Essay

The Photograph Looked Back at Me is a series of prose miniatures, each born from an image the author cannot turn away from: a ghostly plant printed in a book about Chernobyl; a miner's face obscured by smoke, hanging in a Kyiv gallery; a picture of Katja Petrowskaja's parents, from an old family album.

Over a decade’s worth of essays: movies of America in parallax view.

A personal reflection on fragmentation, language, and place.

A reflection on the autonomy and eternity of art by Canadian writer Madeleine Thien, based on a mural in the Thousand Buddha Grottoes of Bezeklik, China.

The origins, scope, and legacy of Duchamp's revolution in the visual arts.

Sylvia Sasse explores and analyzes subversive affirmation as a critical practice in different political systems.

Karenna Gore posits a future for the design practices that works within the living and intelligent design of Earth.

How the transition to fossil fuels entailed an intensification of ongoing processes of racialization.

The edition offers a new approach to what Ines Weizman names "documentary architecture," meaning that to write about the history of a building is also to map the world in which it is located.

A highly personal reflection on the practice, teaching, and very essence of architecture and design.

A counter-history of contemporary art, where experience becomes form, and aesthetics is redefined as a radical relationship with the living.

An insect theory of media to understand our media devices and our technological modernity.

D. N. Rodowick examines the complex relationships between contemporary art and cinema, around questions of movement, image, time, and history.

The new information regimes and document uses created by four major figures in the art world between the 1960s and 1970s—Germano Celant, Lucy R. Lippard, and Carla Lonzi, curators and art critics, as well as Seth Siegelaub

Art as a set of practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context: the manifesto that has renewed the approach of contemporary art (also available in English edition).

A major study in art history in which Sophie Leclercq, drawing on and analyzing multiple sources, texts, and visual documents, sheds light on a blind spot in French colonialism: how, between 1870 and 1960, children were taught about colonial conquest through edifying imagery, and how their view of colonized populations was shaped?

Architect Mark Lee presents a body of work on the basis of five considerations: on history, on cadence, on autonomy, on America, and on point.

How does photography depict our environment? How does it contribute to its destruction? This book explores this paradox through the analysis of the work of fifteen contemporary artists.

An artistic exploration of the political and emotional stakes of translation in the context of asylum law, through the lens of rarely heard testimonies: those of interpreters.

On the occasion of Seasons, Maurizio Cattelan's exhibition at GAMeC, art historian Lisa Parola, investigates how contemporary art can redefine the idea of the monument.

What can resistance look like today? In search of an answer, Enis Maci draws a line from Jeanne D'Arc via Sophie Scholl to the Albanian Sworn Virgins.

A radicant thought extended to modes of cultural production, consumption and use, against the multiculturalist critical model.

A history of art in France from the women's perspective.

A groundbreaking study on the relationship between Wassily Kandinsky, pioneer of abstract art, and the photographic image.

Maria Clara Araújo dos Passos examines the interplay of education, identity, and liberation in Brazil's travesti community.

The act of translation as a pedagogical tool, a political act, and ultimately a gesture of care in these tense cultural times.

First published in 1998, Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics laid out a thesis for art's turn towards participation, experience, and the whole of human relations. Over twenty years after its original release, Relational Aesthetics has been updated with a new translation by Denyse Beaulieu and a new foreword by the author.

The first French translation of Giorgio Grassi's 1967 text La construction logique de l'architecture [The Logical Construction of Architecture] is a strong statement in favor of an architecture conceived for its own sake, standing in opposition to the experimental excesses characteristic of both his time and ours.

Production of exhibitions and production of discourse on exhibitions.

The other side of images in cinema, between phenomenology, art history, literature and ecology.

An account of an imaginary fashion exhibition that has no clothing, but in its place, sonic responses to garments and cloth act as a series of calls to explore the concept of Fashion Thinking.

The act of translation as a pedagogical tool, a political act, and ultimately a gesture of care in these tense cultural times.

Considers the work of seven artists through the framework of art as research.

A contemporary artist and an anthropologist engage in dialogue with the history of anthropology, philosophy, and art in an attempt to approach the singularity of the human being.

In this essay, Alexandre Gérard recounts his discovery and interpretation—which was not entirely straightforward at first—of the work of his great-uncle, the artist Jean Dupuy (1925-2021).

A wide-ranging philosophical investigation into the origins and potential of "perspectivism", beyond mere relativism and subjective "interpretation".

The stock theatrical character Pierrot is an enduring figure in French visual art, where he emerges at the intersection of theatricality and the marketplace. This book offers an account of Pierrot's recurrence in painting, prints, photography and film, tracing this distinctive type from the art of Watteau to the cinema of Occupied France.

An analysis by American historian Dagmar Herzog of the emotional springs and body-related obsessions of the new extreme right.

This posthumously published essay presents Hans De Wolf's sharp analysis of one of the greatest rivalries in art history, a rivalry between two centuries, embodied by two of their most prominent figures: Courbet for the 19th and Duchamp for the 20th century.

An unclassifiable classic, precursor of the “material turn” and of media theory, finally reissued.

Through the operative concept of literary and political extremism, this volume explores the links between the revolutionary aspirations of far-left socio-political movements and the quest for a new articulation between literature and reality in 1970s Italy, a dynamic exemplified by poet and novelist Nanni Balestrini (1935-2019).

A challenging study of contemporary theater in all its political dimensions.

Pictorial abstraction in the Middle Ages: an innovative reflection that offers a powerful cross-disciplinary approach to medieval art, under a completely rethought concept of abstraction in close contact with finely analyzed images.

The relationship between quantifiable and experiential knowledge as entanglement of multiple temporalities.