism: The Return include: Sally Mann, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Math Bass, Lorna Simpson, Laurie Simmons, Alex Prager, Lana Del Rey, Jessica Lange, and Louise Lawler, among others.

A comprehensive record of the London-based art collective BANK’s notorious project from the late 1990s, a fierce critic of the language elements of the art market.

Between 1998 and 1999, BANK operated The BANK Fax-Bak Service. For the project, the group’s members, Simon Bedwell, John Russell and Milly Thompson proof-read and copy-edited more than 300 press releases published by galleries in London and New York. The procedure was simple: after adding their mocking corrections, the artists faxed the promotional texts back to the respective galleries. The BANK Fax-Bak Service exposes the art market’s (ongoing) sisyphean effort to legitimize itself through boasting, self-important and nonsensical language. Published in collaboration with Treize (Paris), this volume is a comprehensive record of BANK’s notorious project from the late 1990s.

Edited by Tenzing Barshee, Gallien Déjean, Dan Solbach. Designed by Dan Solbach.