2023/31/08 Publication: Neocolonial Visions: Algorithmic Violence and Unmanned Aerial Systems
To read the full essay and download the book, see here.
To read the full essay and download the book, see here.
Books
To read the full essay and download the book, see here.
2022/06/02 Book: Shona Illingworth: Topologies of Air
(Ed. Anthony Downey, Sternberg Press, 2022)
For link to Introduction, see here
For PDF of Anthony Downey, “The Algorithmic Apparatus of Neocolonialism: Counter-Operational Practices And The Future Of Aerial Surveillance”, see here
2022/08/04 Book: Khalil Rabah: Falling Forward / Works (1995–2025)
The monograph includes essays by Chiara de Cesari, Anthony Downey, Tom Holert, Chrisoula Lionis, Hoor Al Qasimi, Khalil Rabah and Rasha Salti.
To read Anthony’s essay, “Falling Forward: Speculative Practices and Institutional Realisations”, see here
To read Anthony’s interview with Kahlil, “On What Grounds?”, see here
For copies of the book, see here
2020/07/10: Book Publication: Heba Y. Amin: The General’s Stork (Sternberg Press, 2020)
The General’s Stork
Edited by ANTHONY DOWNEY
In 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork for espionage. This incident is the focus of Heba Y. Amin’s The General’s Stork, an ongoing project that investigates the politics of aerial surveillance—against the backdrop of biblical prophecies, drone warfare, and colonial narratives—from a bird’s-eye view. The research that informs The General’s Stork looks at how conquest from the sky—through land surveying, mapping, bombing, and drone technologies—has effectively transformed Western power into a spectacle of high-tech weaponry. Through the lens of the paranoia that led to a bird being accused of spying, and with contributions by Adam Harvey, Adel Iskandar, Haitham Mossad, and Laura Poitras, this volume also reveals the extent to which military techniques of visualization both define and, ultimately, delimit the topography of the Middle East.
For further details of the book, see here.
Heba Y. Amin: The General’s Stork is volume 02 in the Research/Practice series, edited by Anthony Downey and published by Sternberg Press (2019-ongoing). Each volume focuses on artistic research and how it contributes to the formation of experimental knowledge systems. Drawing on preliminary material such as diaries, notebooks, audiovisual content, digital and social media, informal communications, and abandoned drafts, the series examines the interdisciplinary research methods that artists employ in their practices. Each volume endeavors to ask: In their often speculative and yet purposeful approach to generating research, what forms of knowledge do artists produce?
For further information on the Research/Practice series, see here.
2019/10/30: Book Publication: Research/Practice 01: Michael Rakowitz: I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze (Sternberg Press: Berlin and New York, 2019)
Research/Practice 01: Michael Rakowitz: I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze (Sternberg Press: Berlin and New York, 2019)
Editor: Anthony Downey
Michael Rakowitz’s project I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze (2009–ongoing) charts the historical context and aftermath of a concert that never happened. In 2009 Leonard Cohen was scheduled to perform in Israel. Because of increasing pressure from pro-Palestinian voices to dissuade Cohen from performing in Israel, a twin event in Palestine was organized. Amid protests and claims that the latter concert was a token show of solidarity and a hollow attempt to appease demonstrators, a cultural boycott of Israel was put in place and the concert was canceled. But the story, as Rakowitz’s work demonstrates, did not end there. Conjoining the cultural histories of Palestine and Israel with the ethical dilemmas faced by performers under the conditions of a boycott, this volume, the first in the Research/Practice series, brings to light the research that went into this multifaceted work and plots the future arc of its trajectory.
Edited by Anthony Downey, Research/Practice focuses on artistic research and how it contributes to the formation of experimental knowledge systems. Drawing on preliminary material such as diaries, notebooks, audiovisual content, digital and social media, informal communications, and abandoned drafts of projects, the series examines the interdisciplinary methods that artists employ in their practices. Each volume endeavors to ask: In their often speculative and yet purposeful approach to research, what forms of innovative knowledge do artists produce?
For full details of the volume see here: MIT Press: I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze
2019/10/30: Book Publication: Research/Practice 03: Larissa Sansour Heirloom (Sternberg Press: Berlin and New York, 2019)
Research/Practice 03: Larissa Sansour Heirloom (Sternberg Press: Berlin and New York, 2019)
Editor: Anthony Downey
This volume includes an essay by Nat Muller and an in-depth interview between Sansour and Lindsey Moore.
Heirloom documents the development of the artistic research for Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour’s project for the Danish Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. It explores how recurrent notions in Sansour’s oeuvre, such as memory, trauma, identity, epigenetics, and belonging, intertwine with the discourses of science fiction and environmental disaster narratives. The volume also examines what it means to produce work from within contested geographies, specifically considering how, through research and the process of production, the artist grapples with complex issues of national representation. In keeping with the focus in this series on the research that informs the elaboration of an artist’s work over time, the material for this publication has been collated in parallel with its development over the past year.
