Over the course of approximately one year, The Registry of Promise consisted of four autonomous, interrelated exhibitions, which can be read as individual chapters in a book. In this series, Chris Sharp reflects on our increasingly fraught relationship with what the future may or may not hold, and the work engages with and plays upon the various readings and mutability of “promise”, along with the inevitability of what may come, whether positive or negative. Such polyvalence is particularly topical, as we have shifted from the anthropocentric promise of modernity to a negative faith in the post-human.

Including artists Becky Beasley, Patrick Bernatchez, Juliette Blightman, Peter Buggenhout, Nina Canell, Michael Dean, Alexander Gutke, Jochen Lempert, Jean-Luc Moulène, Marlie Mul, Matt Mullican, Rosalind Nashashibi, Antoine Nessi, Jean-Marie Perdrix, Reto Pulfer, Mandla Reuter, Hans Schabus, Lucy Skaer, Michael E. Smith, Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli, Francisco Tropa, Andy Warhol, Anicka Yi.

Voebe de Gruyter is an artist who makes propositions about unexpected scientific phenomena and other patterns which reveal themselves in everyday situations. Her work abounds with elementary particles: “points of concentration, information particles, small units which contain multitudes,” the artist once explained. For this publication De Gruyter went through her complete inventory and studio archives. With texts by Maria Barnas and Roel Arkesteijn, plus explanatory notes by the artist herself for almost all the works. Designed by Felix Weigand.

A preview of the publication can be found here.

This volumnious book in a clinical white vinyl sleeve suggests high tech content, as if it belongs to a laboratory. Within a wide space of white and light grey pages—which could represent painted walls of a white cube—39 works by conceptual Belgium artist Steve Van den Bosch are exposed. The photographs are taken by a forensic photographer and the text, entitled Event reconstruction from trace images: an original methodology, comes from the Swiss Institute for Police Science. The book itself is #40 in the list of works and printed in a limited edition of 300 copies. Designed by Steve Van den Bosch and David van Mieghem.

‘Tokyo Papers’ comprises a collection of 41 monoprints created by Dutch graphic designer and typographer Karel Martens between 2019 and 2020. In 2018, Martens received a package from artist-curator Pierre Leguillon that contained filled-in Japanese forms which he had found at a street market in Tokyo. Martens was intrigued by the collection of thin paper with a rectangular black-blue layer of carbon on the back. In 2019 he started to print on these back sides, but because the overprinting on the carbon layer caused unwanted damage, he switched to printing them on the front sides as well. “The closing image is related to Tokyo in a different way,” he explains.

A special archival issue, featuring unpublished Martin Margiela lookbook photographs, a horse, street style from the 90’s, vases of Japan, a silver story, a flash forward and back, tennis, an icecube tray, more Margiela, Hysteric Glamour and a bunch of frivolous images. The stories are sourced from the book collections of RareBooksParis and Julie Peeters. Edited and designed by Julie Peeters.

Experimental Jetset’s second volume in its self-reflective series is an inquiry into the role of the city as an infrastructure for language and vice versa, seen through the lens of four significant movements: Constructivism, Situationist International, Provo, and Post-Punk. Emerging from a research project and exhibition by the design studio, the book features extensive footnotes by 20 guest authors, including Linda van Deursen, Owen Hatherley, Adam Pendleton, Simon Reynolds, Lori Waxman, Mimi Zeiger, and others. An added bonus: it comes with a 26-page zine, zooming in on the design typology of the original exhibition.