FIGURES IN AIR

Micah Silver

Cutting-edge sound artist and theorist Micah Silver produces sound installations and writes about the impact of sound on human behavior and social space. His research ranges from Yves Klein’s Air Architecture to La Monte Young’s Dream House, and culminates in a discussion of historically significant sound systems and their physical and experiential impacts (e.g., the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound custom PA). Silver, also a noted young curator in his field, studied music at Wesleyan and MIT’s Program in Art, Culture, and Technology. His installation and performance work have been realized at Mass MoCA, Issue Project Room, Palais de Tokyo in Paris and OK Zentrum along with many other international venues. The release of this combination reader and discussion of the artist’s work, coincides with an exhibition at Audio Visual Arts (AVA), New York City, in 2014.

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Final Vocabulary

On Searching for New Language

Mai Abu ElDahab (Ed.)

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?

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THE FLOOD OF RIGHTS

Thomas Keenan, Suhail Malik & Tirdad Zolghadr (Eds.)

It is difficult to imagine making claims for human rights without using images. For better or worse, images of protest, evidence and assertion are the lingua franca of struggles for justice today. And they seem to come in a flood, more and more, day and night. But through what channels does the torrent pass? The Flood of Rights examines the pathways through which these images and ideas circulate—routes that do not merely enable, but actually shape humanrights claims and their conceptual background. What are the technologies and languages that structure the global distribution of humanism and universalism, and how do they leave their mark on these ideas themselves? Which narratives and imageries have proven easier to export and import, and whose interests are at stake? Contributions by 14 artists, curators and academics make up this important reader, including Thomas Keenan, David Levine, Hito Steyerl and TIrdad Zolghadr, among others.

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THE FOREST AND THE SCHOOL

Where to sit at the dinner table?

Pedro Neves Marques (Ed.)

Edited by writer and visual artist Pedro Neves Marques, The Forest and the School is the first comprehensive anthology in English about the Brazilian tradition of Antropofagia, an aesthetic movement and South American cosmo-political philosophy. Over 30 contributors from Montaigne to Jarry are included in this dense softcover reader. Antropofagia refers to the concept of anthropophagy—literally, cannibalism—to call for the transformative digestion of modernity’s paradigmatic divides of nature and culture, human and animal, object and subject, labor and technology.

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FRENCH THEORY AND AMERICAN ART

Anaël Lejeune, Olivier Mignon & Raphaël Pirenne (Eds.)

Many postwar American artists were influenced by French philosophy, literary studies, and social sciences. French Theory in American Art examines some of the main historical conditions of this reception.

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Peter Friedl

Secret Modernity

Anselm Franke

An engrossing collection of writings and interviews by Berlin-based artist Peter Friedl brings together – for the first time – wide-ranging work dating back almost 30 years. As in his artworks, Friedl’s writings quote from and re-work multiple genres, offering reviews and portraits of George Sand, Clarice Lispector and Jean-Luc Goddard; examining theater, film and art history through the work of Robert Wilson, Yoko Ono and Glauber Rocha; and expanding and reflecting on his own projects. Alongside these are essays delving deep into the past, exploring mainly colonial history and its paradoxical traces in the present through narratives about Haiti, South Africa and Italy’s repressive colonial rule in Africa. A mind-expanding reader from one of the art world’s great contemporary thinkers, author of Four or Five Roses and Working at Copan.

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Fundamentalisms of the New Order

Charlotte Brandt, Lars Bang Larsen, Jean-Charles Massera and Cristina Ricupero

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FUTURE IMPERFECT

Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural
Institutions in the Middle East
Visual Culture in the Middle East Vol. 3

Anthony Downey (Ed.)

Future Imperfect, the third volume in the ongoing series from Visual Culture in the Middle East, critically examines the present and future role of Middle Eastern and North African cultural institutions as contexts for the production, dissemination and reception of contemporary art. Using historical examples of discussions that have become increasingly urgent in recent years such as the role of culture in a time of conflict and globalization, this reader offers an in-depth critique on the state of cultural institutions in an age of exuberant cultural activity, political upheaval, social unrest, ascendant neoliberal forms of privatization, and regional uncertainty. With over 30 contributors including renowned academics, critics, activists, filmmakers, artists and others, this timely and important publication considers how new infrastructures and institutions can effectively emerge in our current climate. Essays by Hoor Al-Qasimi, AMBS Architects, Stephanie Bailey, Elizabeth Derderian, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Rijin Sahakian, Gregory Sholette and more. With online projects by Yasmine Zidane.

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THE FUTURE OF ART: A DIARY

Erik Niedling with Ingo Niermann

When Berlin-based artist Erik Niedling dies, he would like to be buried in Pyramid Mountain, the largest tomb of all time as conceived by writer Ingo Niermann, his collaborator on this book. The second in Niermann’s Future of Art series, this Diary documents a year in the life of Niedling, who lived each day as though it were his last. In a letter that examines the social and philosophical implications of the project Tom McCarthy calls the book “a kind of Atkins diet for the soul.” The book was published as a companion to the exhibition “18.10.1973–29.02.2012” (Niedling’s fictional life-span) at the Neues Museum Weimar.

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GERMAN FOR NEWCOMERS

Stine Marie Jacobsen

Working with participatory tools to raise solidarity and civic engagement, Stine Marie Jacobsen (b. 1977) designs educational projects that deal with ethics, identity, control, fear and trust. German For Newcomers is a language project and workshop concept by the Danish artist; several workshops took place over the course of one year, and a film was also produced. The role of the student and teacher is shifted in German For Newcomers: expats, immigrants and refugees are invited to improve their basic German language skills by collectively writing useful teaching material for themselves and others. The material is inspired by their own experiences with German culture, language and bureaucracy. The idea for this publication came about after the success of Jacobsen’s German For Artists, a hybrid, pocket grammar book containing reflections on philosophical aspects of the German language in relation to art (hierarchy).

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