Sternberg Press

History, Criticism and Theory

 
Francis McKee - How to Know What\'s Really Happening
2016
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
In this post-truth era, how does one navigate the endless information available and choose a viable narrative of reality? In How to Know What's Really Happening Glasgow-based writer and curator Francis McKee looks at various techniques for determining verity, from those of spy agencies and whistle-blowers to mystics and scientists.
Publishing as Artistic Practice
2016
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
An examination by artists, publishers, and scholars of recent publishing concepts emerging from the experimental literature and art scene.
Frederick Kiesler - Function Follows Vision, Vision Follows Reality
2016
bilingual edition (English / German)
Sternberg Press
sold out
A collection of unpublished or rare texts by architect and theoretician Frederick Kiesler written between 1927 and 1957.
Rare Earth
2016
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
An attempt to define the spirit of an age: exploring how today's myths, identities, and cosmologies relate to current advances in technology—through reference to the material basis to our most developed weapons and tools; a class of seventeen rare earth elements from the periodic table—Rare Earth challenges the rhetoric of immateriality associated with our hypermodern condition.
Marcos Lutyens - Memoirs of a Hypnotist - 100 Days
2015
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
An account of Lutyens' long-term Hypnotic Show at Documenta 13 in 2012.
Art in the Periphery of the Center
2015
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
This book is the result of four years of collaborative work that focused on topics of affect, the return of history, ecology, and art and its markets in today's power law–based economies. It attempts to shift practices of thought toward both critical realism and new materialism.
Realism Materialism Art
2015
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
Cutting across diverse thematic interests and modes of investigation, the thirty-five essays in Realism Materialism Art (RMA) offer a snapshot of the emerging and rapidly changing set of ideas and practices proposed by contemporary realisms and materialisms, and examine their ramifications on the arts.
Textiles - Open Letter
2015
bilingual edition (English / German)
Sternberg Press
sold out
Rike Frank and Grant Watson's research project examines the referential and analytical qualities of textiles through both contemporary and historical works.
Artist Novels - The Book Lovers Publication
2015
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
This publication is devoted to the phenomenon of the artist novel, and whether it can be considered to be a medium in its own right within the visual arts. Thanks to the contributions of a selected group of artists, writers, curators, and scholars this publication strives to demonstrate that literature, when treated by visual artists, can take place well beyond the space of the book.
Aesthetics of the Flesh
2015
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
A reader.
In the Holocene
2015
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
In the Holocene is based on a 2012 group exhibition of the same name at the MIT List Visual Arts Center that explored art as a speculative science, investigating principles more commonly associated with scientific or mathematical thought.
Per/Form - How to Do Things with[out] Words
2014
bilingual edition (English / Spanish)
Sternberg Press
sold out
The meaning of performance and performativity today.
The Phantom of Liberty - Contemporary Art and the Pedagogical Paradox
2014
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
A manifesto to reestablish a social and aesthetic dialogue between visual art, pedagogy, and psychology, philosophy, critical journalism, etc.
Truth is Concrete - A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics
2014
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
The possibility of concrete truth as a working hypothesis, for an art that not only represents and documents, but engages in specific political and social situations—and for an activism that searches for intelligent, creative means of self-empowerment.
Forensis - The Architecture of Public Truth
2014
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
This book excavates the notion of forensis (Latin for “pertaining to the forum”) to designate the role of material forensics in articulating new notions of public truth. The condition of forensis is one in which aesthetic practices, new technologies, and architectural research methodologies bear upon the legal implications of political struggle, violent conflict, and climate change.
Andreas Töpfer - Speculative Drawing - 2011-2014
2014
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
Speculative Drawing presents fifteen books—from monographs and translations to collections of essays—that emerged from the research platform Speculative Poetics, conceived by Armen Avanessian in 2011.
Eyal Weizman - Architecture after Revolution
2014
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
A series of provocative projects by the architectural collective Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) that try to imagine “the morning after revolution.”
Chantal Pontbriand - The Contemporary, the Common - Art in a Globalizing World
2014
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
A collection of essays in which Chantal Pontbriand examines themes of being-in-common in today's world and their relation to the development of art practices.
Rémy Zaugg - The Art Museum of My Dreams or A Place for the Work and the Human Being
2014
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
In his influential 1986 text, now translated into English for the first time, Swiss artist Rémy Zaugg (1943–2005) laid out fundamental ideas on the art museum. For him, the museum is an everyday tool that enables the encounter between viewer and work—raising the question of the kind of architecture appropriate for such a space.
