World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER.
RE-OPENING 01.02.24
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2024, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 21.0 x 14.3 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$52.00 - In stock -
Tracing the relation between fascism and settler colonialism.
Ever since neofascist movements began to surge across the globe, liberal commentators have tried to put a name to what they are defending from these illiberal ideologies. The consensus is reason or rationality—after the Second World War, mainstream scholarship has supported the view that adherence to fascism is a thing of unreason. This distinction between reason and unreason, a tenet of Enlightenment thought, sustains the universal appeal of liberal democracy but leaves unexamined the paradoxes that haunt modernity, particularly its colonial foundation, thus obscuring the continuities between fascism and imperial policies.
The White West contends that, without confronting the structuring force of race in the production and reproduction of global wealth disparities, fighting for reason only leads to flawed utopias in which a critique or disruption of capitalism is easily inflected in the direction of neofascism. This collection of writing by leading historians, theorists, and scholars is an attempt to engage the overlaps between philosophical predicates and colonial legacies, as well as the undertheorized continuities between fascism and settler colonialism.
Contributors:
Larne Abse Gogarty, Norman Ajari, Ramon Amaro, Sladja Blazan, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Donna V. Jones, Nitzan Lebovic, Olivier Marboeuf, A. Dirk Moses, Rijin Sahakian, Nikhil Pal Singh, Kerstin Stakemeier, Felix Stalder
2023, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 11.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$40.00 - In stock -
Published following the eponymous exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern in 2020–2021. A cultural examination of the enigmatically iconic figure of the Dandy, both in history and as a figure for the future.
With Kai Althoff, Lutz Bacher, Kévin Blinderman / Pierre-Alexandre Mateos / Charles Teyssou, Marcel Broodthaers, Ursula Böckler, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Hanne Darboven, Stephan Dillemuth, Victoire Douniama, Lukas Duwenhögger, Cerith Wyn Evans, Sylvie Fleury, Andrea Fraser, Sophie Gogl, Gogo Graham, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, David Hammons, Birgit Jürgenssen, K Foundation, John Kelsey, Michael Krebber, Miriam Laura Leonardi, David Lieske, Mathieu Malouf, Ulrike Ottinger, Mathias Poledna, Raymond Roussel, Heji Shin, Reena Spaulings, Sturtevant, Bernadette Van-Huy, James McNeill Whistler, Virginia Woolf.
Designed by HIT.
2014, English/German
Softcover, 114 pages, 14.3 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$160.00 - Out of stock
First, very quickly out-of-print edition of "I'm Isa Genzken, the Only Female Fool", copublished by Kunsthalle Wien and Sternberg Press on the occasion of Isa Genzken’s exhibition of the same name, May 28–September 7, 2014, Kunsthalle Wien. Foreword by Nicolaus Schafhausen; texts by Joshua Decter and Tom McDonough. Heavily illustrated throughout with foiled covers.
“The Only Female Fool” is how Isa Genzken describes herself in the self-chosen title of her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien. This statement is typical of the fluid boundaries between deep seriousness and the exuberant, eccentric spirit that pervades her work. Genzken’s artistic practice is characterized by a wide spectrum of media and forms, although her roots in sculpture always remain visible. The exhibition and catalogue focus on specific aspects of her oeuvre, including the mirror motif, the examination of architecture, and space as a social sphere; where early works are juxtaposed with series from later creative periods. Genzken’s collaboration with other artists and her admiration for certain artistic positions is also brought into focus, and selected works by Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Lawrence Weiner are presented in dialogue with Genzken’s multilayered work.
Design by Kummer & Herrman
Very Good copy, like new with only light cover dust wear.
2002, English / German
Hardcover (clothbound), 197 pages, 27 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$220.00 - Out of stock
Long out-of-print and collectible, Gebärden und Ausdruck (Gestures and Expression) is the first comprehensive publication on the work of German artist Kai Althoff (b. 1966). Fully illustrated and conceived by the artist, this beautiful clothbound hardcover book traces the evolution of the Althoff's work from the early nineties until 2002. The texts discuss Althoff’s repertoire of bohemian adolescents, revealing how his untranslatable dialect, hermetic cultural codes and twisted youth motifs are ultimately in service of the work’s epic dimension.
