From shaming and shamefulness to shame-avoidance and shamelessness, the experience of shame influences our social behaviours, decision making abilities, and desires. Shame determines what we show and what we hide. And yet, as an emotion that begs for its own concealment, what is the structure and appearance of shame? How does shame interact with the realm of the visible, and where does it surface in visual culture? In this extensive historical and contemporary analysis of shame and its power, artist Andrea Büttner probes the definitions and representations of shame. The book includes close readings of Sigmund Freud’s writings on play and fantasy, challenges theoretical approaches to Andy Warhol’s queer performativity on film, and frames Dieter Roth’s representations of shame in his writing and moving image work.

Designed by HIT.

Edited by Axel Wieder, with texts by Robert Glück, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Pauline Oliveros, Adrienne Rich and contributions by Basma Alsharif, Erika Balsom, CAConrad, Adam Christensen, Beatrice Gibson, Mason Leaver-Yap, Eileen Myles, Irene Revell.

Deux Soeurs brings together a chorus of voices that explore representations of parenthood, friendship, and disobedience. The book acts as a reader to artist Beatrice Gibson’s films, I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (2018) and Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (2019), and includes material that informed Gibson’s working process, together with the artist’s texts and notes used in both films.

Designed by HIT.

You can listen to Beatrice Gibson’s podcast What’s Love Got To Do With It  here.

Published to coincide with Hopf’s exhibitions A Line May Lie, at Kunsthalle Lingen and Testing Time at Studio Voltaire, 2013. Includes essays by Meike Behm and Joe Scotland.

Hopf’s work focuses on how our social environments shape us, influence us, and by extension thereby exclude us from ourselves. Hopf uses a wide variety of techniques such as sculpture, installation, film and performance, often engaging subjects and materials that can be found in the immediate environment.

Designed by HIT.

A comprehensive exhibition guide for The scene in which I find myself / Or, where does my body belong at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, curated by Ruth Buchanan.

Presenting the largest number of collection works ever shown at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, including treasured highlights, the project seeks to break (open) the mechanisms of collecting and challenges the role and success of the museum. If a collection is meant to reflect the society that creates it, there are problems with the methodologies if amongst this highly regarded collection, so few perspectives are captured.

This conflict in motion is made visible through the lens of a gallery collection, and provides a crucial course alteration for the future. Here, the collection becomes the scene, and the body in attendance is dynamically addressed, and each of us – the institution, the visitor, and the artist herself are implicated in what these future procedures may be.

A PDF of the publication can be downloaded here.

The “economization of art” began to take shape in the wake of the crisis of capital in 2009. The shifts that occurred in the art field during this time were accompanied by explicit critique and academic analysis that aimed to make the genesis of these transformations comprehensible. In this book, first delivered as a lecture at Kunsthalle Bern in April 2016, Diedrich Diederichsen follows Marx’s labor theory of value and counters the symbolic economies dominating the art field, as well as economic exceptionalism or calculation, with systems of recording and reading out. Expanded to include the sphere of individual aesthetic experience, these systems are not formulated as solipsism, or in terms of purposefulness, but as a means to compare relations within the productivity of open and incalculable connectivity, relations that allow aesthetic experience to be read out as the liquefied labor and lifetime of concrete others. Designed by HIT.

BAD VISUAL SYSTEMS is an extension of the exhibition with the same title held at the Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand in late 2016. Through paying close attention to both colour and texture the publication brings together elements seen in the show and transforms and reconfigures them into the framework of the A4 page: the tongues of Judith Hopf’s concrete serpents become cartoon-style cut outs, Ruth Buchanan’s 13m long banner of wavy lines becomes a place holder that repeats throughout the book while Marianne Wex’s work is discussed in detail in a new essay by Mike Sperlinger. The book also includes an introduction to the project by Christina Barton and a fold-out index of exhibition snapshots. Designed by HIT Studio. Photography by Shaun Waugh, Sophie Thorn, Jim Barr.