The inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art in 2019, titled The Shoreline Dilemma, was the first edition of a two-part biennial that traced interconnected narratives around the city’s ever-changing shoreline. These connections sought to reveal strategies of resistance against industrial-colonial systems, uncover polyphonic histories sedimented around the shoreline, and open up relations between the human and more-than-human. To extend this artistic thinking and expand notions of relationality, in 2022, the second edition, titled What Water Knows, The Land Remembers, moves inland to follow tributaries and ravines, both above ground and hidden, that shape this place.

In relation to the two Biennial exhibitions, this publication Water, Kinship, Belief is a “third” site, a place where the continuities, resonances, and dissonances between Biennial editions are extended. Its pages become a means to bring together the artists, artworks, collaborators, and ideas that have together informed the exhibitions, irrespective of chronology, dispensing with categories, and part of a greater whole. Through its content and unique design, it is both a generative guide to the exhibitions and a Biennial site of its own, presenting new artistic relations that course through the book like tributaries.

Artists: AA Bronson, Abbas Akhavan, Abel Rodríguez, Adrian Blackwell, Adrian Stimson, Aki Onda, Althea Thauberger, Kite, Amy Malbeuf, Andrea Carlson, Ange Loft, Arin Rungjang, Augustas Serapinas, Aycoobo, Bárbara Wagner, Benjamin de Burca, Brian Jungen, Caecilia Tripp, Camille Turner, Caroline Monnet, Curtis Talwst Santiago, Dana Claxton, Dana Prieto, Denyse Thomasos, Eduardo Navarro, Elder Duke Redbird, Embassy of Imagination, PA System, Eric-Paul Riege, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Hajra Waheed, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, ᐃᓱᒪ / Isuma, Jae Jarrell, ᔭᓇ ᑭᒍᓯᐊ / Janet Kigusiuq, Jeffrey Gibson, ᔨᐊᓯ ᐅᓈᖅ / Jessie Oonark, Joar Nango, Judy Chicago, Jumana Manna, Kapwani Kiwanga, Laurent Grasso, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lisa Reihana, Lisa Steele, Kim Tomczak, Lou Sheppard, Luis Jacob, Mata Aho Collective, Marguerite Humeau, Maria Thereza Alves, Moyra Davey, Nadia Belerique, ᓇᐸᓯ ᐳᑐᒍᖅ / Napachie Pootoogook, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, New Mineral Collective, New Red Order, Nick Sikkuark, Paul Pfeiffer, Qavavau Manumie, Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian, ReMatriate Collective, Shezad Dawood, Susan Schuppli, Syrus Marcus Ware, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Tsēmā Igharas, Erin Siddall, ᕕᐃᑎᕋᐊ ᒪᒍᓯᐊᓗ / Victoria Mamnguqsualuk, and Waqas Khan.

Contributions by Adrian Blackwell, Ange Loft, Camille Georgeson-Usher, Camille Turner, Candice Hopkins, Charles Stankievech, Chiedza Pasipanodya, Ilana Shamoon, Katie Lawson, Melony Ward, Patrizia Libralato, Sebastian De Line, Susannah Rosenstock, Tairone Bastien, and Yaniya Lee.

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Written and conceived by Stephan Crasneanscki, ‘LOVOTIC’ is a concept album by Soundwalk Collective, composed in collaboration with lauded actress and singer/songwriter Charlotte Gainsbourg, Featuring veteran techno stalwart Atom™, rising singer/composer/performance artist Lyra Pramuk, celebrated actor Willem Dafoe, and writer/philosopher Paul B. Preciado, the album will be available from April 1st via the new Berlin-based Analogue Foundation.

Inspired by a relatively new field of research that seeks to explore and develop the possibilities of sexual and emotional relationships – and even love – between humans and robots, ‘LOVOTIC’ interrogates the impulses, ideas, and needs underlying this phenomenon. The project ventures into a future where sex, intimacy and desire are reformulated through the connection of humans, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

In an age of such hybrid entanglement with the machine, human identity requires the construction of new forms of intimacy, gender, and sexuality. At present, however, such technologies are primarily used to produce programs of limited sexual iterations that do not question the preformatted categories of gender and sexual orientation. In contrast, on ‘LOVOTIC’, Soundwalk Collective ask whether the future of sex and sexuality could instead be an exponentially expanding kaleidoscope. Where does the impulse of preference come from? What sets of words from our vocabulary can be communicated to the AI mind to generate a new identity for desire? Could the machine be another technology that brings us closer together?

