Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer (born 1967) devises collections that unite aspects of visual art, literature, music, politics and history, and that eventually culminate in sprawling theatrical installations. This publication offers detailed insight into the artist's installation entitled "Let's Make the Water Turn Black."

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, "The Promises of the Past" examines the former opposition between Eastern and Western Europe by reinterpreting the history of the Communist Bloc countries through art. Challenging the idea that art history is somehow linear and continuous, this transnational and multigenerational project features works by more than 50 artists, many of them from Central and Eastern Europe, including: Marina Abramovic, Yael Bartana, Dimitrije Basicevic (Mangelos), Tacita Dean, Liam Gillick, Sanja Ivekovic, Julius Koller, Jiri Kovanda, Edward Krasinski, David Maljkovic, Marjetica Potrc and Monika Sosnowska. Accompanying an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, this publication features previously unpublished archival documentation, as well as historic essays by Slavoj Zizek, Igor Zabel and others.

Wolfgang Tillmans (b 1968) is arguably the most influential artist and photographer of his generation, widely known for his work in 'i-D', 'The Face' and 'Purple', and for photographing, among others, Kate Moss, Gilbert and George and John Waters. The first non-British-born artist to be awarded the Turner prize, Tillmans has exhibited internationally, with two major museum tours travelling worldwide over the past ten years and many exhibitions in some of the finest art institutions. This revised edition is brought up to date with the inclusion of Tillmans' most recent work.

Paulina Olowska's paintings, collages, and knitted works explore Communist Poland's fascination with Western consumerism and celebrates the spirit of what Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand called the "Applied Fantastic," or the vernacular recreations of Western styles--while also paying tribute to American Pattern and Decoration art of the 1970s. This first overview includes an interview with Adam Szymczyk and an essay by Jan Verwoert.

Stano Filko is considered as an influential utopian and polyartist, who understood art and life universally and cosmologically as a unity beyond geographical attributions of East and West. Filko was one of the most important representatives of the Central European neo-avant-gardes, whose work has remained current. Early on, he designed hybrid objects and environments, extending them into unfamiliar terrains with his basic conceptual approach. Again and again, the focus of the work changes: assemblages are followed by text-based works and performances that attempt to circumvent state repression, and later by large-scale gestural painting, characterized by artistic self-assertion, and finally by a final phase, which he dedicates to his increasingly complex "System SF". The publication approaches the multi-layered œuvre from various perspectives and takes a fresh look at this exuberant oeuvre. After achievements in the 1960s, Stano Filko (1937-2015) became persona non grata as a result of the Prague Spring, which led to a daring escape from the "Eastern Bloc", his participation in Documenta, and him eventually moving to New York. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he returned to Bratislava and transformed the studio house Snezienková into a multi-dimensional, colorful "gesamtkunstwerk".

What do we learn by making art? What do we discover by discussing our art with other people? These are the questions at the heart of No New Kind of Duck, which documents an exchange between Jan Verwoert and artists, critics, and other researchers at the Graduate School at the Berlin University of the Arts, including artists Alex Martinis Roe, Jeremiah Day, Azin Feizabadi, Lizza May David, and Ralf Baecker and composers Nuria Nunez Hierro and Bjorn Erlach. Creating art and coining the terms to explain and define one's artistic practice, the contributors find, are two closely related yet distinct practices. The book begins with an introduction by Verwoert that discusses the politics of art as a form of knowledge production. Verwoert's introduction is followed by contributions that turn the focus on the stakes of an art practice today. The book also presents a careful selection of art, in which each piece is presented without accompanying explanations or justification, highlighting the possibilities for artists to coin their own terms to describe the concerns of their practice. Beautifully designed by artist Nienke Terpsma, the book will be an equally welcome companion for established or aspiring artists.

This first monograph on Phillip Lai (b.1969, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) charts the artist's sculptural development over the course of the last two decades. From a basement soy-sauce factory to the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, the publication surveys several of the artist's exhibitions across London, Wakefield, Turin, Berlin and Hong Kong. The nine chapters explore an evolving oeuvre that finds form in materials like aluminium, pewter, concrete, resin, rice, cooking pots, textiles and film. It is through these technologies that Lai broaches the material limits of the everyday world, often working with casting processes that see the abstraction and changing stability of materials as they transition from fluid to solid. What comes into focus is a fascination with how objects can relieve or modulate primal human urges to food and water and how, by extension, a material world might be re-envisioned around concerns of depletion and survival. This publication includes an essay by critic and writer Jan Verwoert, with bilingual text in English and Chinese throughout.