In June 2019, Praneet Soi travelled across the occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel. Beginning in Haifa, he drove up to the occupied Golan Heights and from there, down to Bethlehem, Battir, Hebron, Jericho, Nablus, Jenin, Salfit, and Ramallah, before driving back up to Haifa, Akka and Tel Aviv. Looking for alternative representations of a land under occupation, Soi’s aim was to experience the country through facets of its landscape and to visit, en-route, farms, workshops and factories, to engage with productivity, entrepreneurship, and minutia of everyday life for people in Palestine.

At the beginning of August, while Soi was developing this work, the Indian state of Kashmir had its autonomous relationship with India revoked. It was split into two parts along religious lines (Muslim and Buddhist) and its state-hood was terminated. People in Kashmir have long identified with the Palestinian struggle. 1947 marked Indian independence from British rule, and the beginning of Kashmir’s quest for autonomy. In that same year, the UN voted to end the British Mandate in Palestine, leading to an event called Nakba, or ‘The Catastrophe’ by Palestinians, and the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.

In this book, through film stills, collage, drawing, notes and sketches, Soi draws on the work made in Palestine, and hints at this link to Kashmir, to explore the distortions that are caused by these disturbed political climates.

Praneet Soi was born 1971, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Following studies in India and the USA, Soi moved to the Netherlands in 2002, and divides his time between Amsterdam and Kolkata. His work is internationally recognised for its explorations of socio-political nuances and media representations. Soi’s practice incorporates traditional methods of miniature painting and sculpture, as well as time-based media such as video and sound. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Third Factory-From Kashmir to Lisbon via Caldas’, at Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2018), ‘Notes on Labour’ at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai (2017), and ‘Srinagar’ at the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2016).

‘There is no tool to make noise, only a happenstance wrong wielding of an awkward implement. I hear noises but they are mainly alarming. Take me to a sound that grows bolts and leaves and lanterns. It must be this silence of his sleeping that houses something I have yet to hear.’

Guitar! describes the contours and conditions of writing – interrupted, in flashes, or in restless moments through the night. A narrator listens; as a child learns to speak there is a re-acquaintance with the strangeness of putting a feeling into words. There is a yearning for meeting, and an idea of love or companionship as a sense of being met. Reading is punctuated by a series of black and white images of buskers, photographed by Francis McKee in Glasgow. Cover artwork by Ciara Phillips.

Sarah Tripp is an artist, writer and lecturer based in Glasgow. Previous Book Works publications include You are of vital importance, 2014, and ‘Aide-Mémoires: As if’, published in The Happy Hypocrite – What Am I?, issue 5, 2010, edited by Maria Fusco. Her writing can also be found in F.R. DAVID (Berlin), 2HB(Glasgow), and Space Poetry (Denmark).

Guitar! is generously supported by Creative Scotland and The Glasgow School of Art.

This series of interviews, held by curator and writer Gilane Tawadros are focused entirely on Stuart Brisley’s practice and directed by him. The artist’s narration of his practice demonstrates an unswerving resistance to controlling the narrative or fixing the meaning of his works. Citing the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, Brisley emphasises the critical importance of error to the creation of his performances: ‘You can say what you’re going to do, you can think about it, you can prepare it, and then when you start, it’s all disappeared because it’s actually meaningless… errors make for where the key value lies.’ The enduring resonance of Brisley’s work lies in its formless and slippery characteristics that resonate so poignantly with our shared human condition.

A second edition of The Night with a new postface by Michèle Bernstein.

‘I am a fraud. Anyone who buys The Night (thank you) and so much as skims it might think that I used to spend my time walking the streets of Paris like the two lovers in the book. Not true. Sure, many a night I used my feet in the company of some extremely bright youngsters, the same youngsters I’d sing and drink with in a shabby little dive (the dive from which everything was to spring later). But most of the time I was pedalling silently, alone.’ – from the new postface to the second edition, Michèle Bernstein

Translated from La Nuit, 1961, into English for the first time by Clodagh Kinsella, this is the second novel of Michèle Bernstein, a founding member of the Situationist International. Following All the King’s Horses, it was also written for cash, and again cannibalises the plot of Les Liaisons dangeureuses, featuring the same characters as her debut: Gilles, Geneviève, Carole and Bertrand. The story remains the same, but the book is different, this time parodying the style of the nouveau roman, with its elongated sentences and non-linear sense of time and place. As its protagonists drift through the streets of Paris, through the entanglements of a ménage à trois, and the ennui of a summer holiday on the Côte d’Azur, The Night is littered with détournements – unattributed quotations and knowing winks at situationist practices – and clues that give insight into the lives and spirit of both the author and her husband Guy Debord.

‘We were all Marxists, or course – still are. Totally under the charm of the old man – the genius. Maybe he will become more and more important now.’ – The Game: An interview with Michèle Bernstein, novelist and founding member of the Situationist International by Gavin Everall, frieze magazine, September 2013

Common Objectives is a series of quick-fire, rapid-response projects from artist/writer collectives or individual art practices engaged with emerging political struggles, rejecting the idea of culture as a playground for the elite, engaging in the potent mix of free discourse, solidarity and the production of new desires and prepared to break open old worlds, either in the virtual space of communication and networks, or in the concrete world of action, discourse and distribution. Other projects in the series include: After The Night by Everyone Agrees; Bad Feelings by Arts Against Cuts; The Counsel of Spent by Inventory; Even the Dead Rise Up by Francis McKee; Move…ment, a new issue of the journal …ment, edited by Federica Bueti; Pre-enactments by Victoria Halford and Steve Beard; and Shy Radicals by Hamja Ahsan.