Books published by Afterall Publishing

An illustrated study that casts a new light on Oiticica's most important work of "quasi-cinema" on its fortieth anniversary.

An illustrated exploration of Helen Chadwick’s erotic, playful, and fierce 1986 installation. In 1986 the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London showed a new commission by the artist Helen Chadwick (1954–1996). What Chadwick conceived for the ICA exhibition explored her characteristic themes—the female body (her own), the aesthetics of pleasure, the material variety and wonder of phenomena—but took them in a new, flamboyant direction. In this illustrated volume, Marina Warner examines one part of Chadwick’s installation, The Oval Court. This work was erotic, playful, and fierce; it showed imaginative ambition on an exceptional scale and a unique, piquant sensibility, both raunchy and delicate. Despite the work’s recognition as a feminist monument of rare intensity, it has rarely been shown or discussed since the author’s catalogue essay for the original exhibition. Warner here reconsiders Chadwick’s influence as an artist who helped to shift conventional aesthetics and transvalue despised, even abominated forms. Exploring the work’s richly layered composition in light of intervening years, Warner shows how Chadwick’s imagination has shaped many artists’ ideas and ethics, and emboldened their adventures with materials.

An examination of Pierre Huyghe''s post-apocalyptic Untitled (Human Mask), which asks whether our human future may be one of remnants and mimicry.Pierre Huyghe''s 2014 film Untitled (Human Mask) combines images of a post-apocalyptic world (actual footage of deserted streets close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of March 2011) with a haunting scene of a monkey working in an empty restaurant wearing a human mask and a wig. She''s a girl! The flat, emotionless almost automaton state of the mask and the artificial glossy hair topped even with a child''s bow, suggests that she, the monkey, might be a character from Japanese Noh theatre. But there''s no music. Instead Huyghe''s film evinces the terrifying possibility that our own, human, future might just be one of remnants and mimicry; that the deserted streets of Fukushima and the monkey''s recognizable, alienating chimeric performance is all that might survive us. Untitled (Human Mask) presents a pluperfect world with extinction the endgame for a civilization that cared little for the present, dreaming only of a future that inevitably and necessarily could not include it.

Offers in-depth considerations of the work of contemporary artists, along with essays that broaden the context in which to understand it. This journal features essays on art history and critical theory.

Features essays on art history and critical theory. This book looks at connectivity and the role of the museum in the contemporary age. It also examines notions of materiality and historicity in practices.

An illustrated examination of one of Hirschhorn's "precarious" monuments, now dismantled.

A journal that offers in-depth considerations of the work of contemporary artists, along with essays that broaden the context in which to understand it. It looks at artistic practices that question notions of marginality, with special attention to the work of Panamarenko, Nilbar Gures, K P Krishnakumar, and the Kerala Radicals.

An examination of the complex and subtle world on display in Rodney Graham's film of an LSD-inflected bicycle ride.

Looks at artists whose practices respond to specific local contexts in different ways, from American artist Jimmie Durham's installations about US politics and civil rights to Israeli artist Yael Bartana's films about contemporary Europe.

A richly illustrated study of Marc Chaimowicz's groundbreaking 1972 post-Pop installation-performance piece Celebration? Realife.

The first sustained examination of a canonical and widely exhibited work by a leading artist of the former Yugoslavia.

An illustrated study of Hanne Darboven's masterwork, the massive Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 (Cultural History 1880-1983).

A critical close-up of Warhol's famous film and its cultural impact

An extended illustrated account of the Hollis Frampton film that marks critical moment in art history when photography meets filmmaking.