Sternberg Press – förlag

A massive value shift for existing buildings, infrastructure, materials, unbuilt land, earth, and the labor that holds our world together.To build is to destroy, writes Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. From steel bolts to concrete blocks to wood flooring to polyester insulation panels, every single component of the built environment is the product of extractive processes. Driven by greedy economies, the global enterprise of space production expands, impacting climate, earth, water, humans, and non-humans everywhere. However housing is both a human right and the mandate of design disciplines: How to navigate the need for housing versus the destructive practice of construction? To pause new construction—even if momentarily, creates a radical thinking framework for alternatives to the current regime of space production and its suspect growth imperative. Engaging with unsettling questions, A Moratorium on New Construction envisions a massive value shift for our existing stock. From housing redistribution to reinviting value generation, from anti-extractive measures to profound structural changes, from curricula reforms to purging the exploitative culture of the office, an entire rewiring of design processes and construction lays ahead. Somewhere between a thought experiment and a call for action, A Moratorium on New Construction is a leap of faith to envision a less extractive future, made of what we have: Not demolishing, not building new, but building less, building with what exists, inhabiting it differently, and caring for it.

The work of Sámi architect and artist Joar Nango, investigating indigenous spaces and their critical value in a contemporary cultural discussion.Centering on a notion of nomadic space, this publication offers the first in-depth overview of the projects, photo archives, and architectural investigations of Sámi architect and artist Joar Nango, and includes a series of essays and conversations with long-time collaborators and discussion partners. Conceived as platforms that consciously create autonomous spaces in which Sámi and indigenous cultures can grow, Nango’s projects seek encounters and open processes, developing new forms of expression and alliance with non-Sámi contexts. Often developed in collaboration with practitioners from a range of fields including architecture, art, theory, and crafts, Nango's practice operates between institutional and public spaces. Featured projects include ongoing discursive social platforms such as the mobile Sámi architecture library Girjegumpi, a series of films and conversations titled Post-Capitalist Architecture TV, image archives documenting contemporary expressions of Sámi architectural principles in Northern Scandinavia and beyond, and European Everything, first presented at documenta 14, for which Nango traveled by van along the borders of Europe from his home in Tromsø, Northern Norway to Athens in Greece, mapping the fringe and the excluded of this political and cultural terrain.Joar Nango is an artist and architect. His projects explore the boundaries between architecture, design, and visual art as an investigation of Indigenous space. He was trained at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, the Bergen School of Architecture and Weissensee Kunsthochschule in Berlin. He is a founding member of the architecture collective FFB and is currently setting up a nordic network of Sámi architects. Nango has exhibited extensively internationally, including at documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, Nasjonalmuseet Oslo, Kiasma—Museum of Contemporary Art Helsinki, the Toronto Biennial of Art and Bergen Kunsthall. In 2023, he will present a solo exhibition in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennial of Architecture.ContributorsMathias Danbolt, Candice Hopkins, Tone Huse, Joar Nango, Vivi Noahsen, Taqralik Partridge, Sofia Singler, Sigbjørn Skåden, Axel WiederCo-published by Bergen Kunsthall

Essays on the question on how art—and contemporary art practices in particular—embodies an intelligence capable of serving the erasure of the culture/nature distinction.The Complex Answer: On Art as a Non-Binary Intelligence presents a series of entangled essays on the question on how art—and contemporary art practices in particular—embodies an intelligence capable of serving the erasure of the culture/nature distinction. The book is conceived in four parts and each not only introduces a slightly different writing on the subject matter, but also refers to concrete questions that affect the practice of art, the exercise of exhibiting, the duty of reflecting, and the institutional forms that define our present but may radically change in a near future.The book imagines art and contemporary art as an organ. An organ that produces an experience of inexpressible realities that are fundamental to understanding life and its processes. Stem cells exist, first, without a purpose and it is for the whole organism to decide if they will become part of an auditive nerve or the brain or the cornea of an eye. This adding to an organ is how Chus Martínez understands the intelligence of art. Poets and artists have claimed to understand the language of birds and flowers. We speak now of multi-species communication without a trace of metaphoric language. The experience of nature has evolved inside artistic practice. One could claim that the very fact that we talk about artificial intelligence is a merit of the arts. To transfer traits of organic life to inorganic entities such as information systems is a bold move that took centuries to prepare. Art has been essential in getting our senses and our arguments ready to accept this reality. The same with animal language, the synchronized reactions of a rainforest, and the transformative way fish have been discovered as able to recognize their own image in a mirror. These are just jests on the part of the sciences, developments of technical knowledges.

A proposal that artists are the anthropologists of our new era or ecological crisis.“Today, the ecological catastrophe challenges us to rethink the space our societies have assigned to art. Creativity, critical thinking, exchange, transcendence, the relationship to the Other and to History are values intrinsic to artistic practice that will soon be of vital importance for the future of mankind. We need art to give a meaning to our lives, and the banks will not supply that. By attempting to unfold a few of the aesthetic figures floating in the global imaginary, this book intends to describe what is at stake in artistic activity in the age of the Capitalocene and to argue for it as a vital need.” The current ecological crisis has brought about a new relational landscape: an unprecedented collapse of distances is creating interspecies promiscuities and a crisis of the human scale. With Inclusions, Nicolas Bourriaud proposes that artists are the anthropologists of this new era. Artists acknowledge the fading of the division between nature and culture, which has been the matrix of segregation for millenia. Capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, social segregation, the exploitation of land, subsoil, and animals—all are based on status distinctions between subject and object. Against the commodification of natural elements, Bourriaud sees a new generation of artists calling for a molecular anthropology that studies the human effects on the universe and the interaction between humans and nonhumans. Contemporary art reconnects to archaic magic, the witches, sorcerers, and shamans of precapitalist societies. Against the devitalization of the world, art has managed to preserve certain aspects of the social function and spiritualist practices of these societies. Inclusions explores art history as a network of underground galleries, and sutures sundered connections.

Proposing a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of art institutions.

This volume gathers and expands upon the results of the research project “Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions,” held at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, and proposes a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of art institutions. It undertakes a transdisciplinary history at the nexus of art history, science studies, and philosophy, exploring the role the exhibition played in the construction of the conceptual categories of modernity, and outlines a historiographical model that conceptualizes the exhibition as both an aesthetic and an epistemic site.

Contributors

Etienne Chambaud, Elitza Dulguerova, Anselm Franke, Tristan Garcia, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Yuk Hui, Pierre Huyghe, Sami Khatib, Jeremy Lecomte, Stéphane Lojkine, Rafael Mandressi, Vincent Normand, Peter Osborne, Filipa Ramos, Juliane Rebentisch, João Ribas, Pamela Rosenkranz, Anna-Sophie Springer, Lucy Steeds, Olivier Surel, Etienne Turpin, Kim West, Charles Wolfe

In response to recent developments in pictorial practice and critical discourse, Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition seeks new ways to approach and historicize the question of the medium. Reaching back to the earliest theoretical and institutional definitions of painting, this book—based on a conference at Harvard University in 2013—focuses on the changing role of materiality in establishing painting as the privileged practice, discourse, and institution of modernity. Myriad conceptions of the medium and its specificity are explored by an international group of scholars, critics, and artists. Painting beyond Itself is a forum for rich historical, theoretical, and practice-grounded conversation.

ContributorsCarol Armstrong, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Sabeth Buchmann, René Démoris, Isabelle Graw, David Joselit, Jutta Koether, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Julie Mehretu, Matt Saunders, Amy Sillman

Institut für Kunstkritik Series

Leading scholars explore the connections between democracy and justice, architecture and urban design, the growth of cities, cosmopolitanism, inclusion, and free speech.This book builds on conversations that took place in the Fall of 2024 at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design marking the release of the book Democracy and Urban Form, a co-publication by Harvard Design Press and Sternberg Press. The original book showcased a series of six lectures that the sociologist Richard Sennett gave under the same name at the GSD in the fall of 1981. The original lectures, which happened more than forty years ago, addressed a much different political climate. Even so, Richard’s core insights into the connections between democracy and justice, matters of architecture and urban design, the growth of cities, cosmopolitanism, inclusion, free speech, and other related matters remain just as relevant today.In the spirit of reflecting on these urgencies, the GSD invited the political philosopher Michael Sandel to deliver a lecture that drew on themes from the new edition of his book Democracy’s Discontent. In his opening talk, which took place on the evening of Wednesday, October 9, Sandel encouraged the audience to consider what might account for the polarization that imperils democracy today, as well as what might be done about it? Beyond analyzing the forces that were about to decide the 2024 election, he proposed a bold project of civic renewal to reimagine the economy and empower citizens as participants in a shared public life. On Thursday, October 10, these provocations continued during a panel discussion that included Richard Sennett, Diane Davis, Claire Zimmerman, Markus Miessen, and Miguel Robles-Durán. All reflected on Sandel’s talk, as well as on the state of democracy as it related more specifically to architecture and the design and planning of cities and metropolitan regions.ContributorsDiane E. Davis, Markus Miessen, Miguel Robles-Durán, Richard Sennett, Claire Zimmerman

