HATJE CANTZ VERLAG

Yüksel Arslan: Artures offers a close-up view of one man’s paean to Western culture and its discontents. A Turkish artist and self-diagnosed schizophrenic, Arslan, born in 1933 and residing in Paris since 1962, has lived as much in great books, music and ideas as in the documentary art that he has been inspired to create. The over 700 imaginative and semiscientific diagrams and drawings that he has produced to date with homemade colors (including dried feces) present an encyclopedic range of subject matter: botany, ethnology, urban architecture, politics, autobiography, history, fantasy and sexology, as well as texts and portraits of the geniuses he reveres. This German-English monograph includes three curatorial essays giving an intimate portrait of this strange man and his obsessive art, which the artist describes as “between painting and writing, between painting and poetry.” 

BLACK DOG PUBLISHING

In Ramallah, Running refrains from theoretical hyperbole or displays of erudition, offering instead something far more valuable to an understanding of artistic production: a sense of time and place. Guy Mannes-Abbott skillfully rescues the dérive from banality, refashioning it into a visceral struggle to comprehend the plethora of spiteful limits—mental and physical—that constrains the city’s inhabitants as the Oslo Accords recede into absurdity. As Mannes-Abbott runs through Ramallah and its environs, he strives to notice what life and space really mean beneath the vulgar gaze of the gleaming hilltop settlements—to locate hope amid this “non-sense.” In response, artists and writers including Emily Jacir, Najwan Darwish and Adania Shibli give insiders’ accounts of existing within these borders—a mixture of humiliations, scrutinies and normality. The one disappointment is the introduction, a formulaic lecture by Jean Fisher. 

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Drawing on historical documents and early photography, a vast breadth of knowledge and her own travels in Tibet, Oxford anthropologist Clare E. Harris “curates” the Museum of Tibet as it exists in London and Lhasa, and in the imaginations of the Chinese government and of scholars, politicians and Tibetophiles in the West. Written with elegance, clarity and passionate objectivity, the book begins by contrasting British and Chinese colonialism in the formation of the idea of Tibet, and traces the construction of Tibetan museum collections in the West and China. Harris takes us from skull drums and thangkas to New Buddhism and the world of contemporary Tibetan artists at home and in exile, explicating the crisis of Tibetan identity and culture. Harris gives us a highly focused contribution to the discourse on the postcolonial world that is also a pleasure to read.