To the Man in My Dreams

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.

Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who lived in exile in the United States, was one of the most provocative and complex personalities of the 1970s’ art world. In Where is Ana Mendieta? art historian Jane Blocker provides an in-depth critical analysis of Mendieta’s diverse body of work. Although her untimely death in 1985 remains shrouded in controversy, her life and artistic legacy provide a unique vantage point from which to consider the history of performance art, installation, and earth works, as well as feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism.

Taken from banners carried in a 1992 protest outside the Guggenheim Museum, the title phrase “Where is Ana Mendieta?” evokes not only the suspicious and tragic circumstances surrounding her death but also the conspicuous absence of women artists from high-profile exhibitions. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, Blocker discusses the power of Mendieta’s earth-and-body art to alter, unsettle, and broaden the terms of identity itself. She shows how Mendieta used exile as a discursive position from which to disrupt dominant categories, analyzing as well Mendieta’s use of mythology and anthropology, the ephemerality of her media, and the debates over her ethnic, gender, and national identities.

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.

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.

This work is in French.

Take Me To Your Favourite Place is an audio and written journal that starts with artist Maria Sideri’s trip to Brussels. The work suggests a subjective geography that observes and reinvents the city and its miscellaneous facts, in order to create movements between the spaces of a metropolis in constant transition.

This book explores the self in modern and contemporary art. Accompanying an exhibition in four chapters of the ISelf Collection at the Whitechapel Gallery, it looks at the complex ways in which artists are thinking about identity as an individual, in relation to others, to society and the wider world.

A critical exploration of the creative practice, socio-historical context and cultural impact of multifaceted artist Leigh Bowery. Engaging with Bowery’s key looks and live art through a variety of disciplines and challenging research contexts, Sofia Vranou navigates costuming as a performative strategy that blurs the boundaries between art and life.

Thought-provoking and enlightening, the study investigates his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire as well as his fascination with extremity, hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language, establishing Bowery as a radical figure in contemporary perfromance and queer visual culture.

Video documentation of an artist conversation with Lucy Sheen on 28th June 2024 at The Garrett Centre. This conversation followed screening of Lucy’s film Abandoned, Adopted Here as part of our LADA Screens programme on Voice, Care and Healing. Following the screening Lucy gave a performative reading of the poem I Know This Face, followed by a panel on the complexities of post-pandemic working in cultural and performative spaces for British East and Southeast Asians. With Jennifer Lim (Chair), Rosa Fong, Lucy Sheen, and Moi Tran.

Abandoned Adopted Here explores the nature of belonging in the British society and the unheard, silenced, and often erased voices of British East and Southeast Asians with mixed heritages and complex identities.

This is a video file. For a version with closed captions, visit our vimeo channel

This e-journal edition from performingborders gathers artists and practitioners exploring how their work crosses borders—territorial, cultural, political, and personal. Rooted in connection, resistance, and shared struggles, these contributions reimagine collaboration and solidarity across time and space. With a foreword by their long-time collaborator Diana Damian Martin, this collection is a tapestry of methodologies and practices grounded in survival and creative resistance.

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.

shado Issue 02: Global Womxnhood

Feature/Poetry by Fatimah Asghar with Art and introduction by Sabba Khan.

A publication with an essay by Stephen Ellcock in which he exemplifies the spiritual and mythological references in Delaine Le Bas’s work and in particular in the installation conceived for the Secession with references from Greek mythology and ancient Egyptian death cults.

Languages: German, English