DIRECT ACTION is a book based on the movie of the same name filmed in the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes by Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau

While the film is intended to be contemplative and silent, the book is intended to be a counterpoint. Cailleau and Russell decided to extend the experience by collecting the stories of the film’s protagonists, after screenings, in informal interviews or by correspondence. The almost total absence of spoken political discourse in the film allows for the parallel existence of a book focused on language, reception and interpretation. These interventions consist of personal anecdotes, political histories and intimate details prompted by the images, revealing a rich network of links between a place, a person, a collective and a cause.

Designed by Johanna Himmelsbach and typography by Johanna Himmelsbach & Theetat Thunkijjanukij.

A new book by poet-activist CAConrad combining essay, memoir and (Soma)tic poetry rituals. Documenting the pervasive homophobic violence of the 1980s and the overwhelming losses of AIDS, this work is an unwavering testament to queer resilience. CA’s text forms a resounding incantation to friends and lovers lost.

CAConrad has been writing poems for more than 50 years and working with (Soma)tic poetry rituals for over 20 years. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). The Book of Frank is available in 9 different languages, most recently French and Italian. They also exhibit poems as sculpture with recent shows in London, Melbourne, Porto, Santander, and Tucson.

Produced on the occasion of Lili Dujourie’s exhibition at Micheline Szwajcer Gallery, Antwerp, 20 November, 2025–17 January, 2026.

The work of Lili Dujourie provokes an astutely intellectual yet poetic engagement with the world around us through various mediums, from painting and sculpture, to photography, collage, video and installation. Dujourie operates at the intersection of minimalism and conceptualism, consistently and systematically challenging the subject position of the viewer through clever experimentation with material and form.

Portrait Mode presents a new essay by artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey. In aphoristic texts paired with her own photographs, Davey interweaves accounts of her experiences as a photographer with reflections on canonical practitioners and theorists of the medium. With a particular focus on framing, light, contingency, and temporality, she considers the work of photographers who have challenged conventions of (self-)portraiture and representation, connecting their approaches to contemporary queer and feminist protagonists of the genre.

Treatise of a Coat gathers for the first time works on paper by Helen Marten. Featuring coloured pencil, watercolour, ink, airbrush, acrylic and graphite, alongside other more unusual media like sand, silicone or olive oil, this book is a sumptuous, visual document of Marten’s drawing and painting practice on paper. Designed as an unruly “artist’s book”, Treatise of a Coat has multiple physical and linguistic folds. The title is a forcing of the homonymic similarities of coat: the literal jacket that is unfurled to expose the naked and unruly shame of human forms; the fur or hair of an animal; the verb-function of to coat, with its intentional building up of visual desire – the acts of lacquering, spreading, enclosing, flooding, directing, or husking that line and colour expedite when creating an image. The constituent materiality of this book is designed with the physicality of making a work on paper in mind.

Edited by Taylor Walsh, Sam Agnew, Helen Marten, Matthew Stuart & Jeffrey Rowledge. Designed by Matthew Stuart.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Forrest Bess at Fridericianum, Kassel, 15 February–6 September, 2020.

Forrest Bess was one of the most interesting figures in US-American post-war art. Starting in the 1940s, he lived in isolation in Texas and created small, biomorphic abstractions that reflected his visionary experiences between wakefulness and sleep. Bess combined art with an intense exploration of mythology, psychology, and sexology, believing that the path to completeness and immortality could only be achieved through what he called hermaphroditism. His unconventional works received posthumous recognition in international exhibitions and influenced many contemporary artists such as Amy Sillman, Richard Hawkins and James Benning.

With texts from Tomma Abts, Dieter Schwarz, Amy Sillman & Moritz Wesseler.