ART

Posthuman Knowledge and the Critical Posthumanities

Sternberg Press 2024 ISBN 9783956796104 Acqn 34359
Pb 12x18cm 80pp ills £12.50

Robots designed to care for people and neglected landscapes of digital trash. The promise of
synthetic biology and the panic of living on a dying planet. Wonderful feats of intelligence and
systemic acts of violence. Exhilaration and exhaustion. Rosi Braidotti argues that we must think
about these apparent contradictions all together in order to make differences that actually matter.

Posthuman Knowledge and the Critical Posthumanities oscillates between evocations and
transections of contemporary conditions, for which Braidotti offers what she calls the "posthuman
convergence" as a new paradigm for situating and navigating their problems and possibilities.
Reflecting on the knotted situation of the academic humanities, cognitive capitalism, and
advanced climate change, she delivers an intersectional critique of humanism and
anthropocentrism, and targets their exclusions and aporias to address subjectivity, knowledge
production, and academic structures within that posthuman convergence. Braidotti's convergence
demands imagination, endurance, connectivity, and perspectives multiplied, embodied, and
grounded in the only world we have.

orders@artdata.co.uk

www.artdata.co.uk
 ART

Cosmos Cinema - The 14th Shanghai Biennale

Sternberg Press 2024 ISBN 9781915609601 Acqn 34429
Hb 21x28cm 424pp col ills £40

We look to the stars not to escape from the world but to understand our position within it. From
contemplating the sun, moon, and stars, humanity has derived its diverse origin stories,
cosmologies, belief systems, concepts of death, and social hierarchies. The cosmos defines us
just as we define the cosmos.

Published to complement the 14th Shanghai Biennale, entitled Cosmos Cinema and curated by
Anton Vidokle, this illustrated catalogue extends the exhibition's proposal that the methodologies
of filmmaking might offer one way of representing and reimagining our entanglement in time and
space. The book presents the work of artists from the early twentieth century to the present
alongside a series of specially commissioned essays on subjects ranging from the history of
Shanghai cinema to the possibility of communicating with nonhuman intelligence. These artworks
and texts encourage readers to reflect on their place within the systems that shape every aspect
of our lived experience.

Foreword by Gong Yan. Contributions by Hallie Ayres, Dong Bingfeng, Lukas Brasiskis, Christina
Kiaer, Ekaterina Kulinicheva, Jonas Staal, Anton Vidokle, Elena Vogman, Zairong Xiang, Wang
Xin, Zhang Zhen, Arseny Zhilyaev.

orders@artdata.co.uk

www.artdata.co.uk
 ART

Ines Doujak - Twisted Language

Sternberg Press 2024 ISBN 9781915609328 Acqn 34715
Pb 16x24cm 240pp col ills £21.50

In the context of Ines Doujak's exhibition Geistervolker, Kunsthalle Wien and Sternberg Press
publish a book that looks deeply into the artist's practice. In the exhibition, curated by What, How
& for Whom / WHW, the artist traced, in fragments, the origins of pandemics throughout history
and linked them to a global economy that is based on logics of extraction facilitated by colonial
legal mechanisms and late capitalism.

These subjects have always been present in Doujak's works. Therefore, it felt crucial to have a
book that allows several writers, theoreticians, and poets from different geographies to reflect on
the political and aesthetic strategies that Doujak has been using during these past thirty years.
The book is not a monograph nor a catalogue but rather a mosaic of texts in dialogue with Ines
Doujak's Oeuvre, which engage with burning and urgent topics such as how we relate to the
world around us and to each other.

