New Museum of Contemporary Art,U.S. – förlag

This volume is published for a new site-specific installation that incorporates several films by Italian artist Adelita Husni Bey (born 1985), including the premiere of a major new work. Chiron continues Husni Bey’s explorations of the complexity of collectivity and the human and social consequences of imperialism.The introductory text to the catalog, “On exercise and outcome,” by New Museum Associate Curator Helga Christoffersen, features a survey of Husni Bey’s work from the past decade. Two new texts and an interview were written specifically for this catalog: “Who determines if something is habitable?” by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Referred pain: On the work of Adelita Husni Bey” by Johanna Burton, and “There is water in among the Stones: A Conversation between Adelita Husni Bey and Hannah Black.”

Published for Jordan Casteel’s major New Museum show, Within Reach surveys her paintings exploring the nuances of Black subjectivityIn her large-scale oil paintings, New York-based artist Jordan Casteel (born 1989) takes up questions of Black subjectivity and representation by examining the gestures, spaces and forms of nonverbal communication that underpin portraiture. “There is a certain amount of mindfulness that it requires ... to be present with someone in a moment.” she explains. “I’ve always had an inclination towards seeing people who might be easily be unseen.”Published for Casteel’s first solo museum exhibition in New York, this volume brings together 40 large-scale paintings from throughout her career, including works from the celebrated series Visible Man (2013-14) and Nights in Harlem (2017), along with recent cropped “subway paintings” and portraits of her students at Rutgers University-Newark. Whether depicting former classmates from Yale, nude and in serene repose; street vendors near her home in Harlem; anonymous New Yorkers huddled on the subway; or her own students, posed largely in domestic interiors among their personal belongings, she explores how both public and private spheres can serve as frames for an inner life.This generously illustrated, oversized publication honors the larger-than-life scale of the artist's work. It is the first comprehensive monographic publication on Casteel’s work and includes texts by Dawoud Bey, Amanda Hunt and Lauren Haynes, and conversations conducted with the artist by Massimiliano Gioni and Thelma Golden.

Recent works by Hong Kong animator Wong Ping, whose childlike cartoons evoke adult themes and anxietiesProduced in tandem with his first solo museum exhibition in New York, this publication offers insight into the work of Hong Kong–based animator Wong Ping (born 1984). Over the past ten years, Ping has crafted tales of individual desires, societal pressures and political upheaval. His works, which are often vibrantly pop-colored and rely on geometric form, reveal themselves as metaphors for larger systemic issues, such as immigration, social relations and economic anxieties. Although his videos may initially recall the language of children’s cartoons, Wong Ping’s work emerges from his own stories and journals in which he reveals the daily aspirations and anxieties of everyday residents of Hong Kong through surreal narratives and a bizarre cast of anthropomorphic characters. This exhibition brings together a selection of recent work by Wong Ping from across his widely experimental oeuvre.

Pepón Osorio’s epic installations unite conceptual art and community dynamicsInformed by his background in theater and performance as well as his experiences as a child services case worker and professor, the richly textured sculptures and installations of Puerto Rican–born, Philadelphia-based artist Pepón Osorio (born 1955) are deeply invested in political, social and cultural issues affecting Latinx and working-class communities in the United States. Published for the artist’s most comprehensive exhibition to date, this catalog focuses on the elaborate, large-scale multimedia environments that Osorio has been creating since the early 1990s. Often developed through long-term conversations and collaborations with individuals in the neighborhoods where they were first shown, his installations draw from personal stories in order to empathetically elucidate larger social ills. Taken from an eponymous work, the book’s title addresses themes that resonate throughout Osorio’s practice, such as the need to better care for one another.