Edited by Anthony Downey, Research/Practice focuses on artistic research and how it contributes to the formation of experimental knowledge systems. Drawing on preliminary material such as diaries, notebooks, audiovisual content, digital and social media, informal communications, and abandoned drafts of projects, the series examines the interdisciplinary methods that artists employ in their practices. Each volume endeavors to ask: In their often speculative and yet purposeful approach to research, what forms of innovative knowledge do artists produce?
For full details of the volume see here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/heirloom
For full details of the book launch see here: https://copenhagencontemporary.org/en/event/cc-opening-larissa-sansour/
2019/10/23: Book Publication: Critique in Practice: Renzo Martens’ Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (Sternberg Press, 2020)
Critique in Practice: Renzo Martens’ Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (Sternberg Press, 2020)
Editor: Anthony Downey
Associate Editor: Els Roelandt
Investigating the economic value of one of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s most lucrative exports (namely, poverty), Renzo Martens’ provocative film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008) remains a landmark intervention into debates about contemporary art’s relationship to exploitative economies. Throughout Critique in Practice, contributors explore the work’s legacy and how it relates to the politics of representation, uses of the documentary form, art criticism, the deployment of humanitarian aid, the impact of extractive forms of globalized capital, and the neoliberal politics of decolonization. The unconventional representation of acute immiseration throughout Enjoy Poverty generated far-from-resolved disputes about how deprivation is portrayed within Western mainstream media and through global cultural institutions. Using a range of approaches, this volume reconsiders that portrayal and how the film’s reception led Martens to found a long term program, Human Activities.
Contributors: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Eva Barois De Caevel, Pieter Van Bogaert, Jelle Bouwhuis, JJ Charlesworth, T.J. Demos, Angela Dimitrakaki, Anthony Downey, Charles Esche, Dan Fox, Matthias De Groof, Xander Karskens, J.A. Koster, Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, Suhail Malik, Renzo Martens, Nina Möntmann, René Ngongo, Paul O’Kane, Laurens Otto, Nikolaus Perneczky, Kolja Reichert, Els Roelandt, Ruben De Roo, ka˛rî’ka˛chä seid’ou, Gregory Sholette, Sanne Sinnige, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Emilia Terracciano, Nato Thompson, Niels Van Tomme, Frank Vande Veire, Eyal Weizman, Vivian Ziherl, and Artur Zmijewski, among others.
This volume is co-published by Human Activities, KASK / School of Arts (Ghent), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), and Sternberg Press (Berlin). It is supported by Galerie Fons Welters, KASK / School of Arts, Mondriaan Fund, and Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds.
For full details of the volume see here
To read Anthony Downey’s introduction to this volume, see here
To read Anthony Downey’s essay, “Is There a Right Way to Do Wrong: Enjoy Poverty and the Case Against Ethics”, see here
Book Publication: Don’t Shrink Me to the Size of a Bullet: The Works of Hiwa K (Walter Koenig Books, August 2017), Documenta 14, Kassel
May 2017
Don’t Shrink Me to the Size of a Bullet: The Works of Hiwa K
Edited by Anthony Downey.
Contributors: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Natasha Ginwala, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Aneta Szyłak, and Bakir Ali.
Publisher: Walther König Verlag.
Publication Date: May 31, 2017.
244 pp.
Colour illustrations.
Last time I saw my mom before my farewell, I said, “Mom, I am leaving for good. I don’t know… maybe I will not make it like the other 28 people who got shot last week” . She said “Son, if death comes, don`t panic. It is just death”.
Hiwa K, “Don’t Panic”, 2016
Covering over decade of projects, Don’t Shrink Me to the Size of a Bullet: The Works of Hiwa K provides the first comprehensive account of the artist’s practice to date. Edited by Anthony Downey, with a foreword by Heike Catherina Mertens and Krist Gruijthuijsen, the volume includes essays by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Natasha Ginwala, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Aneta Szyłak, and a conversation between the artist and Bakir Ali. A series of texts have been prepared and revised by the artist, and he has also included a collection of anecdotes that recount gossip, stories, jokes, personal insights, conundrums, and aphorisms garnered from multiple sources. These have all been translated into Kurdish for the first time. The volume is fully illustrated and will contain extended notes on the works.
To read Anthony Downey’s essay, “Unbearable States: Hiwa K and the Performance of Everyday Life”, see here
Don’t Shrink Me to the Size of a Bullet: The Works of Hiwa K was launched at KW (Berlin), 31 May, and Documenta 14 (Kassel), 11 June, 2017.
Buy the book here.