Texts by John Barker, Maria Berrios, Alice Creischer, T. J. Demos, Danny Hayward, Patricia
Highsmith, Matthew Hyland, Ernst Jandl, Pablo Lafuente, Pedro G. Romero, Grace Samboh,
Klaus Speidel, Markus Worgotter. Foreword by WHAT, HOW & FOR WHOM / WHW.

orders@artdata.co.uk

www.artdata.co.uk
 ART

The Autonomy of Art Is Ordinary - Notes in Defense of an Idea of Emancipation

Sternberg Press 2024 ISBN 9781915609618 Acqn 34716
Pb 12x19cm 64pp £7

Over recent decades, a post-critical theoretical and methodological paradigm has become
increasingly dominant in the human sciences. Proponents of this approach have come to dismiss
the idea-central to all modern aesthetics-of the autonomy of art.

Written by critic and researcher Kim West, this book is a defence of art's autonomy and
addresses some of the major arguments against it in recent post-critical writings. West critiques
three key positions: first, that the concept of art's autonomy equals a myth of objective
independence; second, that it is inextricably tied to traditions of formalist elitism; and third, that
the ideal of autonomy reinforces the illusion of the inherently free and rational subject. From
within this critique, West advances principles for how the autonomy of art could be understood
today.

orders@artdata.co.uk

www.artdata.co.uk
 ART

Why I Do What I Do - Global Curators Speak

Sternberg Press 2024 ISBN 9781915609526 Acqn 34717
Pb 11x18cm 256pp £14.25

For this fourth volume of the series Thoughts on Curating, twenty renowned curators and
collectives from across the globe write about a single exhibition or curatorial project they created
that transformed their thinking and the way they have curated ever since. Their innovations,
practical considerations, and ways of grappling with the most urgent issues of the day offer a
unique handbook of curatorial ideas-rational and whimsical, poetic and political-and serve as a
fascinating record of exhibition-making in the twenty-first century.

Contributions by Defne Ayas, Zoe Butt, Raqs Media Collective, Adrienne Edwards, Ruth Estevez,
iLiana Fokianaki, Hendrik Folkerts, Kate Fowle, Martin Guinard, Kit Hammonds, Hou Hanru,
Maria Belen Saez de Ibarra, Udo Kittelmann, Catherine Nichols, Hoor al Qasimi, farid rakun,
Bernardo Jose de Souza, Claire Tancons, Xiaoyu Weng, Raimundas Malasauskas with Joy Zhu.

orders@artdata.co.uk

www.artdata.co.uk
 ART

Stinkhorn - How Nature's Most Foul Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen
Sternberg Press 2024 ISBN 9781915609274 Acqn 35947
Hb 17x24cm 208pp col ills £26

The stinkhorn mushroom is one of the weirdest wonders of the fungal world, certainly the
smelliest. Ever since it was described by a Dutch doctor in a sixteenth-century pamphlet, the
stinkhorn has been reported to emit odors resembling damp earth, dung, rotting cheese, decaying
flesh, and even semen. It also happens to look like a phallus, bursting out of a subterranean egg
to poke above the ground, where it lures insects towards its slimy, fetid cap. In Stinkhorn, artist,
musician, and writer Sion Parkinson asks: What can the pervasive stench of this mushroom and
the droning noise of the flies compelled towards it reveal about how sounds and smells are
combined in the imagination?

A heady mix of natural history, science writing, musicology, philosophy of the senses, and illness
memoir, Parkinson uses examples of so-called bad smells to argue for a theory of Stink as a kind
of "smelling sound." Alongside images and insights from the author's search for stinkhorn fungi in
nature, the book expands upon the philosophy of listening to consider the role of the nose and the
"nasal imaginary" in how we make sense of sound.

In this treatise on malodors and how they can transform the conditions for listening, Parkinson
considers John Cage's silent fungal forays, Brian Eno's compositions with perfumes, the hum
note of a vibrating bell, the "eggy" odor of space, and the author's own hallucinated stench as the
result of an epileptic seizure. What links these disparate ideas and sensory experiences can be
found in a single encounter with a ripe stinkhorn mushroom.

Includes 16-page insert of a facsimile of the Neo-Latin-English translation of The Description of

the Phallus by Hadrianus Junius, translated by Caroline Spearing.

orders@artdata.co.uk

www.artdata.co.uk