Art as anthropology: uncovering and upending regimes of visibilityOver the past decade, Canadian-born, Paris-based artist Kapwani Kiwanga (born 1978) has created complex installations, sculptures, performance lectures and films that consider marginalized histories and colonial economies. Drawing from her training in anthropology and the social sciences, Kiwanga’s ethereal environments bring attention to the backstories of systems of authority and their embodied effects.Accompanying the exhibition at the New Museum, this catalog provides one of the most complete overviews of Kiwanga's work in sculpture and installation. Inspired by the early 18th-century New York legal codes known as “lantern laws”—ordinances that required all Black, Indigenous or mixed-race individuals over 14 to carry lanterns or lit candles after dark if not accompanied by a white person—her new commission for the New Museum weaves together different layers of opacity and transparency through the use of large-scale curtains and mirrored surfaces, playing with natural light and darkness.

This first major monograph on Guatemalan multimedia artist Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa (born 1978) contextualizes his works in performance, sculpture, drawing and printmaking of the past ten years. Ramírez-Figueroa's installations often combine sculpture and aspects of avant-garde theater to allude to traumatic events that have shaped the political climate of present-day Guatemala. Ramírez-Figueroa expands on references to literature, folklore, magic and childhood memories. For this catalog, Catherine Wood, Senior Curator of Performance at Tate Modern, considers the artist's work through the lens of performance art, while Guatemalan Garifuna poet Wingston Gonzalez takes up its connections to the legacy of experimental theater in Latin America. Natalie Bell, Associate Curator at the New Museum, contributes an essay surveying selected bodies of work, and Kunsthalle Lissabon directors João Mourão and Luís Silva contribute an interview with the artist.

Accompanying her forthcoming New Museum solo exhibition, this book surveys the recent work of Turkish artist Asli Cavusoglu (born 1982), who works in media, including artists books, videos, photography and installations pursuing a commitment to exposing the untold histories and politics contained in objects, images and materials. Writer and curator Amy Zion contributes a monographic essay examining the prevailing concerns of Cavusoglu's practice, and artist Mariana Castillo-Deball reflects on shared interests in the social and political histories of pigment and the fields of archeology and science. Natalie Bell, Associate Curator at the New Museum, contributes an interview with the artist that explores her background and probes the philosophical and conceptual threads that run through her works.

This catalog is the first monographic publication to survey the work of London-based artist John Akomfrah (born 1957) and accompanies his upcoming New Museum exhibition. Since the early 1980s, Akomfrah's moving image works have offered some of the most rigorous and expansive reflections on the culture of the black diaspora. Zoe Whitley and Aram Moshayedi survey Akomfrah's early work as part of Black Audio Film Collective. Tina Campt explores the sonic resonances of Akomfrah's installation The Unfinished Conversation (2012), which focuses on the life of cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Diana Nawi examines the recent work Transfigured Night (2013/2018), considering how Akomfrah continues to find new languages for film, representation and narrative. T.J. Demos and Okwui Enwezor look at Vertigo Sea (2015), Akomfrah's monumental work exploring the concept of the black Atlantic, using the work to articulate the visual and philosophical underpinnings of Akomfrah's work across his career.

Menesunda Reloaded marks the first-ever presentation outside of Argentina of the legendary work, La Menesunda, first envisioned by Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín in 1965. Over the past 60 years, Minujin (born 1943), a pioneering Argentinian artist, has developed happenings, performances, installations and video works that have greatly influenced generations of contemporary artists in Latin America and beyond.The catalog features a text by Zanna Gilbert of the Getty Research Institute that focuses on La Menesunda in the context of Argentinian and international art of the 1960s. Also included in the catalog are a new interview with Minujín and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neelson Artistic Director of the New Museum, and Helga Christoffersen, New Museum Associate Curator; and a contribution from environmental artist Christo.Menesunda Reloaded is part of an ongoing series of solo exhibitions that provide a focused exploration of artists’ practices and continues the New Museum’s history of bringing first-ever presentations of major works to New York.