In Douglas Coupland's writing, the doldrums of a world afflicted by the pains of dotcom booms and busts, the ascendency of subcultures to pop cultures, and the subsequent struggle for identity are counterbalanced by droll, personal, and incisive analyses. This collection of nonfiction essays provides an illuminating meander through what we call culture today.

Douglas Coupland is a Canadian writer, visual artist, and designer. His first novel, Generation X, was an international bestseller. He has published fourteen novels, two collections of short stories, and seven nonfiction books; written and performed for the the Royal Shakespeare Company; and has penned a number of works for film and television. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Wired magazine, and the Financial Times.

Curators and thinkers about contemporary art consider how to engage audiences in creative forms of protest and advocacy.

With the global rise of a politics of shock, driven by nationalist and authoritarian regimes, what paths to resistance and sites of sanctuary can cultural institutions offer? In this book, more than twenty of the world's leading curators and thinkers about contemporary art offer powerful case studies from their own work, along with historical and theoretical perspectives, that point the way for cultural producers everywhere to engage audiences in creative forms of protest and advocacy capable of confronting the fierce political challenges of today and tomorrow.

ContributorsDefne Ayas, Ute Meta Bauer, Nicolas Bourriaud, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Joshua Decter, Clémentine Deliss, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Boris Groys, Hou Hanru, Pi Li, Maria Lind, Steven Henry Madoff, Antonia Majaca, Gabi Ngcobo, Hans Ulricht Obrist, Jack Persekian with Alison Ramer, María Belén Saéz de Ibarra, Terry Smith, Nato Thompson, Mick Wilson, Brian Kuan Wood, Tirdad Zolghadr

Critical writings that index the material and linguistic problems of making art.Compiled here for the first time, the selected writings of Helen Marten probe the critical spaces between image and language, material subject and conceptual idea. Working across sculpture, painting, drawing, writing, and video, Marten has emerged as one of the leading voices of her generation, investigating how we exist within and retranslate the world around us. Driven by both informational logics and emotional heat, her object-making compels a peculiar engagement with language—its wounding or wailing power, its sly metamorphosis, its seduction. She explores this submerged side of materiality where dark intent lies, questioning the linguistic framework of theoretical doubt as the place where mistakes are embraced to become generative. Marten envisages the artist to be like a busy dog, sticking its nose into the indexes of social or technological space and shuffling things about, coaxing or relegating artefacts to the peripheries like an aggravating archaeologist. This iterative flexibility holds great appeal, but also a certain danger—to find exposed and sticky the granular indecency of material, its mechanistic hierarchies, its feral stink of policy or corruption. Exploring theories of the mercantile and the digital, her writing examines craft as syntax and touch as a rejection of heteronormativity: instead, pleasure in material promiscuity is felt as a “fundamental itch.” With additional texts on fellow artists including Cady Noland, Sigmar Polke, Hervé Télémaque, Laura Owens, Matthew Barney, Charline von Heyl, and Lubaina Himid, Marten explores accumulative textual venture as an inventive mode of saturation.Approximation, models, collage and inlay; dust, vectors, animals, snow, blood and diagrams—the essays compiled in Mud Physics consider the human figure as one that hauls itself through an immense field of daily signs, sorts agitated language into piles, and emerges via the triumphant urgency of the imagination.