Sonically ‘LOVOTIC’ is unidentifiable, artificial, and genuinely futuristic, occupying an amorphous androgynous netherworld at the borderlands between biotic and android. Traditional musical signposts are virtually non-existent, instead offering a mercurial, formless sound which mirrors the flourishing of gender fluidity it suggests could be on the horizon.

‘LOVOTIC’ is available as an artist edition double LP pressed on transparent vinyl, featuring a hand engraving on each side. It includes a 16-page booklet containing lyrics and painted artwork, both by Stephan Crasneanscki.

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Who’s this shadowy figure? An appendage in a trench coat, cat’s eye lenses, a hat atop a strangely curling wig… in this two-faced publication, Evelyn Wh-ell presents Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole: How to Escape Yourself Without Even Trying, a science fiction dick tip diptych.

A diptych is any object with two flat plates which form a pair, often attached by a hinge. The diptych hinges on an image, or, maybe more accurately, becomes unhinged through an image, and in its unhinging cleaves open a wormhole; a fall between two surfaces; the surface of the pages of a magazine; of sunglasses; of a glistening dildo that is pointing right at you.

An ontological gender-fuck of comedies, Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole calls on the queer feminist possibility of science fiction with camp audacity. With an absurdist style which speaks to the punk brutality of the likes of Kathy Acker and John Waters, Wh-ell twists mundane activities such as going to a greasy spoon or watching television into sites for dismembering gender, penetration, iconography and worship.

As readers, we are led through the church, the image-as-hole, down the high street and to confession, where we sit in hallowed pews resplendent in fake tan. Our Narrator plays games with us, we paint ourselves in Her image, which is only ever a hole to fall through – and again, flipped over.

With two stories horizontally placed, neither takes precedence over the other but skews an image and replicates it. Circulating the penetrator and the penetrated, Wh-ell shows us how to escape yourself without even trying, resulting in a convergence. We follow Wh-ell’s paranoiac dioramas like the upward curve of our pinkish rod, to the centrefold wormhole.

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Evelyn Wh-ell is a writer, artist and critical theorist interested in queer/trans aesthetics. Their writing has been published by Another Gaze, Cambridge Literary Review, permeable barrier, b l u s h lit, and Sticky Fingers Publishing’s Dead Lovers series. They are also a 2021-2023 Research Associate at CCA Derry~Londonderry.

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Sticky Fingers is an intra-dependant feminist publisher based in London. It consists of designers and writers Kaiya Waerea (she/her) & Sophie Paul (she/her).

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Published for the exhibition Hunting & Collecting, Mu.ZEE, Ostend, Belgium, cur. Sammy Baloji, Philip Van den Bossche and Anouck Clissen (3 August 2014 – 21 September 2014).

Whatever can hunting wild animals in colonial Congo and the exploitation of Congolese mines in the present have in common with a collection of modern and contemporary art in a museum in the Belgian coastal city of Ostend? In 2014 Sammy Baloji initiated an ambitious research exhibition bringing together historical documents, pictures by Congolese photographer Chrispin Mvano, works of Belgian artists from the 19th and 20th century included in the collection , contributions by contemporary artists dealing with the exploitation of Congo and finally his own acrimonious collages. This book transforms the numerous layers of the exhibition into a experimental visual essay. The seemingly distant realities f art history and global economies appears as closely intermingled.

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2nd Edition

A speculative book reflecting on design and architecture centred LARPs (Live Action Role-Play) organised by the Trojan Horse collective. The book is an exploration of Live Action Role-Play as a design and architecture research tool. By inviting the reader to try on different characters, switch roles and reconsider their everyday practices, the book aims to approach issues such as identity, performativity, gender, colonialism, care and fear in the context of architecture, design and urban planning.

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Dear friends,

Please join us for the presentation of

Nervous Fossils: Syndromes of the Synthetic Nether
with the author Mochu, who will be reading excerpts from the book.

May 3rd at 7pm
@ Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68
10997, Berlin

Stationed around an art freeport megaproject in the Persian Gulf, and hopping across numerous locations real and fabricated, the book spins off into shadow-histories of synthetic colour production, abstruse citizenship schemes, nuclear warning signs, and syndromes leaking back from the future. During their idiosyncratic philosophical debates, the project employees gradually begin to sense a manic sensorium operating beneath their seemingly sterile financial and logistical systems. Troubles erupt while discussing works of art; futurist imaginaries of financialisation stumble upon the deep inertia of historical time preserved in museums and tombs. Monumental works of art pleasantly rotting in history enter into messy partnerships with volcanoes, hadopelagic planktons, and whimsical vibes of rich people. Stakes are endless while smiles are fake, as the debates swerve into the discreet horror of corporate gleefulness.