On Ed Atkins’ recent video art installation, commissioned for the New Museum in collaboration with Bell Labs’ newly reinstated E.A.T. initiativePublished for British artist Ed Atkins’ (born 1982) major video/installation art commission at the New Museum in New York, this book features a selection of the artist’s critical writings and recent works. Atkins' project at the New Museum was produced in partnership with the newly reinstated Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a series of exhibitions, residencies and programs developed by the New Museum and Nokia Bell Labs in order to foster collaborations between artists, scientists, technologists and engineers. This new incarnation of the legendary Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) reconnects to the projects initiated in the 1960s by Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, who collaborated with artists such as John Cage, Marta Minujin, Robert Rauschenberg, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Whitman and others.

A concise introduction to the pioneering media artist, from drawings to net-based artFor over 50 years, Lynn Hershman Leeson (born 1941) has created an innovative and prescient body of work that mines intersections between technology and the self. Known for her pioneering contributions to media art, Hershman Leeson has consistently worked in tandem with the latest technological developments from Artificial Intelligence to DNA programming, often anticipating many of the issues affecting society today.Twisted brings together a selection of the artist’s work in drawing, sculpture, video, photography, and interactive and net-based art, focusing on themes of transmutation, identity construction and the evolution of the cyborg. It includes some of Hershman Leeson’s most important projects, including the Breathing Machine sculptures; early drawings from the 1960s, many of which have never been shown; works from the Roberta Breitmore series (1970–79), perhaps her best-known project, in which she transformed her own identity into a fictional persona; selections from her Water Women series (1976–2010); and many more.

Machinery and organism merge in Lee’s sculptural explorations of bodily function and environmental decayPublished on the occasion of Mire Lee's (born 1988) first American solo museum exhibition, this publication brings together Lee's recent architectural environments and kinetic sculptures. Composed of materials including low-tech motors, pumping systems, steel rods and PVC hoses filled with grease, glycerin, silicone, slip and oil, Lee’s animatronic sculptures operate both like living organisms and biological machines. Drawing references from architecture, horror, pornography and cybernetics, and evoking bodily functions and environmental decay, Lee offers a visceral means to describe properties that exist between the realms of the technological and the corporeal: tenderness, desire, abjection, anxiety and revulsion, among other states. In the past year, Lee has had institutional solo exhibitions at MMK Frankfurt and Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Netherlands, and has participated in major international exhibitions including the 59th Venice Biennale, the 58th Carnegie International, and Busan Biennial 2022.

At once factual and otherworldly, Nguyen’s collaborative interdisciplinary practice addresses suppressed histories and the healing of intergenerational traumaDeveloping projects through collaborative community engagement and extensive archival research, Vietnamese artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen (born 1976) utilizes strategies of remembrance to highlight unofficial and suppressed histories. Interweaving fact and fiction and often employing mythologies of otherworldly realms, Nguyen reworks dominant narratives into stories that propose creative forms of healing the intergenerational traumas of colonialism, war and displacement.Nguyen’s 2023 New Museum presentation is his first US solo museum exhibition, showcasing a new film and two recent video projects, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022) and The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), alongside works from the artist’s sculptural and object-based practice. Drawing together conceptual threads from across the Global South, Nguyen’s exhibition sparks a dialogue on inherited memory and testimony as forms of resistance and empowerment.

The first volume in the New Museum’s redesigned Focus series spotlights Marcon’s uncanny, unsettling recent video workItalian artist Diego Marcon’s (born 1985) installations and films co-opt familiar forms from horror movies, slapstick comedies and cartoons to underscore and subvert cinematic archetypes. Animation, stop-motion, musicals and other subgenres feature heavily, with echoes of popular culture ranging from the world of Tim Burton to the music videos of early MTV. Shocking, uncanny and surreal, his filmic worlds, writes Kate Brown, “are exercises in navigating unknowns, and that is what makes them unforgettable.” Arrivederci, Piggies presents a newly commissioned video alongside three additional works, while the catalog provides a retrospective overview of Marcon’s oeuvre. This exhibition at the New Museum, New York is part of a new partnership with Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin.