“Healing The Museum” is a mid-career monograph looking at Grace Ndiritu’s diverse practice over the last twenty years, which encompasses performance, film, shamanism, social actions, painting, publications, textile work, and collection research. The large selection of artworks included in the publication are in a dialogue with each other, further enriched by in-depth conversations with Brook Andrew, Gareth Bell-Jones, and Philippe Van Cauteren, and written contributions from Ifeanyi Awachie, Ann Hoste, and Hammad Nasar. The monograph’s publication coincides with the eponymous exhibition at S.M.A.K.–Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent.

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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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“Invisible Beauty,” the title of this book and of the Iraqi Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, refers both to the unusual or unexpected subjects in the featured works and to the inevitable invisibility of Iraqi artists on the international stage. The endlessly interpretable title is intended to reveal different ways of approaching art generated by a country that has been subjected to war, genocide and, in the last year, the rise of Isis. The systematic demolition of the cultural heritage of Iraq by Isis has made it more important than ever to focus on artists continuing to work in Iraq. The Pavilion will provide a platform to make these artists visible. The five artists featured in the exhibition and in this volume are the photographers Latif Al Ani and Akam Shex Hadi, the visual artist Rabab Ghazoul, the ceramicist Salam Atta Sabri and the painter Haider Jabbar. A rich compilation of texts accompanies by Iraqi authors the artists’ sections, addressing the wider notion of “invisible beauty” and its ramifications: an essay on the cylinder seals of Iraq by Lamia Al-Gailani; “My Lost Hen,” a story by poet and writer Fares Haram; “The Infidel Woman,” a short tale by novelist Ali Bader; Sherko Bekas’s poem “During the Great Raid”; and “The Sign,” a play by Atyaf Rasheed. Co-published with the Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Iraq.