COG

I Love You Too is a project from a visual artist focused on the writing of letters, shifting the focus from how a community uses a library to how it creates one – a library, in this case, of love. The stories in this book were told during the COVID-19 pandemic by more than 100 people from across Manchester. Through in-person and online interviews with 11 writers, their testimonies were transformed into this collection of love letters. To ensure all those involved felt safe and supported while sharing their deeply personal stories, well-being managers were on hand at every stage of the process. By way of thanks, each participant was gifted a portrait created at the time of their interview. Thank you to the people of Manchester for sharing these beautiful and personal stories with us.

South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere spent MIF19 in residence in Manchester’s network of libraries – and two years on, published I Love You Too, a beautiful book inspired by the time he spent in the city.

At the start of 2021, Wa Lehulere invited more than 100 people from across Manchester to share with us their love stories: to people, to places, even to possessions. Through a series of online and in-person meetings, a group of 11 Manchester writers put their words on to the page. The result is I Love You Too, a personal, powerful and inspiring 232-page hardback book of love letters rooted in our city – and the first in an international series.

In this pocket publication Flanders Arts Institute examines new ways of working internationally in the arts. Joris Janssens collects insights and light bulb moments from the research & development trajectory (Re)framing the International.

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.

Let’s Pretend None of This Ever Happened documents neon, LED and other text works by the British artist Tim Etchells. The book creates a compelling and comprehensive investigation of Etchells’ projects in public space and galleries, leading with images of key works installed in sites all over the world.

Alongside its wide-ranging image survey, this work features an extended conversation between the artist and Jule Hillgärtner, director of Kunstverein Braunschweig, as well as a text by curator Ben Borthwick.

Surveying the full range and approaches of Etchells’ sculptural work with text, Let’s Pretend None of This Ever Happened creates dialogue across the artist’s works spanning sixteen years, as well as exploring the complex relation between individual works and the different contexts in which they have been installed over the last several decades.

Dinner with America is the second in a trilogy of performance installations addressing the complexities of cultural identity in the 21st Century. Where the first piece in the trilogy, Mr Quiver (Nuffield Autumn 07), explored Indian and English stereotypes, this piece questions what America means to us.

As the performance space shifts and transforms around the audience, it gently uncovers themes of consumerism, rights, ownership, voices, hopes, harvest and division in a visually compelling and unusual piece of work.

This booklet was published in November 2008 to accompany the touring production of Dinner with America by Rajni Shah Theatre. All images, films and texts were made during and as part of the creative process. They are designed to illuminate both the core and outlying ideas that inhabited the artists’ thinking at the time of making the show, between February 2007 and November 2008.

Celebrating the first-ever retrospective exhibition of performance art icon Jess Dobkin, this book reflects on the internationally acclaimed artist’s playful and provocative practice as a performer, curator, and community activist, and asks: How do archives perform? With contributions by more than twenty renowned performance scholars, archivists, and creative collaborators and a riot of full-colour photographs, Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective provides unparalleled access to Dobkin’s artistic process and production from the last thirty years.

Video documentation of an online book launch of  A Good Love Story by Sibylle Peters on 14th February 2021. This conversation spanned  love, intimacy and isolation, the state of Pleasure Activism today,  heterasexuality and the question of what constitutes a good love story.

Sibylle Peters was joined by artist, activist and editor of German pop feminist Missy Magazine Margarita Tsomou; writer and sexual health activist Almaz Ohene; artist and activist Brian Lobel; artist and Heteraclub collaborator Ansuman Biswas; Canadian based artist and activist Cassie Thornton; and artist and A Good Love Story editor Hester Chillingworth.

An essential introduction to the life and work of Sonia Boyce, a leading contemporary artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores artistic authorship and the creative potential in unexpected play.

Afterall Journal

Issue 49 Spring/Summer 2020 – ‘Extractivism’ – looks at a nexus of practices engaging with environmental issues and extractivist capitalism. In parallel, it covers alternative ways in which artists are occupying spaces of art, history or economics.

pg. 59-67

In Acts of Affect, siren eun young jung returns to the disappearing Yeoseong Gukgeuk theatre. In her discussion of the project, Ashley Chang examines how masculinity is produced by women.

Afterall Journal

Issue 49 Spring/Summer 2020 – ‘Extractivism’ – looks at a nexus of practices engaging with environmental issues and extractivist capitalism. In parallel, it covers alternative ways in which artists are occupying spaces of art, history or economics.

pg.49-57

Hyunjin Kim contextualises siren eun young jung’s audio-visual work at the 2019 Venice Biennale in relation to queer performance in South Korean history.

Afterall Journal

Issue 49 Spring/Summer 2020 – ‘Extractivism’ – looks at a nexus of practices engaging with environmental issues and extractivist capitalism. In parallel, it covers alternative ways in which artists are occupying spaces of art, history or economics.

P.27-35
Nizan Shaked traces the interventions of Sonia Boyce’s work in received categories of artistic practice, considering how these interventions suggest means of classification beyond media, artistic intention and identity.

Art Review Issue 26  / October 2008

pg. 74-81

Feature on Elmgreen & Dragset : Inconvenient Truths