Sturtevant was a visual artist, who was based for the longest part of her career in New York. In the 1960s Elaine Sturtevant began operating an art practice in which she meticulously copied selected works of her male colleagues. Her practice was a critique of the culture of the art world in which she was working, one that was dominated by the concept of the lone genius, autonomous, white male creator. From the beginning she dropped her first name to subvert the concept of the identity of a female artist. In Hainley’s study he recalls the early performances by Sturtevant including The Store of Claes Oldenburg, Picabias’ Ballet Relache and the ambiguous reception of her work at the time.

On a rug a number of balls formed out of clean white snow are placed very orderly in relation to their size. One of them David Hammons holds in his hand. The others are in front of him displayed for sale on the ground. This performance was staged in 1983 in New York on a corner of Cooper Square amongst other street sellers. Elena Filipovic gathers material documenting this iconic piece, part of an oeuvre that has only recently become well known. She places Hammon’s work, purposefully elusive and hard to grasp, in the context of his critique of questions of race in the United States and in the mechanisms of the Art World.

This book is a collection of essays by Teju Cole, an American writer and photographer. These essays reflect on his experience of being black and living a cosmopolitan lifestyle in an (only sometimes) cosmopolitan world. It’s an analysis of writing, music, conversations, places and images that he loves or that have disturbed him. When Cole considers each of these he translates his responses into a kind of personal archive, that counteracts rootlessness and condenses them into something that has shared meaning.

Testo Junkie – Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era – published 2007 in Spanish and French, translated into English in 2013, is an uncompromised document of the nearly year-long self experiment with synthetic testosterones and its lasting effects. The writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado shares the intimate radical shifts he undergoes while becoming ‘man / male’ and juxtaposes this document of his political performance with an analyses of how concepts of gender in society are shaped by the pharmaceutical and pornography industries. Preciado continues where Michel Foucault left with The History of Sexuality.

Read Thread is an artist book by Cecilia Vicuna, a writer and visual artist, that invites us to follow the thread beyond the western linear idea of time towards an endless movement of celestial patterns and its reflection in the human and landscape body. Vicuna, who left Chile 1973 during the dictatorship first for London, lived then in Bogota and after in New York, refers back to different indigenous concepts and techniques, which she poetically and politically interprets and places in tension with the current ecological and economical disaster. 

Martin Herbert introduces us in his essay collection Tell Them I Said No to 10 artists that have all for different reasons and in different forms decided to withdraw from the art world and its mechanisms. Amongst them are David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Lutz Bacher and Trisha Donelly. Herbert looks in detail at how their practices are shaped by strategies to counter established patterns and positions of power and dominance and instead foster the artists’ independence, each withdrawal comes with different implications.

The catalogue Traces documents the oeuvre of Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta (1948 – 1985). In her works she takes agency for and ownership over her body and creates often ephemeral works for which she almost exclusively used natural materials. The female body and the question of belonging are standing in the center of her practice. Mendieta realized many of her performances in nature, which she then documented on film – photographic and moving images. Poetically she expresses in her drawings, sculptures and performances an idea of an inseparable relationship between earth and humanity.

Jill Casid is a historian, theorist and practising artist based in the US. This study draws on an extraordinary range of resources for cultural criticism to explore colonial landscapes in the eighteenth century and their legacy today. In tracing the language and visual culture of plants and horticulture from literature, botanical illustration, garden design, and written archives she considers associations between colonial landscapes and heteronormativity. Casid gathers together and multiplies feminist, queer and postcolonial readings of concepts such as hybridity, productivity, fertility, rootedness, and displacement.