Reflections on the conditions of contemporary exile, refugeehood, migration, and community building at the margins of society.According to Pelin Tan, there are forms of belonging that do not quite belong. In this collection of essays and conversations with artists and practitioners across twenty years of research and fieldwork, she sets out to situate the conditions of contemporary exile, refugeehood, migration, and community building at the margins of society relative to the production of space, structural violence, shifting landscapes, and desecration of the environment. She also engages methodological questions integral to critical practice, including radical pedagogy, forms of commoning, non-hegemonic instituting practices, and the imagination of survival.How can the experience of art reveal and embody the voice of apocalyptic landscapes? How can the effects of large-scale disasters be memorialized through artistic and architectural methodologies? In addressing such questions, the book aims to advance collective critical thinking by inviting the reader to engage with particular artifacts and architectures as traces of an apocalyptic era, lands as strata of violence, cycles as Earth’s navigation, and exile as a form of semi-voluntary collectivity. Co-published by e-flux journal

On the forms of sabotage, insubordination, and invisible activity that evade the terrain of politics.What gets stranded outside the borders of the political? Inhuman Resources develops an account of sabotage, insubordination, and the invisible activities that undermine the ideas of accountability and identification on which representative politics rely.Drawing from histories of labor, disability, infrastructure, writing, and war, Williams offers  genealogies of the tropes of paralysis and sabotage, which leave behind notions of public citizenship to reveal an “inhuman” agency that hinges on the unexpected friction between humans, materials, machinery, and other non-human life. Yet to detect this and move away from fantasies of clarity and visibility, we need to take cues from political and artistic practices that evade such legibility, and are attuned to what happens off-screen and without recognition.Spanning an ambitious range of subjects—from prison architecture to digital animation, legal history to self-help books, and electrical blackouts to silkworms saturated with toxic dye—Inhuman Resources gathers materials for thinking differently about insurgent activity. This is a theory that does not privilege exodus, pride, or autonomy but instead takes shape inside the very processes, architectures, appearances, and systems it seeks to ruin.

How the transition to fossil fuels entailed an intensification of ongoing processes of racialization.From the eighteenth century onwards, Western science began to tap a large, yet non-renewable, capital store of energy. This transition from agricultural production dependent upon the flow of annual cycles (the sun) to industrial production based on the usage and subsequent depletion of energy stocks (fossil fuels) peaked around 1860. The period that followed roughly coincides with what genocide scholar Dirk Moses has dubbed “the racial century”—that is, the epoch when all political questions were articulated through the language of biology. Entropy and Chronopolitical Allegory considers the question: Why does the transition to fossil fuels entail an intensification of ongoing processes of racialization? Extrapolating the steam engine’s low thermal efficiency into the idea of a universe running out of time, the late nineteenth century mobilized evolutionary theory to counter the dissipative force of entropy. Flowing from this equation between time and energy, the discourse of the early twentieth century is marked by a search for “superman” types—a form of secular seekership that extends from technological to spiritual registers, leading to a conceptualization of technology that is closer to alchemy than mechanics. Against the backdrop of these structuring analogies, Ana Teixeira Pinto looks into the racialized inscriptions of difference energy conversions connote, and how they are mobilized in order to convert monetary value into cultural values.

A history of the modern architectural manifesto, with a focus on Mies van der Rohe.

The history of the avant-garde (in art, architecture, literature) can't be separated from the history of its engagement with mass media. It is not just that the avant-garde used media to publicize its work; the work did not exist before its publication.   

In architecture, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe came to be known through their influential writings and manifestos published in newspapers, journals, and little magazines. Entire groups, from Dada and Surrealism to De Stijl, became an effect of their manifestos. The manifesto was the site of self invention, innovation, and debate. Even buildings themselves could be manifestos. The most extreme and radical designs in the history of modern architecture were realized as pavilions in temporary exhibition. 

In the third book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Beatriz Colomina traces the history of the modern architecture manifesto, with particular focus on Mies van der Rohe, and the play between the written and built work. This essay propels the manifesto form into the future, into an age where electronic media are the primary sites of debate, suggesting that new forms of manifesto are surely emerging along with new kinds of authorship, statement, exhibition, and debate.

Critical Spatial Practice 3Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen Featuring artwork by Dan Graham

Examinations of Francis Ponge's texts on Jean Fautrier's “Hostage Paintings,” Jack Whitten's Memorial Paintings, and Banksy's auction stunt Love is in the Bin.

This book contains three case studies on very different artists, analyzing their work through their respective historical contexts: the writer Francis Ponge (1899–1988) and his seminal text on Jean Fautrier's “Hostage Paintings” from 1943; visual artist Jack Whitten's (1939–2018) Memorial Paintings and Banksy's notorious auction stunt Love is in the Bin from 2018.

