November 20, 2024, 1pm
Online. Free but RSVP.

Graphic Negotiations is back for a fourth series of online conversations with designers. For this event we’re delighted to welcome Cairo-based graphic designer, Engy Aly.

Engy Aly is a graphic designer with an MFA from the International Master of Design program at UIC/HGK, Basel Academy of Art and Design, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She primarily focuses on cultural commissions, including posters, catalogs, and artist monographs. She is also the initiator and organizer of various workshops, exhibitions, and events centered around design and visual culture in Cairo and beyond, working under the title ‘Sporadic Schooling.’ https://www.engyaly.com

Graphic Negotiations is a series of lunchtime online talks with designers, some of whom we’ve worked with in the past. Book Works sees graphic design as crucial to realising artists and writers’ ideas in the final form of the book. While conventionally designers often become involved in the later stages of a book’s production, and with a limited brief, we involve the designer in a collaborative process from the start, with designer, artist and editor working together to create a book that realises the artists’ vision. Graphic Negotiations aims to centre the sometimes overlooked role of the designer in creating artist books.

14 November 2024
Dead Ink Books, Liverpool
Currently sold out but more info here.

21 November 2024, 6.30pm
Blackwells Manchester
£4 or £14 with book, here.

Two new events for The Wastes coming up. First Roy Claire Potter will be at Dead Ink Books in Liverpool on 14th November, where they’ll be joined by Jade Blackstock, Roo Dhissou, David Jacques and Harriet Morley. Then on 18th November they’ll be in Manchester, where they will be in conversation with Gareth Gavin. More details/tickets for both events available at the links above.

We’re pleased to announce that the final two books in our Arrhythmia series, guest-edited by Katrina Palmer, will be released this December with titles from Nairobi-based multidisciplinary artist, writer, and experimental beatmaker Kamwangi Njue, and Brooklyn-based writer Andrew E. Colarusso. Their release will coincide with the end of Katrina’s residency at the National Gallery, and the launch of her own publication with Book Works, The Touch Report.

Kamwangi Njue’s Through The Tinnitus is a multi-media book of sound and image which explores spatial and sonic phenomena through psychoacoustics. The images, taken around the artist’s locale of the Jamhuri and Sabaki Neighborhoods of Nairobi, were produced using a version of the pioneering Soviet-designed ANS photo-optical synthesiser. These were then processed and converted into graphical sound by Njue, and the resulting tracks have been collected into an album accompanying the book. In both works ekphrastic rhythms hum to the sonic backdrop of political violence and utopian dreams. A download code for the album, included as a bookmark insert, is available on purchase of the book.

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.

Arrhythmia is a series of four books selected by artist and writer Katrina Palmer through open submission. The open call sought artists and writers whose work explored ideas of being out of joint with the predominant social order, whether through disrupted trajectories, physical displacement, or political dissonance. The first two books, released in June 2024, were The Wastes by Roy Claire Potter and The Medium by Alice Walter.

Black Slit by Katrina Palmer (2023) is our Book of the Month, with 30% off all November.

Black Slit documents a process whereby Katrina Palmer learned to throw a knife, using vibrantly painted clay objects as her targets. The setting is a studio/office/classroom/bedsit at night – a multi-purpose space which must be prepared for the action. We see a sofa-bed being made in low light, a knife laid on a table before it flies through the air, and then the focus shifts to the targets themselves. The clay was still wet and unstable when struck by the blade, resulting in unpredictable radical disruptions to the colour and shape of these hand-crafted forms. Alongside filming and editing footage of the knife throwing, Palmer practised drawing lines, to make a series of works on paper which are also reproduced in this book. Responding to the borders, margins and channels of the lined A4 page, Palmer produced curiously visceral but lean forms that are a new element to her work.

Black Slit was developed alongside the 2023 exhibition: Katrina Palmer, ‘What’s Already Going On’, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre.

Palmer is the author of three other books, published by Book Works, and is guest-editor of our current open-call series Arrhythmia. We are delighted to be publishing Palmer’s new book The Touch Report in December 2024 which draws on research done during her 2024 residency at National Gallery, London.