BOTM – Friendship of Nations: Polish–Shi’ite Showbiz
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Beginning as an investigation into the apparently disparate events that bookend the twentieth and twenty-first century – the collapse of Communism and the Islamic Revolution in Iran – Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz traces unlikely points of convergence in Iran and Poland’s economic, social, political, religious and cultural histories. Drawing on Slavs and Tatars’ multi-disciplinary practice encompassing research, installations, lecture-performances and print media, this publication embraces new contributions in the form of essays, interviews, and archival presentation on subjects that range from seventeenth-century Sarmatism to the twenty-first-century Green Movement, taking in along the way, tales of the Polish Exodus, Wojtek the bear, craft, hospitality, Passion plays and taziyeh, and the political lessons of a Polish slow burn revolution for contemporary Iran.
Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China and is joined here by Agata Araszkiewicz, Ramin Jahanbegloo and Adam Michnik, Mara Goldwyn, Shiva Balaghi and Michael D. Kennedy. Former projects with Book Works include Kidnapping Mountains (2009), 79.89.09. (2010) commissioned for Again, A Time Machine, and contributions to the publication Again, A Time Machine: from archive to distribution. Slavs and Tatars recently exhibited at 10th Sharjah Biennale, UAE (2011), Tate Modern, (2011), MoMA, NY (2012), Secession, Vienna (2012).
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distinguish the limit from the edge: Berlin & NYC launches
Berlin, 16 April 2026, 7pm
Centre for Contemporary Art, Breitscheidplatz, 10789 Berlin
Free entry, conversation will be in English. More info.
The event will take place in the basement of CCA Berlin, presenting a short film by Jimmy Robert, followed by a conversation between Robert and Erin Honeycutt on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s influence on their work and on the book as a form of dialogue.
NYC, 19 April 2026, 7pm
Participant Inc.,116 Elizabeth Street, floor one, New York, 10013
Free entry. More info.
New York launch of the publication which was developed in parallel with the 2024 exhibition at Paricipant Inc, “flipping through pages keeping a record of time”: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha & Jimmy Robert, curated by Jacob Korczynski.
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Tsundoku Art Book Fair 2026
17-19 April, 2026
International Centre for the Image
Coopers Cross, Mayor Street Upper, North Wall, Dublin 1, D01 E5Y8, Ireland
More info
We will have books on sale at the Tsundoku Art Book Fair this weekend at the International Centre for the Image in Dublin, including some new and forthcoming titles! Come and say hi.
Tsundoku Art Book Fair 2026; ; January 1970;
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Lucy Skaer, Simon Harlow and Tanoa Sasruku in conversation at Good Press
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30 April 2026, 6.30–8.30pm
Good Press, 32 St Andrews St, Glasgow, G1 5PD
Free & open to all, no RSVP needed.
To launch her book, The Truth and Untruth of Stones, Lucy Skaer will be in conversation with Simon Harlow, who has fabricated her work for the last 20 years and Tanoa Sasraku, with whom she shares ideas of the meaning and histories of materials, and ways to situate a queer rural practice.
Simon Harlow graduated in Environmental Art from GSA in 1998 and has been working as a self employed designer and maker ever since. Using a broad material palette he works with Artists, Architects, Designers, domestic and commercial clients to produce his own designs, and theirs. He works locally, nationally and internationally, choosing to be based in Govanhill, Glasgow, where he produces sculpture and furniture and makes a decorative solid surface material called Mirrl, based on his time in Japan.
Tanoa Sasraku (b. 1995, Plymouth)’s practice encompasses sculpture, drawing and filmmaking. Her work is rooted in the material and symbolic properties of land via landscapes, pigments, and minerals, and informed by a personal relationship to textiles and patternmaking. Sasraku graduated from Goldsmiths University (2018) and Royal Academy of Arts (2024). Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Morale Patch’ ICA, London, 2025, ‘Man Engine’, Vardaxoglou, London (2023); Tanoa Sasraku, Vardaxoglou, London (2022); ‘Terratypes’, Spike Island, Bristol (2022); and ‘Liths’, Peer, London, UK (2023).
Lucy Skaer lives on the Isle of Lewis. She is an artist who works with sculpture, film, print and drawing. Her work slows ideas down to abstractions and makes them concrete.
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