In Sculptor’s Notebook, originally written in 1985, the artist Pushpamala N evaluates the artistic practice that she had been developing until then. Centred largely around themes of adolescence and womanhood, her sculptures had won her the Sixth Triennale Award and the National Award. While the sculptures take centre stage, in this dissertation can be found a longing to move further towards performance, humour, and play-acting—themes that the artist would go on to develop over the following decades. Both an artist’s statement and a notebook-format prophecy, Sculptor’s Notebook charts the motivations, struggles, and desires of the artist’s multi-medium practice.

Published for the first time by Reliable Copy and Sharjah Art Foundation, Sculptor’s Notebook was written as part of Pushpamala N’s Master’s in Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. The complete facsimile of this dissertation is accompanied by a recent interview with the artist by Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian.

Born in Bangalore in 1956, Pushpamala N has been called “the most entertaining artist-iconoclast of contemporary Indian art.” In her sharp and witty work as a photo- and video-performance artist, sculptor, writer, curator, and provocateur, and in her collaborations with writers, theatre directors, and filmmakers, she seeks to subvert the dominant cultural and intellectual discourse. She is known for her strongly feminist work, for her rejection of authenticity, and her embracing of multiple realities. Pushpamala exhibits widely in India and internationally, and speaks often at seminars and conferences.

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“Cher Mohamed,

Tu ne me connais pas, je ne t’ai jamais vu, mais je prends la liberté de t’écrire cette lettre pour
t’annoncer ce livre, un hommage à ton œuvre, à ta prose sanguine, ta parole à jamais insoumise, à
tes refuges de Tanger, les stations de tes odyssées intérieures, ces endroits minuscules et sacrés, les déserts où se récoltent les mots et le sens.

Un livre de plus, me diras-tu, qui fait de toi cette icône figée, que tu n’aurais probablement pas
aimé. Et de plus, c’est le petit Français des Colonnes qui te l’annonce. J’entends déjà ta colère, de
celles que tu avais fameuses. Mais, tu sais, je n’aurais pas pris la plume, si Abdellatif, Rachid, Tarik, qui furent tes amis et aujourd’hui les seuls garants de ta parole, ne me l’avaient demandé.

Mais il te faut bien accepter cet ouvrage, cet hommage qui est aussi une déclaration d’amour,
même si tu dois trouver cela bien poussiéreux. Sache seulement qu’on te lit, on t’écoute mieux
qu’avant, on t’imite maladroitement. Ils sont nombreux, tu sais, à te traduire, à te publier dans toutes les langues, à t’admirer plus que de mesure, à sonder tes univers merveilleux, à te suivre sur le chemin caillouteux de la littérature. C’est pour eux que je t’écris.

Je ne te connais pas, tu ne m’as jamais vu, mais je sais tous les lieux où tu rodes en bienveillant
fantôme, les bars aux vitres opaques, les venelles à l’ombre fraîche de Bni Idder, les pensions
accueillantes et discrètes où tu as refait mille fois le monde à ton image.

Je ne sais que l’obscurité de l’écriture, la lumière des mots. Et crois moi, j’essaye de les crier aussi
fort que tu l’as fait, pour que rien ne s’apaise, qu’enfin tout devienne chant.

Simon-Pierre Hamelin
14 julliet 2015”
(Extrait du livre)

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Urban Kitsch, originally written in 1996, explores the forms of vernacular visual culture that emerged in the city of Baroda following the liberalization of the Indian economy. Plastic toys, celebrity mud flaps, and postmodern architecture collide into a new formal category—both celebrated and derided—as Praneet Soi traverses the city on his trusted Yamaha RX 100.

Published for the first time by Reliable Copy and Sharjah Art Foundation, Urban Kitsch was written as part of Praneet Soi’s Master’s in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. The complete facsimile of this dissertation is accompanied by a recent interview with the artist by Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian.

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Over the years 1919–20, the celebrated medical scientist and doctor Carl Julius Salomonsen began giving public lectures and publishing pamphlets regarding a new “epidemic” that had begun to affect the European populace: the increasing ubiquity of modernist art.

In a 1919 pamphlet titled New Forms of Art and Contagious Mental Illness, he wrote: “We stand, at this moment, before a movement in art which is psychopathic in character, and whose victorious journey through all countries is probably caused by the same spiritual disease that gave the older, religious spiritual epidemic such a powerful spread.” This pamphlet and the accompanying talks were countered by a retaliatory pamphlet published by members of Grønningen, a Copenhagen modernist painters group, to which Salomonsen responded with a further pamphlet.

Translated into English for the first time by literary theorist Andrew Hodgson, the entire altercation is gathered in this book, documenting one of the earliest rejections of modernist art.

Edited & Translated by Andrew Hodgson

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The structure of a 1982 Cinderella sticker album formed the basis for Lenard Giller’s Productions, exploring the tension between mass media, memory, empty frames and fulfilling time. Originally conceived to host 360 stickers as a printed synthesis of its cinematic counterpart, Giller reinterprets its configuration offering a new narrative proposition.

In Productions, none of the characters are suitably introduced, confrontations take place without explanation and the resolution is left unresolved. What remains is a broken-up storyboard, a slimmed-down tale told through drawings, the characters becoming innocuous, with their voices from the original film and their emotional journeys entirely absent. It becomes as much about the processes of production as it is about the story, Giller exposes the limits of how entertainment is made, when all is reduced to its core.

Texts by Ted Targett

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This project is dedicated to the research of future actions for the conservation and promotion of biodiversity. The grasslands for insects collected in this book were made possible by several machine learning models.

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Edited by Jeff Khonsary and Kate Woolf
Copyeditor: Jaclyn Arndt

Edition of 500

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Creating, traveling, drawing, and building: such is the DNA of the exuberant architect and designer Marcelo Joulia. Driven from his home country of Argentina by the 1976 military coup, this personal trauma gave him the strength to be a great builder. For thirty years, his agency Naço —‘intuition’ in the Guarani language—has been the laboratory of a global and inventive architecture, aiming to decompartmentalise genres and trades, and mixing knowledge, arts, and professional backgrounds together. Belonging to no specific school, and fiercely attached to his independence and freedom, he has imagined a unique creative space in which expertise and rigor both flourish within the domains of luxury, urban mobility, and major architecture. As an insatiable adventurer, he is able to take an interest in anything —large-scale buildings, design, furniture, bicycles, boats— while not denying himself anything. His passion revolves around teamwork and bringing talents together to conceive of new worlds. As an epicurean, a generous person passionate about art and gastronomy, Marcelo Joulia creates places in his image: unique, welcoming, and always dynamic.

This book showcases the vision of a man and an agency that has surrounded itself with the best and strived to bring to life a demanding and iconoclastic architecture, and carry it forth into the future.

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Anri Sala’s series Untitled (Maps/Species, 2018-2022) consists of diptychs which create a dialogue, within the twenty-four windows of the Passage de la Bourse de Commerce, between an an eighteenth-century zoological engraving with an ink and pastel drawing by the pastel by the artist. This cycle echoes the immense canvas marouflaged on the shoulder of the Rotunda. In the form of a leporello to be unfolded recto-verso, this book gives an account of this project in the context of its project in the context of its presentation.

Text by Anri Sala

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