We’re pleased to announce that the final two books in our Arrhythmia series, guest-edited by Katrina Palmer, will be released this December with titles from Nairobi-based multidisciplinary artist, writer, and experimental beatmaker Kamwangi Njue, and Brooklyn-based writer Andrew E. Colarusso. Their release will coincide with the end of Katrina’s residency at the National Gallery, and the launch of her own publication with Book Works, The Touch Report.

Kamwangi Njue’s Through The Tinnitus is a multi-media book of sound and image which explores spatial and sonic phenomena through psychoacoustics. The images, taken around the artist’s locale of the Jamhuri and Sabaki Neighborhoods of Nairobi, were produced using a version of the pioneering Soviet-designed ANS photo-optical synthesiser. These were then processed and converted into graphical sound by Njue, and the resulting tracks have been collected into an album accompanying the book. In both works ekphrastic rhythms hum to the sonic backdrop of political violence and utopian dreams. A download code for the album, included as a bookmark insert, is available on purchase of the book.

Andrew E. Colarusso’s Black Body Index takes the concept of the ‘ideal black body’ as its guiding object. In thermodynamics and physics, the ideal black body is a theoretical object that absorbs and emits all incident radiation. No such object exists, though a few come close… Told in a mercurial constellation of fragments that move between memoir, poetry and thermodynamic theory, Andrew E. Colarusso’s Black Body Index inspects the ‘thingification’ of an ideal black life and refutes it—insisting on the freedom to live beyond the demands of an enforced objecthood. 

Arrhythmia is a series of four books selected by artist and writer Katrina Palmer through open submission. The open call sought artists and writers whose work explored ideas of being out of joint with the predominant social order, whether through disrupted trajectories, physical displacement, or political dissonance. The first two books, released in June 2024, were The Wastes by Roy Claire Potter and The Medium by Alice Walter.

Katrina Palmer is an artist and writer, Palmer’s solo exhibitions are What’s Already Going On (Mead Gallery 2023); Hello (England’s Creative Coast 2021); The Coffin Jump (Yorkshire Sculpture Park 14-18NOW, 2018); The Necropolitan Line (Henry Moore Institute 2015); End Matter (Artangel, BBC Radio 4, Book Works 2015). Her publications include Black Slit, The Fabricator’s Tale, The Dark Object (Book Works, 2023, 2014, 2010), and contributions to Documents of Contemporary Art, (Whitechapel/MIT 2013 2021). Palmer was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists (2014).