“What is happening here is more a question of the absorption, reduplication, and removal of the core of an existing societal dynamics where convictions, lifestyles, and attitudes previously radically opposed, or even mutually exclusive, have collapsed together into one.” —Anke Kempkes
Edited by Nicolaus Schafhausen with texts By Michaela Eichwald, Anke Kempkes, Bernd Koehler, Jutta Koether.
Fine, As New copy.
2015, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 9.5 x 14.8 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Moderna Museet / Stockholm
$27.00 - In stock -
In October 1963 I met Gil J., and we schlepped to the scrap-metal market. [...] It was there that I came up with the following definition of Lettrism:
Lettrism: 1) technical definition: smithy, arsenal, place where unused weapons are stored; 2) volcanology: rumbling that announces certain volcanic eruptions. Examples: 1) “Thanks to L., insurgent groups were armed” – 2) “The people of Herculaneum did not pay heed to L.” [Acad.]
—Jean-Louis Brau, 1972
The Lettrist movement is unique in the history of avant-garde formations. Founded by Isidore Isou in Paris immediately after World War II, it remains active to this day, having lost none of its radicalism, either aesthetic or ethical. In this book, Nicole Brenez presents the key figures and the basic concepts of Lettrist cinema, the art form within which their formal innovations proved the most far-reaching, prefiguring the breakthroughs of the nouvelle vague and the experiments of expanded cinema.
All the King’s Horses series, edited by Daniel Birnbaum and Kim West
Copublished with Moderna Museet, Stockholm, with support from Allianz Kulturstiftung
Translated from the French by Clodagh Kinsella
Design by Studio Christopher West
2015, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 9.5 x 14.8 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Moderna Museet / Stockholm
$27.00 - In stock -
Considering these facts the Central Committee of the Situationist International:
– proclaims that all followers of Nash, the falsifier, and Elde, his agent, will be considered enemies of the SI.
– confers on J. V. Martin the supreme authority to represent the Situationist International in the area covered by the former Scandinavian section (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden) together with the task and the responsibility to reorganize the true Situationist elements in these countries before the opening of the 6th SI congress in Antwerp.
For the C. C. of the SI.
23 March, 1962
Debord, A. Kotanyi, U. Lausen, R. Vaneigem
—Proclamation from the Internationale Situationniste, 1962
After the infamous split in the Situationist International in 1962, the Danish artist J. V. Martin was unexpectedly put in charge of the group’s Scandinavian section. This book is the first presentation of Martin’s strange trajectory within the SI, in which he would remain a member until the group’s dissolution in 1972.
All the King’s Horses series, edited by Daniel Birnbaum and Kim West
Copublished with Moderna Museet, Stockholm, with support from Allianz Kulturstiftung
Design by Studio Christopher West
2015, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 21.6 x 27.9 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$45.00 - In stock -
Hamlet, mise-en-scène
EXTRA TROUBLE—Jack Smith in Frankfurt
Texts by Sylvère Lotringer, Birte Löschenkohl, Sophie von Olfers, Laura Preston, Juliane Rebentisch, Mark von Schlegell, et al.
The publication brings together extensive material from Hamlet, mise-en-scène presented at Portikus, along with recently restored as well as never-published stills, drawings, and writings by American filmmaker and artist Jack Smith, related to his filmHamlet in the Rented World (A Fragment) (1970–73).
Hamlet, mise-en-scène, directed by Mark von Schlegell, was an adaptation that retold Shakespeare’s most abused tragedy while channeling the ghost of Jack Smith. The two-night rendition of Hamlet was performed by members of Städelschule’s Pure Fiction seminar, presented here alongside a rare selection of works by Smith, both from private collections and from the Jack Smith Archive.
Design by Pacific Design Solutions
2023, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 200 pages, 19 x 12 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$44.00 - Out of stock
The most significant critical, theoretical, and art historical texts by the artist, writer, and filmmaker Aria Dean.
