Will you visit me in the studio just once after hours?

No one would know.

 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).

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.

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.

‘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.