This publication accompanies two exhibitions of recent sculptural work by the artist Magali Reus: Hot Cottons (2017–18) at Bergen Kunsthall and As mist, description, (2018) at the South London Gallery. Featuring an essay by writer and curator Laura Mclean-Ferris and a poetic response by writer and poet Quinn Latimer as well as a fully illustrated overview of Reus’s work, this catalogue provides an in-depth exploration of the artist’s recent sculptural practice.

Producing a sculptural language that is both familiar yet unlocatable Reus draws heavily on the past and present landscape of industry and fabrication, creating forms using a plethora of materials that include: mesh, jesmonite, cotton, steel, rubber, leather. Interested in collaborative processes of making, from virtual design to handmade fabrication, Reus combines sculptural games with material explorations.

Designed by A Practice for Everyday Life.

With texts by Federica Bueti, Malak Helmy, Francis Mckee, Haytham El Wardany, Brian Kuan Wood.

Five essays that take an intimate look at what language’s role is in moments of dramatic change, and how to find meaning for artistic practices in these transformative conditions. Taking its cue from the aftermath of the events of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, Final Vocabulary doesn’t provide answers as much as it captures the spirit of the moment of searching in which the writers find themselves. The book was developed out of a live conversation at an event called “The Informal Meeting” that took place in Leuven in January 2015, where participants were asked: Our histories and references are often in a different language (abstract or actual) than we use ourselves, what tools do you think are or might be useful to help you trust your own memories and narratives? What, if anything, do you think we might borrow from art to experiment with language in different situations? In English and Arabic.

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.

Libraries are generally perceived as storehouses, spaces of stable accumulation and containment. While the architecture may attempt to operate in this stable tone, the material contained within them is often far wilder. Histories, biographies, loose thoughts, detailed notations, bodies, and objects are all temporarily suspended, cataloged, and organized, creating relationships where perhaps previously there was none. An example of where the tension between what is contained in libraries and how it is contained emerges in a highly palpable way in the trajectory of the Staatsbibliothek Berlin. This new artist book by Ruth Buchanan charts three narratives associated with the life of this particular library. The anecdotes become both concrete examples and metaphors through which to interrogate the production, situating, and sharing of meaning.

With texts by Ruth Buchanan and Ian White. Designed by David Bennewith.

Contributions by Nick Aikens, Sonia Boyce, Laura Castagnini, Deborah Cherry, Alice Correia, Chandra Frank, June Givanni, Sunil Gupta, Evan Ifekoya, Claudette Johnson, Raisa Kabir, Gail Lewis, Amna Malik, Samia Malik, Priyesh Mistry, Dorothy Price, susan pui san lok, Raju Rage, Elizabeth Robles, Ashwani Sharma, Marlene Smith, Leon Wainwright, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Rehana Zaman.

The publication developed from the exhibition and research project The Place Is Here (2016–19), which traced the urgent and wide-ranging conversations taking place between black artists, writers, and thinkers in Britain during the 1980s. Within the context of Thatcherism and a racist art establishment, a new generation of black artists and intellectuals produced some of the most compelling ideas and images in recent British cultural history. Across four exhibitions, The Place Is Here brought together over one hundred works by forty artists and collectives, spanning painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and expanded archival displays. Richly illustrated, the book includes thematic essays, close readings of works, and a series of panel discussions bringing together key scholarly, critical, and artistic voices foundational to art in Britain in the 1980s. The result is an intergenerational dialogue around pressing intellectual, political, and aesthetic debates, highlighting the significance of the work of these artists for the present.

Jill Johnston—cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon—was renowned as a writer on dance, especially on the developments around Judson Dance and the 1960s downtown New York City scene, and later as the author of the radical-feminist classic Lesbian Nation (1973). This book collects thirty texts by Jill Johnston that were initially published in her weekly column for The Village Voice between 1960 and 1974. The column provided a format in which Johnston could dissolve distinctions between the personal, the critical, and the political. Her writing took turns and loops, reflecting its times and contexts, and set a stage for the emergence of Johnston as a public figure and self-proclaimed radical lesbian that defied any prescribed position.

Johnston’s original texts are accompanied by three new contributions by Ingrid Nyeboe, Bruce Hainley, and Jennifer Krasinski, as well as an appendix with archival material related to a panel Johnston organized in 1969, titled The Disintegration of a Critic: An Analysis of Jill Johnston. Edited by Fiona McGovern, Megan Francis Sullivan, Axel Wieder. Designed by HIT.

You can read more on Jill Johnston in Jennifer Krasinski’s Art in America article here.