In 1997, during a symposium at Centre Pompidou, Leo Bersani presented a prescient critique of the assimilative tendencies that made ‘gays melt into the very culture they like to think of themselves as undermining.’ Mired in micropolitics, for Bersani, queer activism had relinquished the radical task of reconfiguring the horizon of the possible. Later published as ‘Gay Betrayals’, Bersani’s intervention champions a truly disruptive vision of homosexuality, one that betrays the relational, identitarian and communitarian foundations of bourgeois heterosexual respectability through ‘antimonogamous promiscuity’. Building on extensive artistic research into the politics of queer spaces and culture some 20 years later, artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings revisit Bersani’s polemic with a response in three acts. Through a kaleidoscopic array of drawings, preparatory sketches and egg tempera paintings, a narrative of everyday (homo)sociality comes into view. A series of statuesque figures are caught as they feel the outlines of existing power structures, try out new strategies of inclusivity and, ultimately, wrestle with the blurred lineaments of identity and community.

Produced on the occasion of Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings’ exhibition at the Tate Britain, London 24 September 2022–7 May 2023 as part of the Art Now series.

Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings use the traditional medium of fresco painting to depict street scenes showing groups of people portraying various power dynamics, class and social relations and positions of authority. Their collaborative work is linked to their ongoing research and exploration into the relationship between public space, architecture, state infrastructure, gender and sexual identity, asking viewers to question what public space looks like.

The Classic of In Passing consists of three micro-books containing images from Taipei and Tokyo from 2017–2019. This publication extends 2015’s House, an artist’s book published by the Bordeaux Museum of Contemporary Art (CAPC). Produced by Inesa Brašiškė.

The multifarious practice of Vilnius-based artist Gintaras Didžiapetris (b 1985) thrives on paradox, and the navigation between past and present. Didžiapetris often uses memory as a springboard from which to articulate, question, or proliferate meaning. And while the base elements of logic or myth are perhaps insufficient ways to form narrative paths through the artists’ work, the unlikely collision of both go some way in describing Didžiapetris’ conceptual challenges.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Reinhard Mucha. Der Mucha: An Initial Suspicion at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 3 September, 2022–22 January, 2023. The exhibition united long unseen installations with works from all creative phases at its two venues, K20 and K21, creating a panorama that spans more than four decades of artistic work.

Edited by Susanne Gaensheimer and Falk Wolf.

Produced on the occasion of Tony Coke’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, a collaboration between Kunstverein München and Haus der Kunst. The thematic starting point for Cokes’s new productions is the ideological and propagandistic entanglements of both exhibition venues during the Nazi era as well as their cultural-political role in the context of the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972.

The publication accompanies the eponymous exhibition and translates stills from the newly produced video essays into a book format while examining the significance of Cokes’s work in terms of a contemporary approach to institutional critique. The essays are written by Tina M. Campt and Tom Holert, with an introduction by Emma Enderby and Elena Setzer (Haus der Kunst) as well as Maurin Dietrich, Gloria Hasnay, and Gina Merz (Kunstverein München).

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Me in my going out of myself (and you in yours) by Reinier Vrancken & Émile Hermans at SB34 The Pool, Brussels. Designed by Robert Milne.

“…exchanges and relationships—from me to you and vice versa—with circulating objects and identities, fiction and artificiality, and unstable ontological statuses. From Émile Hermans to Reinier Vrancken, or the other way around, it’s a matter of becoming the other a little, of letting oneself be taken in hand so as to project unexpressed desires. In the space of SB34-The Pool, clothes are lent, flowers offered, we breathe the scent of a stranger, choose the work of a friend, project ourselves through it, and finally, with circumspection, decide on the status of what we have observed.”—exhibition press release