Examining all three artistic propositions from a value-theoretical point of view, Graw finds Ponge's text on Fautrier to be “doubly materialist” insofar as it (seemingly) reveals its own material conditions while simultaneously grasping the specific materiality of Fautrier's paintings; suggests that the indications of value in Whitten's painting to be more indirect; and reveals Banksy's value reflections to have a very different generational thrust.

Gaw shows that Ponge's text is full of value-reflexive insights but that Ponge himself is an ambivalent figure. She finds that the dedication of Whitten's paintings inscribes them in a system of exchange. And, finally, the deliberate aesthetic meagerness of Banksy's Love Is in the Bin points to an emptiness at the heart of value.

Institut für Kunstkritik series

How architecture powered European energy politics in the postwar era and paved the way for today’s dependency on coal, steel, and nuclear power.In this volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series, Dennis Pohl locates the origin of Europe’s dependency on carbon and nuclear power in the postwar architectural designs and energy policies of the European Community. Since the 1950s, architects have proposed territorial, regional, and urban development plans that served the European political project. They collaborated with the European Coal and Steel Community in an effort to render the steel building industry as efficient as the car industry; they incorporated the ideas of infinite nuclear energy, as promoted by the European Atomic Energy Community, into their designs.This book demonstrates how architecture served the political economy of postwar Europe as a means of turning coal, steel, and radioactivity into tools of European governance. Architectural design enabled EU institutions to support social policies and worker housing within the coal and steel industry as well as to promote a new pan-European lifestyle based on nuclear energy. In other words, architecture powered Europe’s larger infrastructural, economic, and cultural network. Pohl’s work not only sheds light on how architecture has contributed to the carbonization of Europe, it also highlights the environmental issue, which challenges both architectural criticism and historiography in the era of the Anthropocene.Design by Zak GroupFeaturing artwork by Armin Linke

Travel from the monasteries of rural Armenia to the exhibition halls of MoMA in the first comprehensive monograph of Iranian American artist Sonia Balassanian.In this deeply personal portrait of Sonia Balassanian (b. 1942, Arak), an Iranian American artist of Armenian descent, author Dr. Omar Kholeif weaves together poetry, memoir, and historical anecdote to trace the contours of Balassanian’s world.With a career spanning more than five decades, Balassanian is known for her multidisciplinary, politically charged practice that spans painting, poetry, photography, video, installation, performance, and drawing. At the heart of her corpus are colorful, large-scale, lyrically abstract paintings that she began in the 1960s. In the 1980s, after she had moved to New York, her work took a political turn following the Iranian Revolution. Balassanian drew newfound attention for Hostages: A Diary (1980), an installation of drawings that mapped the experience of following the Iran hostage crisis from the United States, and for Cauterized Literature (1987), a mixed-media series of burnt books mounted on canvas that comments on censorship in Iran. Balassanian lives and works between New York and Armenia. This is the first comprehensive monograph of her art and life.Published by Sternberg Press in collaboration with artPost21

A new vision for activist curatorial practice.In Pidginization as Curatorial Method: Messing with Languages and Praxes, renowned curator and director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung proposes Pidgin languages as expressions of resistance to settler colonialism and pidginization as a way to approach curating (and the world), creating new spaces for encounter, knowledge, and pluralities. Deftly deploying the thinking, writing, and rhythmic beat of musicians, philosophers, linguists, poets, and novelists, Ndikung offers a new vision for activist curatorial practice and beyond. This is the third volume of the series Thoughts on Curating, edited by Steven Henry Madoff.

