Hello,
This is our occasional press newsletter to let editors, writers and programmers know about upcoming books. You’re receiving this email because you’ve previously indicated to me that this would be welcome – if it no longer is, or if I’ve made a mistake, please let me know by replying to this email and I’ll remove you. This will remain an occasional letter – every couple of months at most.
Below you will find info on an exciting new Katrina Palmer project, The Touch Report. The book is the result of her 2024 National Gallery residency and forms the centrepiece of the exhibition of the same name which opens there on 11 December (opening and press preview is on 10 December, contact me or the NG press office if you would like to come).
We are also publishing the final two books in our open call series, Arrhythmia, which has been guest edited by Katrina. It would be a great time to pitch or commission a profile of this fascinating, complex and quietly subversive artist! Please also consider The Wastes and The Medium for your end of year lists if you liked them!
Amy Ching-Yan Lam will be in the UK to promote her Property Journal, with events in London (30 Nov), Glasgow (4 Dec) and Birmingham (6 Dec). She will also be speaking at Printed Matter in NYC on 21st Nov. If you would like to attend any of these, interview/commission Amy or see the book, let me know.
If you would like a review copy of any of these (or other Book Works) titles, or to profile any of the artists, or have any questions, get in touch (tamar@bookworks.org.uk /+44 7779 251006).
PDFs of all are available now. Bound copies of Black Body Index, Through the Tinnitus and Property Journal are available now. Finished copies of The Touch Report will be available for the launch.
Cheers,
Tamar
The Touch Report
Katrina Palmer
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Will you visit me in the studio just once after hours?
An artist is invited to take up residency in a gallery filled with historical paintings. They are meticulously crafted, maintained, and revered. She begins to make an audit of the paintings, outlining the depictions of violence, subjugation and physical tension on public display. Eleven arrows in a torso, someone’s hair cut as they sleep, a man nailed to a cross. Horses, decapitations, memorable lobsters.
Written in sparse, urgent fragments that invite closer reading, The Touch Report, turns the reader’s gaze into the dark, to question our notions of ‘civilisation’.
Want to see something real, says the artist as she creeps through the darkness, keeping a log.
Katrina Palmer was commissioned by the National Gallery, London, as part of the 2024 National Gallery Artist in Residence Programme in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Society, generously supported by Anna Yang and Joseph Schull. This book is published as a result of research made during this residency.
Katrina Palmer is an artist and writer based in London. Her 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).
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Arrhythmia series: final two novels available for review
In 2021, we put out a call for a new open submission series, Arrhythmia, guest-edited by artist Katrina Palmer. We received over 200 submissions, and commissioned four new works. We are now publishing the final two books in this series, Black Body Index by Andrew E. Colarusso and Through the Tinnitus by Kamwangi Njue
They follow the The Wastes by Roy Claire Potter and The Medium by Alice Walter which came out in June.
Bound copies are available now, reply to this email to request one
Black Body Index
Andrew E. Colarusso
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Then there was the sculpture, a large lustrous black stone of alien provenance. Walking around it I realised that the sculpture had been placed so that upon entering one might see only its black surface. On the other side it revealed a surface open and coated in gold glitter, geodic revelation. I knelt to inspect it closer, witness to a tiny spider crawling across its surface, from black to gold and back.
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.
Andrew E. Colarusso was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York City. He occasionally writes things when not tending to his bookstore, Taylor & Co. Books, in the Ditmas Park neighbourhood of Brooklyn.
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Through the Tinnitus
Kamwangi Njue
Through The Tinnitus explores spatial and sonic phenomena through psychoacoustics—the scientific study of how sound is perceived psychologically. Using a version of the pioneering Soviet-designed ANS photo-optical synthesiser, images taken in the artist’s locale, the Jamhuri and Sabaki Neighborhoods of Nairobi, are processed and converted into graphical or drawn sound. In the sound work accompanying the book, these ekphrastic rhythms hum to the sonic backdrop of political violence and utopian dreams.
A free download code for the album will be provided on purchase of the book.
Kamwangi Njue is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and experimental beatmaker from Nairobi, Kenya.
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Property Journal
Amy Ching-Yan Lam
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‘Around this time last year, I had a birthday astrology reading where the reader said they could tell, just by looking at my chart, that I had run away from home when I was seventeen. They said that this year would be a revisiting of that event, but it would happen in a completely different way.’
From December 2021 to December 2022, artist and writer Amy Ching-Yan Lam kept a record of each time real estate, property or housing came up in conversation. She called this the Property Journal.
Over the course of a year, neighbourhood landmarks are demolished, politicians break promises, friends despair, and parents age. Mould appears to grow on Lam’s face moisturiser; as property organises people’s lives, it also overtakes them. What began as a simple framework soon becomes an index of precarity, told through the indignities, dread, and dreamscapes of what we’re able to call ‘home’.
Tender, fierce, and mordantly funny, Property Journal is a damning indictment of the permanent state of affairs known as the housing crisis.
Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She is the author of the poetry collection, Baby Book (2023, Brick Books), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in Poetry, and Looty Goes to Heaven (2022, Eastside Projects). From 2006 to 2020 she was in the performance art duo Life of a Craphead. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, and was born in Hong Kong.
Property Journal is co-published with Richmond Art Gallery, Canada, with the support of Canada Council as part of our Co-Series, no. 25.
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