Stefanie Hessler – författare

This is the first major exhibition and monograph on contemporary artist David Uzochukwu. David Uzochukwu: Bodies of Water is a poetic meditation on identity, migration, and belonging. Marking the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, the book introduces readers to Uzochukwu’s visionary practice, where mythology, fantasy, and personal history converge. In his photographs, hybrid beings—part human, part animal—move through surreal, aqueous landscapes. Here, Blackness resists fixed definition: fluid, shifting, and vibrantly alive. Rejecting portrayals of African diasporic people as displaced or alien, Uzochukwu imagines figures equipped to thrive in challenging worlds—adorned with fins, scales, and other transformative traits. His seamless digital collages merge precision and wonder, dissolving the boundaries between reality and imagination. The resulting images echo the adaptive strategies of diasporic communities navigating environments often shaped by hostility and exclusion. Featuring newly commissioned essays and reflections, Bodies of Water gathers leading curators, writers, and cultural critics to explore Uzochukwu’s work as a meditation on transformation, survival, and the limitless possibilities of Black existence.Exhibition ScheduleMemphis Brooks Museum of Art,June 10 – December 2026The Weisman Museum in St. Paul, Minnesotain Spring or Fall 2027+ other national venues TBCPublished by Paul Holberton Publishing/Distributed by Yale University Press

Carsten Höller invites readers to disrupt their daily lives with 336 mind-expanding diversions. They can be played alone, in pairs or in teams, in the street, in bed, on a train, wherever. No props or materials are needed. Just one body, all senses and a willingness to try something new, that’s possibly conceptually or physically challenging, but guaranteed to entertain and to widen the player’s horizons.Some games are more obviously daring than others – unexpectedly shouting ‘bang!’ when your driver’s reversing into a parking space is sure to elicit a reaction – but that’s absolutely the point. Other games involve covertly dropping strange phrases into conversation, executing somersaults (without practice), or plucking hairs from your opponent’s head while they stay poker-faced.Höller’s scientific professional background informs his keenness to create what he calls Influential Environments. He wants to tease the brain while testing its limitations, through activity and passivity, agency and inertia. He conceived his first game with a group of friends in 1992, during a tedious dinner after an exhibition opening. Since then, he has collected and invented ideas, inspired by friends, life, the Surrealists, and Arthur Rimbaud. All games are illustrated with commissioned or pre-existing artworks and photographs. We find portraits by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, August Sander, and Nan Goldin next to paintings by Salvador Dalí; snapshots of Joseph Beuys plus son and Donna Haraway plus dog next to appointed pieces by Christine Sun Kim and Anri Sala; film stills by Chantal Akerman, extracts from Shakespeare as well as treasures from Höller’s personal archive—and his mother’s.  Edited by Stefanie Hessler and Hans Ulrich Obrist, this book encourages readers to engage in playful yet cerebral experiments that will leave them with a sense of wonder, disorientation, and a subtle smirk on their face.