ISBN 978-3-96098-160-2
Book Publication: Future Imperfect: Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East (Sternberg Press, 9 December, 2016)
Sternberg Press, 2016 | Editor
To read Anthony’s introductory essay “Future Imperfect: Critical Propositions and Institutional Realities in the Middle East”, click here
Future Imperfect: Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions in the Middle East critically examines the role played by cultural institutions in producing present-day and future contexts for the production, dissemination and reception of contemporary art in the Middle East and North Africa. It offers critical contexts for a discussion that has become increasingly urgent in recent years – the role of culture in a time of conflict and globalization – and an in-depth critique of the historical state of cultural institutions in an age of political upheaval, social unrest, exuberant cultural activity, ascendant neoliberal forms of privatization, social activism, and regional uncertainty.
Organised around three key areas, Future Imperfect draws attention to the ongoing demands and antagonisms that have affected cultural production across the region, both in historical and more recent post-revolutionary contexts. In doing so, it offers an in-depth discussion of how cultural producers have developed alternative institutional models to negotiate the constraints placed upon their practices. How cultural institutions operate within the conditions of a global cultural economy, and alongside the often conflicting demands they place on cultural production in the region, is likewise an over-arching point of reference throughout this volume.
While the politics of contemporary cultural production and institutional practices in the Middle East can tell us a great deal about local and regional concerns, one of the cornerstone ambitions of this volume is to enquire into what they can also impart about the politics of global cultural production. This involves exploring the multiple ways in which contemporary art practices are being reduced, willingly or otherwise, to the logic of global capital. What, in sum, is needed in terms of infrastructure for cultural production today, and how, crucially, can we speculatively propose new infrastructures and institutions in the context of present-day realities?
Future Imperfect contains essays, interviews, and projects from contributors including Monira Al Qadiri, Hoor Al-Qasimi, Anahi Alviso-Marino, AMBS Architects, Stephanie Bailey, Eray Çaylı, Rachel Dedman, Elizabeth Derderian, Anthony Downey, Karen Exell, Reema Salha Fadda, Wafa Gabsi, Hadia Gana, Adalet R. Garmiany, Baha Jubeh, Suhair Jubeh, Amal Khalaf, Kamel Lazaar, Jens Maier-Rothe, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Doreen Mende, Lea Morin, Jack Persekian, Rijin Sahakian, Gregory Sholette, Tom Snow, Ania Szremski, Christine Tohme, Toleen Touq, Williams Wells, Ala Younis and Yasmine Zidane.
The publication is accompanied by a collection of special projects on the Ibraaz website from Leila Al-Shami, Wided Rihana Khadraoui, Lois Stonock, Nile Sunset Annex, Alia Rayyan and Husam Al-Sarray.
Other titles in the Visual Culture in the Middle East series, edited by Anthony Downey, include Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East (2015); and Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East (2014).
The production of this book was accomplished through the generous support of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation.
Buy the book here
ISBN 978-3-95679-246-5
Click on the links below for selected reviews:
Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East
I.B.Tauris, 2015 | EDITOR
Featuring writing, interviews and original art work – reproduced in full-colour – by internationally renowned academics, curators, activists, filmmakers and artists, Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East asks a crucial series of questions: How do we define the ongoing relationship between contemporary art and the archive? How do we understand the suppositional forms of knowledge that are being produced in contemporary art practices in North Africa and the Middle East? Do these practices foster a nostalgic fetishization for the archive or suggest an ongoing crisis in institutional and state-ordained archiving? And what, moreover, do artistic practices that engage with archives reveal about the politics of global cultural production?
Emerging throughout this volume as a troubled, dissonant and performative space, the archive is central to a process whereby contemporary artists produce their own critical and highly speculative visions of the future. In exploring and producing archives, be they alternative, interrogative, or fictional, these artists are not simply questioning the authenticity, authority or authorship of the archive; rather, they are unlocking its regenerative, radical potential.
Contributors:
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, John Akomfrah, Jananne Al-Ani, Meriç Algün Ringborg, Héla Ammar, Burak Arıkan, Ariella Azoulay, Vahap Avşar, Sussan Babaie, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, Timothy P.A Cooper, Joshua Craze, Laura Cugusi, Ania Dabrowska, Nick Denes, Chad Elias, Media Farzin, Mariam Ghani, Gulf Labor, Tom Holert, Adelita Husni-Bey, Maryam Jafri, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Amina Menia, Shaheen Merali, Naeem Mohaiemen, Mariam Motamedi Fraser, Pad.ma, Lucie Ryzova, Lucien Samaha, Rona Sela and Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel).
Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East launches on 30 May 2015 at JAOU Tunis 2015 at the National Museum of Bardo, Tunis.
Read the Introduction
To purchase a copy of Dissonant Archives please follow this link.
ISBN 978-1-784-53-4110
Click on links below for selected reviews: