Various

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.

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.

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.

This funny, playful, rude and serious artist’s book is for anyone who wants an alternative queer and Othered take on the soft and hard power of monarchy. It reveals the discrepancy between its optics and objectives. Homosexual Death Drive plays The Groom of the Stool, or royal arse-wiper. She guides you through Poundbury’s grandiose avenues and lesser-known alleyways. In a bizarre twist, she meets Camilla at Buckingham Palace.

Discover Poundbury’s history, ideology, use of pseudo-tradition, greenwash and social control. Homosexual Death Drive introduces you to some of its people and reveals how they resist royal power-tripping. She argues that Poundbury is currently a death zone that could be redeemed as a postmodern theme park for artists, queers and Others.

Poundbury includes original research, personal reflection, drawings, poetry, experimental writing and AI-generated texts. It is shaped by queer theory, feminism, neurodivergence, and the social model of disability, working class identity, decolonisation, environmental activism and anarchism. Its guiding prnciples are: beauty, intelligence, humor, integrity, the liberation of all beings.

Is violent self-defense ethical? In the history of colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, there has long been a dividing line between bodies “worthy of defending” and those who who have been disarmed and rendered defenseless. That those subject to the most violence-the enslaved, the colonized, the oppressed-have been forcibly made defenseless raises, for any movement of liberation, a question: Can violence be used in the interests of self-defense?

Philosopher Elsa Dorlin looks across the global history of the left to trace the politics, philosophy, and ethics of self-defense. With a historical gaze that captures slave revolts, British suffragists’ training in jujitsu, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the Black Panther Party, queer neighborhood patrols, and Black Lives Matter, Dorlin discovers a “martial ethics of the self”: a practice in which violent self-defense is the only means for the oppressed to ensure survival and to build a livable future.

Translated from the French by Kieran Aarons.

Beauty Kit is an on-going project by the Belgian-Chilean artist Isabel Burr Raty, a hands-on research on the human body as a territory for sustainable agriculture. Isabel Burr Raty’s BK Female Farm is a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their bodily juices to produce beauty care products, which are used for treatments in her BK Spa and critically discussed in her BK Focus Group. Through a playful, embodied and participatory art practice, Beauty Kit tackles radical questions on ecology and exploitation, sexuality and agency.

Video documentation of an artist conversation with Sahera Khan on 1st March 2024 at The Garrett Centre. This conversation followed screening of Sahera’s film My Glow as part of our LADA Screens programme on Voice, Care and Healing. Following the screening Sahera engaged in a Q&A with the audience and gave a short BSL lesson.

In My Glow (2023), Aa mature, Deaf, Muslim, British Sign Language (BSL) mother shares her pregnancy journey through the pandemic, and how she coped with limited communication with others such as the health service.

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

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

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.