Mike Kelley (1954–2012) liked to play with how an artist appears, exists and inhabits a role and how an artwork ‘communes’ with a viewer. Central to his ambitious explorations of memory, history, and the future is his consideration of how one’s individual subjectivity is shaped by familial and institutional power structures within society.  Ghost or Spirit highlights the significant and prescient questions about the role of art, and of the artist, and about gender and class, in terms that stem from Kelley’s own position as a white, heterosexual man in post-modern, capitalist America. Featuring a diverse range of voices, it explores the major works and themes of Kelley’s career, while drawing attention to aspects of his practice associated with performance, activism and collaboration, to emphasise his continual deflation of his own authority, and his willingness to invent and inhabit several identities.  Covering over four decades of Kelley’s work spanning performance, sculpture, video and installation, and articulating challenges to power, gender, class and sexuality, this book is a pertinent presentation of the breadth, complexity and significance of Kelley’s influential practice. Includes contributions from Marie de Brugerolle, Robert Cozzolino, Hendrik Folkerts, Jack Halberstam, Mark Leckey, Laura López Panigua, Fiontan Moran, Grace Ndiritu, Cauleen Smith and John Welchman.

Fujiko Nakaya is one of Japan’s most important contemporary artists. Participating in the 1960s performances of the New York-based collective Experiments in Arts and Technology (E.A.T.), she became internationally renowned for her immersive fog artworks. First created for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka they defy traditional conventions of sculpture by generating temporary, atmospheric transformations that physically engage with the public. Driven by early ecological concerns, Nakaya’s ground-breaking work is based purely on water and air—elements that have particular significance in light of the climate crisis. From the artist’s early paintings to her fog sculptures, single-channel videos, installations and documentation that reveal Nakaya’s cultural and social references, this in-depth survey offers a comprehensive overview of the distinguished artist’s work.

Stunningly beautiful, deeply puzzling, profoundly moving or intensely unsettling - performance art can evoke a wide variety of responses. In this important and richly illustrated book, Catherine Wood, one of the world's leading curators and writers on the subject, provides the broadest and most up-to-date survey published in recent years. Wood proposes performance not as a genre of art separate from object-making but as an attitude that has infiltrated the entire terrain of contemporary art. From the musical-theatricals of Marvin-Gaye Chetwynd to the public encounters created by Tino Seghal and the social activism of Tania Bruguera, a hugely divergent set of practices has emerged in the past twenty to thirty years which embrace the worlds of sculpture and painting, spectacle and protest. Examining in turn individual, social and object-based approaches in the field, Wood first examines the influential performance art of the 1960s to 1980s: the body art of the Viennese actionists; the raw performances of Yoko Ono and Chris Burden; and the experiments of the Japanese Gutai group among others. She then explores how these sources have been revisited, reformed or rejected by contemporary artists in the twenty-first century. This impressive book encompasses international artists who fall outside the traditional European and North American focus, giving the reader the broadest and most up-to-date insight into the subject yet published.

firstsite's autumn season began with a new solo exhibition by the British artist Anthea Hamilton.Hamilton's energetic collages explored the surreal and seductive nature of images. Her sculptures, installations and videos made reference to the history of art, cinema and performance, playfully inserting the viewer into a three-dimensional composition.Sorry I'm Late sees work was installed across the building with firstsite's galleries dramatically transformed into a series of environments - from a film studio to a restaurant kitchen. Soft sculptures, Perspex figures mounted on wheels, a giant zoetrope-inspired portrait of John Travolta and a medieval cocktail that is claimed to cure cataracts are amongst the works that comprise the exhibition.

For sixteen-year-old Jet, her only wish is to be normal and left alone while she is playing video games. However, one mistake sends Jet to Onyx Academy, a school she has managed to avoid for the past three years. She soon discovers that the world outside will change her but not to whom she expects to be, she gets thrown into a secret world with different genes, groups and rules then the one she has grown up with. Jet, learns that her parents weren't the only one keeping secrets. The guy she has a love/hate relationship with may be hiding the biggest secret of them all. As stories become true the danger rises. One thing she never expected was to be risking her life to save someone who was actually supposed to save her.

In Shaping the madre patria, I track the lives of four influential women to show how each ultimately became iconic. In Spain, I focus on Carmen Polo and Carmencita Franco to show how the Francoist-controlled media used the mother/daughter duo to convey ideal notions of family and femininity. The Spanish singer/actress Concha Piquer provides a different model of female identity in the post-civil war years. Eva Pern, the Argentinean icon of this study, fuses together the salient characteristics of Concha Piquer and Carmen Polo de Franco in that, like Piquer, she was a performer, yet, like Carmen Polo, the move that catapulted her to celebrity was her marriage to a powerful man and her subsequent position as Argentinean First Lady. The purpose of studying these women, and their representations in different media, is to reveal that each one was an icon, or revered symbol, at a time when women were scarcely in the public sphere.