Beautiful artist’s book about Tin Drum’s MR installation, Medusa. A meditation on emergent technologies, nature and architecture amidst the climate crisis with contributions from celebrated writers, academics and thinkers. The mixed reality Medusa installation began with the questions: is there even such a thing as non-physical architecture? What is the function of architecture without physical form? Directed by Yoyo Munk and produced by Tin Drum, it headlined the 2021 London Design Festival at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Yoyo Munk’s first book is an exploration into Medusa’s themes, reflecting on our changing relationship with architecture within the context of rapidly advancing technology and ongoing mass extinction. Featuring original artwork by Tin Drum, Medusa is a timely and moving artist’s book about climate grief. Medusa includes fascinating conversations between Munk and Sou Fujimoto, the renowned architect and Medusa collaborator, James Bridle, author of Ways of Being; Veronica Strang, cultural anthropologist; and Seirian Sumner, author of Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps. A dazzling poetic contribution from Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace: A Memoir of Recovery and Renewal is interspersed throughout the book. Medusa is an art object to be treasured, employing multiple inks, foils, papers and processes.

A lyrical manifestation of Leticia Valverdes' award-winning project that took her on a journey back to Portugal, her grandmother's motherland. This extraordinary project resulted in a magical collaboration with the inhabitants of Ana's birthplace, the village of Mundao. By inviting the villagers to write a postcard to her now dead grandmother, they became the fictional friends she believed she had whilst dying with Alzheimer's disease in Brazil. Through photography interspersed with poetic text, cyanotypes and votive offerings, this is a personal yet universal story exploring transgenerational trauma, longing, migration, and what it means to feel divided between two cultures. A hundred years on, this is the perfect time to tell this story, as Europe is engulfed in debates about borders, nationalism and migration.

The debut monograph of Stacey Gillian Abe’s work is created to accompany her first London solo show at Unit London. Featuring works spanning her career to date, the book explores the key themes from Abe’s work and delves deep into her expressive and symbolic indigo portraits. Shrub-let of Old Ayivu includes insightful written contributions from Flavia Frigeri, art historian, lecturer and the Chanel Curator at the National Portrait Gallery and Serubiri Moses, renowned writer and curator, alongside a conversation between the artist and Catherine McKinley, curator and author of the critically acclaimed Indigo: In Search of the Color that Seduced the World and The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts. Abe’s work reflects her past and her memories, highlighting her personal experiences and her relationships to her community. Renowned for her indigo skin-tone paintings, the colour has become crucial in reshaping narratives surrounding the black body.

Walead Beshty is a carefully curated guide to key bodies of work by the acclaimed conceptual artist presented in collaboration with Thomas Dane Gallery in London, Turin and Naples. One of today’s leading conceptual artists, Los Angeles-based Walead Beshty (b. 1976, London) works across photography, sculpture and words. Beshty’s art is expansive and best described as an ongoing conversation, to which this monograph is his next articulation. Through a deconstructing lens, Walead Beshty explores every exhibition and project the artist has presented in collaboration with Thomas Dane Gallery in London, Turin and Naples. The monograph offers a guide to some of the artist’s key bodies of work. Uncovering processes is central to Beshty’s art. He deliberately incorporated marks made by oxidation and human touch into his FedEx copper works and Copper Surrogate works, as well as photographing the many individuals involved in his exhibitions in Industrial Portraits. The work that has gone into this substantial new monograph, which features contributions from publisher Francis Atterbury, book designer Billie Temple and Thomas Dane partner Francois Chantala, is, quite literally, laid bare. Also presented is an insightful essay by leading professor of Juridical Sociology at Univer¬sity of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Carlo De Rita. Adopting a semiotic approach to books as ‘not just a thing you hold, but something held in common’, Walead Beshty embraces the archetypal format, tropes and conventions of a traditional – if unorthodox – book, employing printing and publishing practices seldom seen in contemporary bookmaking. It reflects on what an artist’s monograph might represent as it explores the contingencies that allow art to function. Walead Beshty is itself another carefully curated exhibition of his work.