Over the past two decades, Australian artist Nicholas Mangan has created a compelling body of work that considers humanity’s relationship to the natural world, taking everything from coral rubble to cryptocurrency as a point of departure.

Mangan’s art locates human history in the context of deep geological time. With a focus on Australia’s place in the Pacific, his works reflect on how social, political and economic upheaval are connected to the material world, offering new perspectives on pressing global issues, such as the impact of extractive mining on natural resources and climate change.

Designed by Žiga Testen and Stuart Geddes.

Michael E. Smith occasionally creates drawings as organisational notes for his exhibitions: a to-do list may be intertwined with a sketch outlining an idea for a sculpture, and at times, drawings emerge as impromptu phone scribbles. Over the past fifteen years Smith has accumulated a substantial collection of drawings, collected here for the first time in this publication produced on the occasion of the exhibition Michael E. Smith at the Kunst Museum Winterthur, 3 February – 28 April, 2024.

This publication, conceived as an extension of the eponymous exhibition, paying tribute to Léon Bakst, the greatest set designer of the modern era. Viewing theatre as a total artwork in which choreography, music, costumes and sets were of equal importance, Léon Bakst (1866–1924) worked closely with artists such as Serge Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, Jean Cocteau, Ida Rubinstein and Igor Stravinsky, transforming the perception of ballet.

The book and offers a detailed presentation of Bakst’s drawings, costume and textile designs, previously unpublished writings on ornament and fashion, new scholarship on Bakst’s sources and the impact of his vision, as well in situ views of the scenography created by Nick Mauss for the exhibition.

Second edition.

Dispersed Events brings together for the first time Nick Mauss’ essays from the last fifteen years. Shimmering with the urgency of a new generation of queer thinkers, Mauss’ writing refracts contemporary art through histories of decorative art, film, theater, and dance.

An artist renowned for critically and poetically reconfiguring inherited genealogies and hierarchies of visual culture and art history, Mauss engages writing as a space for relentlessly activating counter-histories, repositioning the voice of the artist and the readers along the way. Whether he considers the practice of artist Lorraine O’Grady, the radical fashion of Susan Cianciolo, the anarcho-vaudevillian theater of Reza Abdoh, or the potential for textiles to disclose a different way of thinking, Mauss insists on the intense power of forms and feelings in their actual rather than enforced prehistories. Reevaluating experiments in fashion, dance, and the decorative arts on the same plane as painting, sculpture and cinema, he locates art as taking shape in the middle of conversations—“between art history and any afternoon.”

New Book is the title of a new poem composed of three existing poems re-edited by Simone Forti. As reading this poem, one moves forward with wonder amid everyday memories, recollections of life, a sense of civic duty, glimpses of a precarious world, the beauty of nature, melancholy, a rage to live.

American dancer and choreographer Simone Forti has been a leading figure in the development of contemporary performance over more than fifty years. Investigating the relationship between object and body, through animal studies, news animations and land portraits, she reconfigured the concept of performance and dance.

Produced on the occasion of Christopher Williams: Radio / Rauhfaser / Television at Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago, 8 February – 19 April, 2024. Designed by Petra Hollenbach.