Publication date: October 2023
Price: £22
ISBN: 9781912570188
Extent: 240pp
Designer: Martin McGrath Studio
Contributors: Sita Balani, Milovan Farronato, Reba Maybury & Ashkan Sepahvand

That Fire Over There takes fire as a metaphor for ideas around queer attachment, proximity, and personal and collective transformation. It also excavates the history of a real fire which in 1981 destroyed the Hambrough Tavern – a contested site symbolic of provocation and conflict against far-right groups in Southall, west London, where Prem Sahib grew up.

A rich body of images – documenting artworks which explore gay cruising, selected from family photo collections, and displaying ephemera from the archive of Prem Sahib’s uncle Kamaljit Sahib, a notable activist in Southall of the 1980s and 90s – combines with extracts from a dream diary and exchanges with family members. Added to this are newly commissioned texts and correspondence by Sita Balani, Milovan Farronato, Reba Maybury and Ashkan Sepahvand, engaging with emotional themes such as grief, shame and loss. Prem Sahib’s own writing makes connections between interlocutors and carves out a space for otherwise disparate material to coexist, all in the pursuit of questioning ideas around freedom, sexuality, and intergenerational experiences of place and politics.

Another Magazine profile. 

Publication date: October 2023
Price: £20
ISBN: 9781912570287
Extent: 132pp
Format: soft cover
Designer: Maeve Redmond
Contributers: Steven Cairns, Maryam Kazeem, Gboyega Odubanjo and Okwui Okpokwasili.

Queen for a Day is Deborah-Joyce Holman’s debut publication, staging a conversation between two of the artist’s films, Moment and Moment 2 (2022), and the work of cinema verité they take as a primary material: Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967). One ‘queen’ of this title is Jason Holliday, the Black gay male subject at the centre of Clarke’s film with whom Holman wants to act in solidarity. Finding Jason captured by the extractive gaze and exhausting line of questioning of a white female director, Holman works to reproduce his words, rather than his image, placing them as looping samples of script in the mouths of two performers, Imani Mason Jordan (Moment) and Rebecca Bellantoni (Moment and Moment 2).

Following this, a conversation between Deborah-Joyce Holman and Cédric Fauq elaborates on Holman’s method, and suggests that there are parallels to be drawn between the cycle of oppression in which Jason is trapped by Clarke, and the way in which the contemporary circulation of images of Black people suffering triggers a retraumatising process of spectacularisation. Newly commissioned essays by Olamiju Fajemisin, Noémi Michel, and Francis Whorrall-Campbell, offer close analysis of Moment and Moment 2, opening up diverse ways of understanding Holman’s aesthetic strategies and politics of representation via film history, decolonial and queer theory.

Publication date: November 2023
Price: £20
ISBN: 9781912570287
Extent: 132pp
Format: soft cover
Designer: Maeve Redmond
Contributors: Steven Cairns, Maryam Kazeem, Gboyega Odubanjo and Okwui Okpokwasili.

Show Me The World Mister is Ayo Akingbade’s first publication, developing work from her touring exhibition of the same name. Centring two films, The Fist and Faluyi, shot on location in Nigeria, the book builds on Akingbade’s cinematic interrogations of history and place, addressing interwoven histories of industrialisation and family.

Originally shot on 35mm film, The Fist is an intimate portrait of a modernist style factory – the first Guinness brewery built outside of Ireland and the UK, located in Nigeria, 12 miles from the centre of Lagos on the Ikeja Industrial Estate. Faluyi follows protagonist Ife as she embarks on a meditative journey tracing familial legacy and mysticism within ancestral land. Shot on 16mm film in the Idanre Hills – a UNESCO World Heritage site in Ondo State, the birthplace of Akingbade’s parents – the film is an introspective contemplation of the artist’s own personal relationship with Nigeria, and her sense of the future.

Featuring diary entries, behind the scenes images from locations in Lagos and Idanre, as well as exhibition and installation views, Show Me The World Mister documents the processes and ideas behind Ayo Akingbade’s work. With written contributions by Steven Cairns, Maryam Kazeem, Gboyega Odubanjo and Okwui Okpokwasili.

“One of the great socialist works of the 20^th century” – Luke Roberts & Amy Tobin

Cecilia Vicuña created Saborami in the aftermath of the September 1973 military coup in Chile. Combining poetry, journal entries, documentation of artworks including assemblages and paintings, the book was published in Devon, England in an edition of 250 hand-made copies by the artist-led Beau Geste Press. It was one of the first artistic responses to the violence of the fascist junta.

In recent years, Vicuña has gained increasing renown, winning the Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2022 Venice Bienniale and with major shows/installations at the Guggenheim (2022); and Tate Modern (2023). Saborami is one of her most important works, made at a turning point in her life and career, and reverberating through to the present day. Though the book is highly regarded, it has also been hard to access. This new, expanded facsimile edition remedies this oversight, and restates Saborami as a central example of artistic engagement in material and revolutionary resistance.

 Years ahead of her time, Vicuña outlines an eco-socialist and feminist vision in the face of defeat.