The story of Helen Khal and the artists who altered the course of modern and contemporary art in the Middle East and beyond.Helen Khal: Gallery One and Beirut in the 1960s is a reflective exhibition catalogue, part archive, as well as a living testament to the late Helen Khal (1923–2009). A polymath, artist, educator, and writer, Khal was also the cofounder of Gallery One, the first modern and contemporary art gallery in Lebanon, which opened its doors to the public in Beirut in 1963. This catalogue follows an exhibition initiated by Carla Chammas and curated by Chammas and Rachel Dedman as part of Home Works 8: A Forum on Cultural Practices, which opened its doors at the Sursock Museum, Beirut in October 2019. The exhibition, like the catalogue, detailed Helen’s life and practice as a catalytic lens through which to explore the work of a group of artists whom she was close to, in life and in art, including: Chafic Abboud, Yvette Achkar, Etel Adnan, Huguette Caland, Simone Fattal, Farid Haddad, Helen Khal, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Aref El Rayess, and Dorothy Salhab-Kazemi.From here, the publication seeks to address the exhibition’s themes of love, sex, and motherhood, the relationship between visual art and the literary landscape of 1960s and 1970s Beirut, and the galleries and studios in which public collaborations and private kinships were forged. Taking an intimate approach to a fabled period, Helen Khal: Gallery One and Beirut in the 1960s unfolds a rich picture of the friendships, connections, modes of exchange, common concerns, and differing approaches of some of the best-known and least-remembered artists of the mid-twentieth century in Lebanon.Copublished by artPost21

How a new paradigm of self-sufficiency is about to force a reinvention of all social parameters.The world is marked by deepening conflicts—between democracies and autocracies, woke and populist identity politics, rich and poor, continued environmental exploitation and harsh complications like climate change. In The Monadic Age, Ingo Niermann argues that, stirred by rapid developments in automation and AI, these manifold crises are about to culminate in a new paradigm of self-sufficiency—monadism—that overturns the liberal era and forces a reinvention of all social parameters.Today, two major post-liberal dispositions are unfolding. On the one side, people envision a harmonious community of all human and nonhuman beings (multi-species kinship, a rainbow of identities). On the other side, people isolate themselves within their own identities and belongings (filter bubbles, safe spaces, gated communities, charter cities, prepping). Monadism recognizes that these two seemingly contradictory dispositions stem from a similar understanding of the world: one is more optimistic, the other more pessimistic, but ultimately they’re interdependent. Before seeking harmony, we humans, a highly dominant species, must first of all restrain ourselves from coercive interactions with our environment. And to protect ourselves sufficiently from our environment, we must minimize its abuse.The Monadic Age unfolds in thirty-three autonomous—monadic—essays on topics as diverse as environmentalism, terrorism, geopolitics, housing, the metaverse, nonbinarism, language, charity, euthanasia, identity politics, tattoos, ableism, AI, birthrates, war, religion, sex, and art.

A journey through over two decades of intersectional and queering practices in film, performance, sculpture, community work, and textiles.BURN & GLOOM! GLOW & MOON! Thousand Years of Troubled Genders was the most comprehensive exhibition to date of Vienna-based artist and filmmaker Katrina Daschner. It was curated by Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and encompassed works from the 1990s to the present, ranging from sculptures, textiles, music, performance, community-based work, and, most prominently, film, which sits at the heart of Katrina Daschner’s practice. This publication transfers the immersive environment of senses, textures, and feelings created in the exhibition into book form. Just like the exhibition, it confronts, touches, embraces, and dreams of transforming “femme”-ness, transforming bodies, and transforming genders. With stylized performances and video works, Daschner plays with the boundaries of human and non-human, and what is socially defined as the norm, exposing the artificiality of the gendered binary—the dualism of men* and womxn—and the prejudices it generates, freeing the body. In doing so, the stage becomes the setting for a precarious desire for visibility and, at the same time, an endless yearning for rebirth. The bodies that perform and the potential audience that follows them mutate and embody different emotional cycles again and again. These artistic acts generate their own community in the making; everyone participating contribute to the stories in the making. They function like threads attaching her stories, stages, and characters together. In Daschner’s textile-based works, threads are minimal yet highly visible, akin to the pinch needed to wake up from a dream. These works—as well as her collages—merge with her confronting yet inviting image politics: she cuts and pastes stories of love and pleasure, violence and resilience, death and rebirth.The written contributions reflect on Katrina Daschner as part of a hardworking generation of queer artists and makers who have been responding to the major conceptual shifts and gender upheavals happening in contemporary art since the 1990s, especially in New York and London. They highlight Katrina Daschner’s longstanding line of intersectional queer interest that continues to undermine (neo-)liberal, heteropatriarchal conceptions of sexuality, gender, subjectivity, and relationships.Copublished by Kunsthalle WienContributorsRike Frank, Amelia Groom, Tim Stüttgen