Which exhibition would you like to see at the Tate Gallery?

All about Chinese feminist Queer diasporic sisters and publications. Pubis Magazine #2

All about Chinese feminist Queer diasporic sisters and publications. Pubis Magazine #1.

Sabrina Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals–where fat bodies were once praised–showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority.
Fearing the Black Body argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. An important and original work, it reveals that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

Por que falamos em arte nordestina ou arte nortista, mas raramente ouvimos a expressão arte sudestina para nos referirmos às produções do Rio de Janeiro ou de São Paulo, por exemplo? Essa pergunta, aparentemente simples, revela muito sobre o modo como o Sudeste foi historicamente alçado, e se impôs à condição de centro normativo da cultura brasileira. A produção artística dessa região costuma ser tomada como “a arte brasileira”, dispensando adjetivos regionais, enquanto as produções do Norte e do Nordeste foram historicamente enquadradas nas margens, exceções ou exotismos dentro desse panorama…

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.

Fungi Media positions performance art of bodily mutations as a form of corporeal philosophy. Examining ecologies of rot and fungal decomposition, it outlines a theory of fungosexuality beyond sexual reproduction and binary gender roles. This theoretical perspective repositions queer sexualities in the context of the original meaning of the term ‘queer’, which is ‘rot’ – and which stands for a fungi-induced process of decomposition. With this, Fungi Media explores the foundational importance of rot for both breaking down and sustaining bodies, relationships and life as such.
The project was developed in a squatted sewage space in London, adopted by the author as a laboratory for mutant performance. The space hosts Chronic Illness events, where Internet-inspired body artists enter an environment populated with fungi. The interventions of human performers are incorporated into the rotten physiology of the space, which itself becomes a live entity. This book involves those events in the analysis of connections between media technologies and primal life processes. It also offers strategies for urban dwelling which transcend normative family life.

Read more at Open Humanities Press– Fungi Media

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.

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.

“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.