Edited by Mai Abu ElDahab. Contributions by Mai Abu ElDahab, Lara Khaldi, Mary Jirmanus Saba, Mirene Arsanios and Nikki Columbus, Basma Alsharif.

Four essays and one conversation with contemporary artists and curators from different backgrounds and origins (Jerusalem, Lebanon, Kuwait, USA, Egypt) discussing their experience of becoming mothers as professionals in the arts, its reality and effects.

While their reflections represent a similar strata of art worker in terms of background, class, and career trajectory, the impact of instruments of patriarchy on rendering maternity invisible that they describe is recognizable and insidious. In a post-partum diary, Lara Khaldi makes audible the everyday exhaustion and disregard that comes with being a new mother; Mirene Arsanios and Nikki Columbus discuss the impact of the absence of legal or social protection for mothers; Basma Alsharif walks us through the difficulties of navigating the demands of different social contexts; Mary Jirmanus Saba pre-occupies at home with a flimsy maternity blog; And Mai Abu ElDahab puts propositions on the table for how to deal with all of this.

Michael E. Smith (born 1977 in Detroit) makes sculptures out of cast-offs, waste and other residues of our consumer society. He assembles and manipulates this found material in an unusual way. He isolates objects, makes changes to their form and seeks out the limits of their imaginative power. His presentations are characterized by an intense yet sparse choreography of the exhibition space.

Initially conceived to document three solo shows at de Appel in Amsterdam (2015), Kunstverein Hannover (2015), and S.M.A.K. in Ghent (2017), the publication also gathers new commissioned texts and a reprint that shed light on the artist’s decade-plus practice.

With texts by Martin Germann, Anthony Huberman, Chris Sharp.

For almost thirty years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been creating new pictorial worlds of abstract photography with his Silver works, which sound out and compellingly expand the boundaries and representability of photographic processes. Brought together for the first time in one opulent artist’s book, Tillmans describes the pictures as ‘stained, impure, bright, unstable, exhausted, fugitive, smear, shimmer, as solid colours’. In addition to the pictures, Tillmans also shows images of the Silver works in exhibition settings: as elements of installations, for example at K21 in Düsseldorf in 2013 or as pure Silver installations like those at Tate Britain in 2003, the Venice Biennial in 2009 or, most recently in 2020, at WIELS in Brussels.

Bottled humanism, colored neon contaminations, tattered flaps of skin, and limp penises bring humanist self-assurance crashing to the ground. What appears as poison or chemical devastation is in fact an appeal to understand metamorphosis as a state of being. Over a period of three decades, from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, the Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo created a consistent body of work that serves as a model for contemporary conceptual approaches of Posthumanism and the New Materialism. The catalogue brings together contributions by artists and theorists and documents Kudo’s comprehensive oeuvre in work and archive images as well as exhibition views from the retrospective at the Fridericianum (2016). Texts from Mike Kelley, Antje Krause-Wahl, Susanne Pfeffer & Reiko Tomii. Designed by Dan Solbach.

Tense is a never-realised title, originally intended for the Top Stories series. It was created by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in the early 1980s but published only now by Kunstverein Publishing, Amsterdam. This limited number of 250 copies was printed to accompany the exhibition Top Stories which focused on the publishing work of Anne Turyn at Kunstverein, Amsterdam, 2 April–26 June, 2021.

A selection of works on paper by Swiss visionary outsider artist and healer Emma Kunz, close to geometric abstraction, produced on the occasion of the exhibition Cosmos Emma Kunz at Aargauer Kunsthaus in 2021.

Kunz is said to have become aware of her special clairvoyant and radiaesthetic [radiation- reading] abilities at an early age. She began to heal her first patients and to work with the divining pendulum that she would use in her drawings from 1938 onwards. Until a few years before her death she produced some 500 characteristic drawings on graph paper, which she used as a tool for her healing activity. She also worked with numerology, researched in the field of herbalism and achieved a legendary series of healing successes. At this time she began to ask her acquaintances to call her “Penta”. In 1942 Emma Kunz is said to have discovered Aion A, the healing rock that is still available from Swiss pharmacies, in a quarry in Würenlos that had been used since Roman times—and is known today as the Emma Kunz Grotto.