Mochu works with video and text arranged as installations, lectures, and publications. Techno-scientific fictions feature prominently in his practice, often overlapping with instances or figures drawn from art history and philosophy. Recent projects have explored mad geologies, psychedelic subcultures, and Indian Modernist painting. Mochu is a recipient of the Edith-Russ-Haus grant for Media Art and his practice has previously been supported by Ashkal Alwan, India Foundation for the Arts, and The Sarai Programme. Exhibitions include the 9th Asia-Pacific Triennial, Sharjah Biennial 13, 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and Transmediale BWPWAP. He currently lives in Delhi and Istanbul.

Published by Reliable Copy in collaboration with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.
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Image by Adriana Preda.

We are pleased to invite you to “Mind The Gap”, the three-days-opening of the Cazul101 group show featuring works of Dan Perjovschi, Anca Bucur, artistic duo SABA (Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu), Nicoleta Moise, Adriana Preda, Ioana Gheorghiu and Megan Dominescu.

28 April, at 6pm
@ Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68
10997, Berlin

Regularly using the subversive and progressive message in their practice, the artists are invited to reflect on the current political situation due to the high rise of extremist regimes in Europe and build a bridge between past and present, personal and political, highlighting the historical events that endangered the freedom of the individual.

The group show “Mind The Gap” is an alarm signal where image and text communicate to question and eradicate the toxic extremist behaviours experienced by the artists in the geographical space they develop their work.

After the three opening days, on 1st of May, from 7pm, the artist Dan Perjovschi will be present for an artist talk about the synthesis of the last years and the current situation in Europe.

Looking forward to seeing you!

With an afterword by Rosi Braidotti, an introduction by Cristiana Perrella and Elena Magini and selected words by the photographers.

The book has been published in collaboration with Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci which hosted the eponymous show.

Soggetto nomade (Nomadic Subject) gathers, for the first time in one volume, shots taken by five Italian photographers between the mid 60s to the 80s. The photographs are giving glimpses on the way female subjectivity was lived, represented and interpreted back in the days, in a time of great social change in Italy. Years of transition from political radicalism to hedonism, the lead years were also years of great participation and civil conquests, mostly due to the feminist struggle. This book is a visual reflection on identity and representation departing from the extraordinary portraits of the trans community in Genoa by Lisetta Carmi (Genoa, 1924), followed by the portraits of actress, writers and artists by Elisabetta Catalano (Rome, 1941-2015); the feminist movements’ shots by Paola Agosti (Turin, 1947); women and young women captured by Letizia Battaglia (Palermo, 1935) in a Sicily disfigured by the mafia; to end with the photos of men who used to turn into women for a day, during carnival, in the small towns of Campania captured by Marialba Russo (Naples, 1947).

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Contributors: Philippe Van Cauteren, Pieter Vermeulen, Grace Ndiritu, Rafaela Lopez, Roberto dell’Orco, Jana Haeckel, Katleen Vermeir & Ronny Heiremans, Nathalie Boobis, Shayla Perreault, Edward Ball, Guadalupe Martinez, Stacy Suy, Ezra Fieremans.

Being Together: A Manual For Living falls in the lineage of publications such as The Journal of the Society for Education Through Art, which throughout the 1960s provided British art schools a window into experimental education. By contrast, Grace Ndiritu’s experience in creating radical pedagogies arose from a connected, yet unorthodox system of ‘self education’. In 2012, she decided to spend time living in cities only when necessary. She thus lived in rural, alternative and often spiritual communities, while expanding her research into nomadic lifestyles and training in esoteric studies, which she began after graduating art school. This research led her to visit Thai and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, permaculture communities in New Zealand, forest tree dwellers in Argentina, neo-tribal festivals such as Burning Man in Nevada, a Scottish Hare Krishna ashram, and the Findhorn Spiritual Community in Scotland. Such lifestyles forever transformed her ideas of education and have proven critical for her art, whether conducting teaching experiments with students, peers and the general public; some of whose voices appear in this publication. Ndiritu posits, “What does (art) education mean today?” and specifically, “What does an embodied (art) education mean in a time of pandemics and social unrest?”. Being Together: A Manual For Living attempts to answer these complex questions.

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Die Nacht Der Lebenden Toten
Hendrik Hegray
02.2019

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