Compiled here for the first time, the selected writings of Aria Dean (b. 1993, Los Angeles) mount a trenchant critique of representational systems. A visual artist and filmmaker, Dean has also emerged as one of the leading critical voices of her generation through a body of writing that maps the forces of aesthetic theory, image regimes, and visibility onto questions of race and power. Dean's work across media has long been defined by what she calls a "fixation on the subject and its borders," and the texts collected here filter that inquiry through digital networks, art history, and Black radical thought. Equally at home discussing artists who embrace difficulty-from Robert Morris to David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, and Ulysses Jenkins-and conceptual frameworks such as Afropessimism, Dean often contends with how theoretical positions brush against the grain of lived reality: how the Structuralism handed down from the academy, for instance, can be commingled with critiques of structural racism, or how Georges Bataille's notion of base matter transforms through an encounter with Blackness.
Dean's thinking embraces a definition of "Black art that luxuriates in its outside-the-world-ness," as she writes in this volume, which works to elucidate "Blackness's proclivity for making and unmaking its own rules as it produces objects" of cultural necessity. Originally published in November-of which Dean is a founding editor-as well as in Texte zur Kunst, e-flux journal, and in exhibition contexts, the essays compiled in Bad Infinity were written over a six-year span that charts our rapidly evolving forms of subjectivity and sociality.
2023, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 21.5 x 14.8 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$48.00 - Out of stock
What comes after end-of-world narratives: visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.
There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end--of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a healthy planet, of the Holocene, of civilization as we know it. Drawing on radical futurisms and visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed--Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist--as materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, in this book. T. J. Demos poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives, arguing that it's as vital to defeat fatalistic nihilism as the false solutions of green capitalism and algorithmic governance.
How might we decolonize the future, and cultivate an emancipated chronopolitics in relation to an undetermined not-yet? If we are to avoid climate emergency's cooptation by technofixes, and the defuturing of multitudes by xenophobic eco-fascism, Demos argues, we must cultivate visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.
2023, English
Softcover, 384 pages, 13.5 x 20 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$58.00 - In stock -
A collection of Dan Graham's interviews and conversations with a wide array of individuals from various backgrounds and disciplines.
Dan Graham- Some Rockin' is a compilation of fifteen interviews (two of them previously unpublished) between Dan Graham and artist friends, architects, musicians, art critics, and curators from various parts of our world. In these interviews Graham's intense interest in and observation of cultural phenomena such as rock music, urbanism, architecture, corporate culture, and art world politics and their historical development overlaps and interferes with the articulated interest of the interviewers in Graham's art, sense of humour, attitude, and point of view in regard of a huge variety of topics. Two essays, besides the "Introduction," are added to this compilation- the essay "The Museum in Evolution" by Dan Graham, and an essay by the editor, Gregor Stemmrich, on the development and far reaching implications of Graham's art.
2023, English (w. German / Arabic)
Softcover (w. dust jacket) 304 pages, 16 x 20 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$54.00 - In stock -
Sibyl's Mouths is the most recent in a series of publications by Pure Fiction, a writing and performance group with shifting members active since 2011. From February 12 to March 6, 2022, Pure Fiction presented an exhibition and performance program at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne titled “Shifting Theater: Sibyl's Mouths”. The starting point was a collective reading of Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, in which the narrator discovers a collection of scribbled oak leaves scattered in a cave outside Naples. Alleged prophecies of the Cumean Sibyl, the textual fragments inscribed on the leaves foretell the story of an epidemic that ravages the globe in the 2100's—a period where solitude, intimacy, and the perception of time is radically renegotiated.
Through a multiplicity of textual genres and writerly approaches, contributors examine the questions and forms that emerge from prophecy: the role of the voice in text, writing and performance; fragmentary heterogeneous narratives. The mouth is consulted, not only as a mouthpiece or as a cavernous instrument for vocalization but as an essential part of the digestive tract. Processes in the gut, such as assimilation, excretion, and regurgitation involve multiple temporal directionalities, and may function as metaphorical gateways to intuitive truths.
Contributions by Rosa Aiello, Gerry Bibby, Coleman Collins, Ayanna Dozier, Annie Ernaux, Amelia Groom, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Ellen Yeon Kim, Bitsy Knox, Dan Kwon, Erika Landström, Enad Marouf, Katrin Mayer, Aislinn Mcnamara, Kamila & Jasmina Metwaly, Luzie Meyer, Vera Palme, Theresa Patzschke, Georgia Sagri, Mahsa Saloor, Elif Saydam, Mark Von Schlegell, Simon Speiser, Elaine Tam, C.S. Tolan, Mikhail Wassmer, Anna Zacharoff.
2023, English
Softcover, 128 pages , 21 x 13.2 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$48.00 - Out of stock
Isabelle Graw's latest book reflects on the purposes and struggles of friendship in competitive social milieus. By focusing on her own social milieu—the art world—Graw demonstrates how friendships are neither totally disinterested nor reduceable to their use. Written in the intimate form of a fictional diary, this book laments useful friendships while praising true friendship in all its forms. For Graw, friendship is an existential necessity--if only because it points to how we relate to and depend on others. Friendship, she finds, is as important as the air we breathe—with it, we are able to fully live.
Isabelle Graw is the publisher of the journal Texte zur Kunst, which she cofounded with Stefan Germer (1958–1998) in 1990, and professor of art history and art theory at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Her previous books include In Another World: Notes, 2014–2017, The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium, and High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture.
"On the Benefits of Friendship strangely calls to mind the fictional schoolboy-diary format Robert Walser staged to deliver his first novel. Aware of its own performance while successfully assuming its desired voice, Graw's diaristic story is a clever vehicle for social critique of utility friendships."—Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You
Cover by Elaine Sturtevant.
2018, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 72 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$40.00 - Out of stock
Why has there been so much interest in “surplus value” in recent years? In “The Outside Can’t Go Outside”, artist Merlin Carpenter considers how this term has been inserted into contemporary art theory following the financial crisis of 2007/8. The book focuses on the idea that the value of art is located in unpaid mental, educational, and communicational labor that is gradually accrued and then exploited according to the logic of Marx’s central thesis on exploitation. This much-hyped view is rejected in favor of a more rigorous Marxist interpretation of the nature of surplus value, and its role in a systematic law of value.
Carpenter counterposes value to what exists outside of it—a dream, an imaginary, what he describes as a “trance” or the location of revolutionary thought and desires. The outside, however, is not proposed as a physical location, but as an outside inside the body that functions as a line of control within. Moreover, the author suggests that the new revolutionary subjects might be the new groups that form in order to push against control networks, in a reordering of class struggles.
Institut für Kunstkritik Series, edited by Isabelle Graw and Daniel Birnbaum
Design by Surface
2018, English
Softcover, 364 pages, 14 x 20 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$62.00 - Out of stock
Isabelle Graw’s brilliant analysis of the exceptional position of painting in our increasingly digital economy combines a deep respect for the objects of study and those who make them with an impressive range of critical and theoretical insights. Along the way, The Love of Painting never loses sight of the medium’s dialectical relationship to the art world, the art market, and society at large. This is a lively, provocative, and persuasively argued book.
—Alexander Alberro, author of Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art
It’s about time for a book declaring “the love of painting” to appear, afer the aridity of postmodernism’s announcement of painting’s demise. Isabelle Graw’s argument in favor of this love turns on what she terms “vitalistic fantasies”: the perception of artworks as “quasi subjects” saturated with the life of their creator. This notion of the work of art as a quasi subject relates directly to the philosopher Stanley Cavell’s consideration that “the possibility of fraudulence, and the experience of fraudulence, is endemic in the experience of contemporary art.” To understand this we must ask: Why do we relate to works of art in the same way we relate to people? The Love of Painting works on this question—and does so with success.
—Rosalind E. Krauss, author and University Professor at the Department of Art History, Columbia University
Painting seems to have lost its dominant position in the field of the arts. However, looking more closely at exhibited photographs, assemblages, installations, or performances, it is evident how the rhetorics of painting still remain omnipresent. Following the tradition of classical theories of painting based on exchanges with artists, Isabelle Graw’s The Love of Painting considers the art form not as something fixed, but as a visual and discursive material formation with the potential to fascinate owing to its ability to produce the fantasy of liveliness. Thus, painting is not restricted to the limits of its own frame, but possesses a specific potential that is located in its material and physical signs. Its value is grounded in its capacity to both reveal and mystify its conditions of production. Alongside in-depth analyses of the work of artists like Édouard Manet, Jutta Koether, Martin Kippenberger, Jana Euler, and Marcel Broodthaers, the book includes conversations with artists in which Graw’s insights are further discussed and put to the test.
Design by Surface
2022, English
Softcover, 172 pages, 12.5 x 20 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$58.00 - Out of stock
The notion of the handmade has shifted from the margins to center stage. Craft’s value is increasingly recognized across creative, economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. Because of its widespread appropriation, and the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, the meaning of handicrafts is changing. While craft’s claims of authenticity and anti-consumerism are in question, its role is poised for optimization within the contemporary climate. Amid new economies of making, craft is moving from “modern craft” to “post-craft.” Through essays, conversations, and projects by designers, artists, and scholars, the third volume in the EP series examines not only the practice of post-craft but also its mediation and interpretation.
With contributions by 6A Architects, Glenn Adamson, Assemble, Jeremy Deller, Peter Dormer, Tanya Harrod, Martina Margetts, Clare Twomey, John Roberts, Catharine Rossi, Richard Sennett, Flore De Taisne.
2022, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Museo Nivola / Orani
$66.00 - In stock -
What if art holds solutions to the ecological crises of our time?
For forty-six years, Peter Fend has argued that art premonitions material culture, therefore the means of production, ensuing changes in social relations. Hence, in his view, works by Marcel Duchamp, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Beth Edelson, Paul Sharits, and others, can prefigure ecological restoration and cohabitation. In the late 1970s, artists in New York initiated teams—first Colab, The Offices, and later Ocean Earth and Space Force—to move from critique into effecting real-world change. Initiatives came from Jenny Holzer, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Taro Suzuki, Joan Waltemath, and Eve Vaterlaus, among others, who linked up with scientists to produce reports and analyses with satellite imagery for news media.
Africa-Arctic Flyway: Physiocratic States gathers documents of Peter Fend’s efforts through Ocean Earth for a planet organized according to hydrology—water basins—rather than national and colonial borders. It lays out tools and technologies derived from art, architecture, and science to replace fossil fuels, dams, nuclear industry, and industrial farming. The ensuing proposal for governance builds on what is identified as the first school of economic thought: physiocracy. Here, via satellite-aided eco-taxation, governance pursues an increase in the numbers of fish, marine mammals, migratory birds, and insects. For instance, ideas from Earth art are applied to restoring wetlands and flyways in three swaths—the Americas, East Asia, and Eurafrica—converging on the Arctic. This book focuses on the Eurafrica flyway and surveys four decades of work. It asks, “How do we go from visual art to reality?” Fend answers: “Through architecture.”
Edited by Elisa R. Linn, Lennart Wolff
Foreword by Eve Vaterlaus & Joan Waltemath
2022, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 256 pages, 10.9 x 180 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$30.00 - Out of stock
Newly commissioned writing and artwork on the themes found in the work of Cecilia Vicuña, including ecofeminism, indigenous forms of knowledge, dissolution and extinction, and exile.
What happens between the knots? is the third book in the annual A Series of Open Questions published by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press. Each book in the series includes newly commissioned writing as well a selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis's year-long research seasons dedicated to single artists. Each book takes the work of a single artist as its point of departure and spirals outward from there to create an expansive and carefully edited ecosystem of ideas and voices.
This third issue is informed by themes found in the work of Cecilia Vicuña, including ecofeminism, indigenous forms of knowledge, poetry and politics, dissolution and extinction, exile, dematerialization, regeneration, and environmental responsibility.
Contributors
Gloria Anzaldua, Elvira Espejo Ajca, Erika Balsom, María Berrios, Marisol de la Cadena, Lynne Cooke, Miho Dohi, Ricki Dwyer, Silvia Federici, Tonya Foster, Phillip Greenlief, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Brian Karl, Dionne Lee, Zoe Leonard, Rosemary Mayer, Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira, Denise Newman, Thao Nguyen Phan, Frances Richard, Dylan Robinson, Abel Rodriguez, Oscar Santillan, Alessandra Troncone, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Ignacio Valero, Jacopo Cathrine Veikos, Cecilia Vicuña, Diego Villalobos, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, Carla Zaccagnini
2017, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 10.8 x 11.8 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$56.00 $15.00 - In stock -
Contributions by Bart De Baere, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Boris Groys, Elena Shaposhnikova, Marina Simakova, Hito Steyerl, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood, Arseny Zhilyaev, Esther Zonsheim
According to the nineteenth-century teachings of Nikolai Fedorov—librarian, religious philosopher, and progenitor of Russian cosmism—our ethical obligation to use reason and knowledge to care for the sick extends to curing the dead of their terminal status. The dead must be brought back to life using means of advanced technology—resurrected not as souls in heaven, but in material form, in this world, with all their memories and knowledge.
Fedorov’s call to redistribute vital forces is wildly imaginative in emancipatory ambition. Today, it might appear arcane in its mystical panpsychism or eccentric in its embrace of realities that exist only in science fiction or certain diabolical strains of Silicon Valley techno-utopian ideology. It can be difficult to grasp how it ended up influencing the thinking behind a generation of young revolutionary anarchists and Marxists who incorporated Fedorov’s ideas under their own brand of biocosmism before the 1917 Russian Revolution, even giving rise to the origins of the Soviet space program.
This book of interviews and conversations with today’s most compelling living and resurrected artists and thinkers seeks to address the relevance of Russian cosmism and biocosmism in light of its influence on the Russian artistic and political vanguard as well as on today’s art-historical apparatuses, weird materialisms, extinction narratives, and historical and temporal politics. This unprecedented collection of exchanges on cosmism asks how such an encompassing and imaginative, unapologetically humanist and anthropocentric strain of thinking could have been so historically and politically influential, especially when placed alongside the politically inconsequential—but in some sense equally encompassing—apocalypticism of contemporary realist imaginaries.
Published in parallel with the eponymous exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Kaye Cain-Nielsen, Stephen Squibb, Anton Vidokle
Design by Jeff Ramsey, front cover design by Liam Gillick
2015, English
Softcover, 110 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
A.P.E (Art Projects Era)
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$45.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Keren Cytter, Nora Schultz
Contributions by Ei Arakawa, Ilan Bachl, Keren Cytter, Matthew Dipple, Genoveva Filipovic, Dan Poston and David Zuckerman, Ulla Rossek, Nora Schultz, Sam Siwe
After Jennifer Lopez graced the 2000 Grammys red carpet in that now-iconic plunging Versace number, the Internet was so overloaded with search requests that Google had no choice but to invent a new function: image search. "At the time, it was the most popular search query we had ever seen," Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt wrote. "But we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted—J.Lo wearing that dress. Google Image Search was born."
—New York Post, April 9, 2015
Terminal is an artist book conceived by Nora Schultz and Keren Cytter. Its title and logic follow Schultz’s latest performance,Terminal + at Tate Modern, London (2014), and the exhibition “I’m Honda” at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York (2015). Nora Schultz used Google’s image search on her own documentation to create an unexpected, ever-expanding narrative of digital associations. She then invited nine artists to contribute to this narrative. Together with the image search, Schultz’s own texts and drawings create a new tale that deals with ideas such as authorship, copyright, surveillance, and documentation. It kicks off with Ilan Bachl’s diary, continues with rippled text by Ulla Rossek, and ends with an item from the Daily Mail about a couple who share their home with a Bengal tiger.
Copublished with A.P.E (Art Projects Era)
Design by Keren Cytter
2016, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket) 188 pages, 14.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$64.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
John Douglas Millar’s Brutalist Readings: Essays on Literature is a significant intervention into recent debates on the place of literature and writing in the context of contemporary art. Featuring essays on the highs and lows of the conceptual turn in poetics, avant-garde literary genealogies, and monographic pieces on Paul B. Preciado, Chris Kraus, and Pierre Guyotat, among others, Brutalist Readings explores the radical histories of writing, as well as its potential now.
Design by Present Perfect
2016, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 13 x 21 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$64.00 $5.00 - In stock -
Traction argues that contemporary art is defined by a moral economy of indeterminacy that allows curators and artists to imagine themselves on the other side of power. This self-positioning, in turn, leaves us politically bankrupt, intellectually stagnant, and aesthetically predictable. In his memoir-polemic, curator and writer Tirdad Zolghadr candidly reflects on his own experiences and the work of others. He also drafts possibilities for a logic and a support structure that can offer some purchase of their own, beyond the gravitational pull of business as usual. Ultimately, Traction calls for a renewed sense of profession, somewhere within the corridors of power where, for better or worse, contemporary art has long arrived.
Design by Aude Lehmann, Zurich
2017, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
Published by
David Pestorius / Brisbane
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$69.00 $2.00 - Out of stock
CityCat Project 2006–2016 is the record of an extraordinary collaboration between American artist Dave Hullfish Bailey and senior Aboriginal writer and activist Sam Watson. The collaboration is structured around Maiwar Performance, in which the CityCat ferries that ply the Brisbane River (Maiwar) execute unannounced maneuvers near a site of significance to the Aboriginal people who lived on the lands around Brisbane before British colonization in the early nineteenth century.
After its first iteration in 2006, Watson designated the event a “Dreaming,” which meant that it should be periodically repeated. The performance has since been restaged in 2009, 2012, and 2016, with Watson seeing it as an important act of Indigenous empowerment: a way of restoring agency to the local Aboriginal people in bringing their past alive and allowing them to think that the future has not been definitively determined.
Parallel to this recurring event is an evolving body of works in diverse media. At its core is Bailey’s lateral research-based process, which combines a highly reflexive approach to language with granular descriptions of material and cultural systems. The call-and-response collaboration between Watson and Bailey and the many irreducibilities within it, generates an articulation of place that is playfully extrapolative, yet politically and intellectually resistant.
This publication includes an introduction by its editor, Rex Butler, and an essay and detailed timeline by CityCat Project curator, David Pestorius, which covers the activities of Bailey and Watson both before and throughout their work together. In addition, art historian Sally Butler reflects upon Watson’s literary production, while curator Michele Helmrich sheds light on the local historical context that significantly informs the collaboration.
Edited by Rex Butler
Texts by Rex Butler, David Pestorius, Sally Butler, Michele Helmrich
Graphic concept by Heimo Zobernig
Design by Michael Phillips
Copublished with Australian Fine Arts/David Pestorius, Brisbane
2018, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 22.5 x 29 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
IMA / Brisbane
$75.00 $5.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Aileen Burns & Johan Lundh, Carolin Köchling, Rafael Ortega, Filipa Ramos, Volker Sommer, Eugenio Viola
The catalogue please listen hurry others speak better accompanies solo exhibitions by Amalia Pica at three venues: “ears to speak” at The Power Plant in Toronto and “please open hurry” at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Two threads in Pica’s practice are brought together: communication between humans and exchange between species. The artist raises questions of mutual understanding through constructing forums that address shared experience. Illustrations of primate and human social models and interpersonal communication in the publication are accompanied by documentation of performances that enact social hierarchies and animal-language studies. Volker Sommer writes about his work on animal rights and the initiative to establish a “community of equals,” and Filipa Ramos reflects on primate anthropologists Jane Goodall and Gregory Bateson. A conversation between Carolin Köchling and Pica considers her artistic practice, and Eugenio Viola and Pica discuss the performative element of the artworks.
Copublished with The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
Design by Lotte Lara Schröder
2022, English
Hardcover, 152 pages, 20.2 x 28.9 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Kunsthall Trondheim / Norway
$65.00 - Out of stock
The first full monograph on Frida Orupabo, with images of her collages on paper and aluminum, digital prints, and a new visual essay by the artist.
Frida Orupabo's first monograph is published on the occasion of her exhibition at Kunsthall Trondheim. The book contains extensive documentation of her work, including social-media imagery the artist has been producing over the past several years, which forms an integral part of her artistic oeuvre. Essays by Stefanie Hessler, Lola Olufemi, and Legacy Russell provide insights into the relation of the artist's practice to Black visual culture, the archive, and digital life.
In her work, Orupabo explores questions of race, family and heritage, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity, while considering the necessity of visibility for political subjecthood. In her research process, Orupabo mines archives with a colonial history, revisiting images that were created through a racialized lens as well as on digital platforms such as Instagram and YouTube. She creates collages from found material, both digital and physical, and videos that are shown in exhibition spaces and distributed on the same online platforms from which she obtains material. The resulting works take the shape of fragmented Black, mostly female-bodied figures, offering various readings of the stories and lives of the people depicted, many of whom are hardly mentioned in the archives. Through relieving the images of their previous context, Orupabo urges viewers to look at them anew. This look can be unsettling--it is met by a countergaze that negates any monolithic categorization of those being depicted. By bridging historical archives and today's digital platforms, Orupabo foregrounds the social and political structures that determine how we see images, and how these structures organize our thinking. In doing so, her work proposes urgently needed alternatives of seeing otherwise.