My Little Enlightenment Plays

Would you like to start changing the world from your living room? What if your neighborhood made its own money? What would happen if all animals, including humans, had equal rights in the park next door? Have you considered that you are flying through space right now? Sibylle Peters, director of Theatre of Research, a Hamburg-based theater dedicated to creating social experiments together with audiences of all ages, invites readers to reimagine the world–and act on it. Based on 20 years of performance-based research, and guided by children’s wishes and concerns, this book of at-home experiments shows you how to change reality through play.

“This publication assembling the practices and discourses of ‘Asian contemporary performance’ is assuredly a statement of ‘the world we have made’ for the now and the future, as well as a means of connecting TPAC and other ‘worlds.’ “－Ruo-Yu LIU, Chairwoman of Taipei Performing Arts Center

“While it is now hardly unusual to find choreographers working in an exhibition setting, or visual artists performing on a stage, it is still rare to see practitioners from the different fields working together, as can be found at ADAM.”－John Tain, Head of Research at Asia Art Archive

“With various understandings from multiple disciplines, life journeys and international practices, this publication is neither a collected manifesto, nor an imprint of harmony and integration. On the contrary, it is the very embodiment of incarnations and trajectories of the world history and the network of contemporary corporeality.”－Chun-Yen WANG, Art Critic

2024 marks the 40th anniversary of The Cholmondeleys dance company, founded in 1984 by Lea Anderson, Teresa Montano, and Gaynor Coward. Inspired by the DIY culture of post-punk UK, they wanted to create something that resonated with their friends, blending dance with the energy of fashion, music, and club culture of the 1980s.

They named themselves The Cholmondeleys, like a band. Emerging from this vibrant time, their performances featured collaborations with British artists, including choreographer Lea Anderson, costume designers Sandy Powell, Emma Fryer, Simon Vincenzi, composers Drostan Madden & Steve Blake, and lighting designer Simon Corder. Together with their sister company, The Featherstonehaughs (founded in 1988), they produced over 87 works, both live and on film, performing in the UK and internationally. This rich creative legacy is captured in an archive of images by photographers such as Chris Nash, Pau Ros, and Matilda Temperley, now presented together for the first time in this celebration of The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs.

Through her engaged and articulate essays in the Village Voice, C. Carr has emerged as the cultural historian of the New York underground and the foremost critic of performance art. On Edge brings together her writings to offer a detailed and insightful history of this vibrant brand of theatre from the late 70s to today. It represents both Carr’s analysis as a critic and her testament as a witness to performances which, by their very nature, can never be repeated.

Documents the work of fourteen performance artists who marked the personal and political resonances of the new Millennium in a series of site-specific actions. Contrasting with the epic, populist and homogenising nature of the official celebrations, these works focused on forgotten and ephemeral experiences, enacting small but significant interventions in the public sphere.

Playing Public: Performing Participation with Pens, Planes, and People is an A5 format artist/research publication and project archive focusing on participatory game Flight Club and the years that preceded its creation. Charting my participatory art journey from prior experiments and involvement with community groups and public-facing, performative events leading up to the production of Flight Club and its iterations, written and photographic documentation combine to show how this game emerged and developed through participation, community and open-source collaboration.

“A love letter to artistic research, Seita’s writing celebrates the desire, disorientation, and discovery to be found in feminist practices of reading. A potent reminder of generative passin thatwe can only wish motivated all critical inquiry.” -Gordon Hall

10 Together: Performances by Longva+Carpenter is an overview of collaborative practice in durational visual art performance, providing a chronology of work presented from 2010 to 2020 in galleries and public spaces, in city centres and small towns from the rural USA to islands in Norway. With essays and project descriptions in both English and Norwegian, the performances are offered to a public beyond the initial viewers at each event.

Yoko Ono is an artist who has made an indelible mark on contemporary culture and political activism through her radical and innovative practice. This remarkable and essential publication, developed n collaboration with Yoko Ono and her studio, traces in full the evolution of an artist whose visionary spirit has transcended boundaries and challenged conventions. In Music of the Mind, explore the world of Yoko Ono and discover the profound impact of her art on the collective consciousness of our time.

The function of the critic and the function of the artist have been traditionally divided; the artist’s concern was the production of the work and the critic’s was its evaluation and interpretation. During the past several years a group of young artists evolved the idiom of Conceptual Art, which eliminated this division. Conceptual artists take over the role of the critic in terms of framing their own propositions, ideas, and concepts.

An essential aspect of Conceptual Art is its self-reference; often the artists define the intentions of their work as part of their art. Thus, many Conceptual artists advance propositions or investigations. It is in keeping, then, with Conceptual Art that it is best explained through itself, i.e., through the examination of Conceptual Art, rather than through any assumptions outside of itself. In this sense, this book is not a “critical anthology” but a documentation of Conceptual Art and Statements.

Wait it Out is published in relation to the research and preparations made for Sandra Johnson’s solo exhibition at Project Arts Centre in 2019 with newly commissioned works. Through an extensive conversation between the artist and curator, editor Livia Paldi, and additional texts and visual documentation the book presents a rich trajectory and variety of reflections to relate to the exhibition and performance at Project, as well as the pre-history that undergirds the project with special focus on Johnson’s work in Dublin during the 1990s.