Political Acts: Pioneers of Performance Art in Southeast Asia

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.

“When Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil invited Célio Turino to develop a programme to democratise access to culture, no one could have imagined the extraordinary initiatives that today cross Brazil from one extreme to the other: from semi-arid sertão to the sea, from Amazônia to the fertile lowlands of the South. The Ponto de Cultura programme has provided instruments for the multiple voices of a diverse nation to find expression in music, literature, petry… Turino’s book is a map of living Brazilian Popular Culture, disseminated to every corner of a nation that is finally seeking to be a country for everyone.” -Emir Sader

This lavishly illustrated magical volume acts a potent talisman connecting the two worlds of Tate – the seen public collection and the unseen secrets lurking in the archive. The pages of this book explore the hidden artworks and ephemera left behind by artists for the first time idea and will shed new light on our understanding of the art historical canon. This book explores the symbiotic relationship between art and the occult and how both can act as a form of resistance to challenging environments. This book will change perceptions forever and illuminate the surprising breadth and extraordinary ways in which artists interpret not just the physical world around them but also the supernatural, and in doing so make the unseen, seen. If you think you know Tate artists, it’s time to think again.

The first of its kind, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, gathers together a diverse range of 55 poets with varying aesthetics and backgrounds. In addition to generous samples of poetry by each trans writer, the book also includes “poetics statements”-reflections by each poet that provide context for their work covering a range of issues from identification and embodiment to language and activism.

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

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.

Before we begin to practice self-design, we find ourselves already designed by the gaze of others. That is why the practice of self-design mostly takes a critical and confrontational turn. We want to bring others to see us in the way we want to be seen – not only during our earthly life but also after our death. This is a complicated struggle, and the aim of this book is to describe and analyze it.

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.