Art Production beyond the Art Market?
2013
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
Theoretical reflections and insights into alternative artistic working models.
Art as a Thinking Process - Visual Forms of Knowledge Production
2013
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
Art as the result of a thinking process (a vast survey of recent debates around art schools and their methods).
T. J. Demos - Return to the Postcolony - Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art
2013
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
Contemporary art and the “colonial present.”
In a Manner of Reading Design - The Blind Spot
2012
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
New perspectives on design and its possible critical dimension.
Actors, Agents and Attendants - Social Housing – Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice
2012
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
How ongoing transformations in social housing are reflected in the aspirations and practices of artists.
Performing the Curatorial - With and Beyond Art
2012
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
The performative dimension of the curatorial.
Work, Work, Work - A Reader on Art and Labour
2012
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
What is “work” today and what is its relation to art.
Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets - A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios
2012
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
The complex and contested entanglements of contemporary art and its commercial markets.
Raimundas Malašauskas - Paper Exhibition - Selected Writings
2012
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
An anthology of writings by curator and writer Raimundas Malašauskas.
Eyal Weizman - Mengele\'s Skull - The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics
2012
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
A study in which Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman discusses the way that forensic investigation and identification of Joseph Mengele's remains marks a transition, giving way to an "era of forensics", in which things—such as bones—act as the witnesses of past events.
Alex Coles - The Transdisciplinary Studio
2012
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
A study of transdisciplinary studio models of artists (Olafur Eliasson and Jorge Pardo), product designers (Konstantin Grcic), and graphic designers (Åbäke).
Design Act - Socially and Politically Engaged Design Today – Critical Roles and Emerging Tactics
2012
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
A project that presents and discusses contemporary design practices that engage with political and societal issues.
Jan Verwoert - Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want
2010
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
A selection of recent writings by the art critic, galvanizing central themes Verwoert has been developing in pursuit of a language to describe art's transformative potential in conceptual, performative, and emotional terms.
Markus Miessen - The Nightmare of Participation (Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality)
2010
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
The Nightmare of Participation calls for a format of conflictual participation—no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking.
Iaspis Forum on Design and Critical Practice - The Reader
2010
bilingual edition (English / Swedish)
Sternberg Press
sold out
What happens when you look at design as some thing more than a service-based relationship between client and designer? What new strategies and models help to question and challenge the limits of design? What outer circumstances influence this kind of practice?
Isabelle Graw - High Price - Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture
2010
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
Towards the art world's inner contradictions between symbolic meaning and monetary value.
Institution Building - Artists, Curators, Architects in the Struggle for Institutional Space
2009
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
A study that conceptualizes, tests, and practically applies the spatial strategy for the European Kunsthalle.
Céline Condorelli - Support Structures
2009
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
A manual for what bears, sustains, and props, for those things that encourage, care for, and assist; for that which advocates, articulates; for what stands behind, frames, and maintains: a manual for those things that give support.
Anders Olsson - As a Weasel Sucks Eggs - An Essay on Melancholy and Cannibalism
2008
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
As a Weasel Sucks Eggs examines the enigmatic relation of melancholia to an early kind of cannibalism, which psychoanalysis, in particular, stressed. It contains readings of, amongst others, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Sigmund Freud, G. W. F. Hegel, and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf.
Diedrich Diederichsen - On (Surplus) Value in Art
2008
trilingual edition (English / German / Dutch)
Sternberg Press
sold out
Drawing on fresh readings of Marxist and post-modern thought, renowned German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen compares the abstract and climbing values of artworks with the plunging value of music—a traditionally immaterial art—in order to formulate a broad reflection on the current “crisis of value in the arts.”
The Greenroom - Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1
2008
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
An anthology of texts on documentary practices in contemporary art.
Hans Ulrich Obrist - ...dontstopdontstopdontstopdontstop
2006
English edition
Sternberg Press
sold out
A compendium of texts containing famous exhibition case studies, involving some of the more thought-provoking artists, architects, and scientists of our time. A must-have for anyone interested in the unusual strategies of a curator-at-large.
Swamps and the New Imagination - On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture and Philosophy
2025
English edition
Sternberg Press
forthcoming
An exploration of the "swampy" zone between the human and the other forms of life that make up his ecosystem and his environment, at the intersection of art, architecture and philosophy, in the perspective of a posthumanist ecology.
Brian Dillon - In Pieces - Writings on Art, Etc.
2025
English edition
Sternberg Press
forthcoming
A collection of critical, polemic, and personal essays composed in the past decade.
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