In recent years, music videos, celebrity dance contests and TikTok challenges have shaped the way we experience choreography and dance culture. During the Covid-19 pandemic when live performance events were cancelled, people confined to their homes turned to making and viewing short dance videos: created on mobile phones and designed to be easily replicable and shared on social media platforms. Dance has long had a relationship to film and the screen, from early films of Loie Fuller's Serpentine Dance (c. 1890s) which highlighted the mediums ability to capture movement and light, to the multi-screen presentations of the choreography of Merce Cunningham transposed into video by Charles Atlas. Visual artists today are inventively reformatting dance and choreographed movement for not only film and the screen but also specifically for the gallery setting, with its repeatable presentation and spatialised viewing conditions. Between Poetics and Politics will feature 10-12 short films by contemporary artists and choreographers that explore the intersection of dance, movement and moving image. These moving image works focus on performing bodies, and unfold as both as individual works but also as collective storytelling, exploring timely topics, ranging from gender politics and desire to bodily memory, resistance and personal healing, to indigeneity and collective identities. The works will be contextualised by three new essays.

This publication accompanies a major new exhibition of Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates (b.1973), focussing on his clay-based work, collaborative projects and large scale sculptures and installations since 2005. Gates's interdisciplinary practice draws on his training in both urban planning and pottery, resulting in work which aims to instigate the creation of cultural communities and the recirculation of art-world capital, all the time considering the notion of Black space and ideology. Fully illustrated with examples of pottery, sculptures, installations, films and archive materials, the book also documents a new film by Gates and features essays from leading craft historians and writers. This in-depth exploration of Gates's work is timely and relevant now in a world where a new generation are raising questions through making, identity and activism.

Accompanying the innovative new 2019 exhibition `Is This Tomorrow?' at Whitechapel Gallery, this fully-illustrated catalogue re-imagines the classic 1956 publication made for the Gallery's seminal exhibition `This is Tomorrow'. For a major new presentation in 2019, Whitechapel Gallery is taking as a model its groundbreaking 1956 exhibition `This is Tomorrow', an event which is indelibly linked to the institution's history. Organised and developed by architect, writer and sculptor Theo Crosby, `This is Tomorrow' featured 37 artists, architects, designers and writers who worked together in 12 small groups. In the catalogue, Lawrence Alloway introduced the exhibition as `devoted to the possibilities of collaboration', the results of which `appear to be setting up a programme for the future.' `Is This Tomorrow?' will also feature 12 groups of contemporary architects, artists and other cultural practitioners to highlight the potential of collaboration, to address key issues we face today and to offer a vision of the future. Both UK and international participants will explore subjects from conflict and warfare, economic inequality, migration and resource scarcity, to education, labour, trade and technology, comparing and contrasting the ideas of the original `This is Tomorrow' artists and architects whose concerns with communication theory, mass culture and the vernacular reflected their associations with British Constructivism and the Independent Group. The accompanying catalogue will take its inspiration from the original seminal 1956 publication, with each group presenting their process of design and collaboration through plans, sketches and photographs, plus accompanying explanatory texts. Architects featured include Adjaye Associates (UK/US/Ghana), Alberto Kalach/TAX (Mexico), Marina Tabassum Architects (Bangladesh) and Studio Anne Holtrop (Netherlands). Artists featured include Rana Begum, Cecile B. Evans, Simon Fujiwara and Kapwani Kiwanga.

The catalogue to accompany a major solo presentation of the work of the influential New York-based artist Mary Heilmann, her first in a public institution in the UK in 15 years. Born in California in 1940, Heilmann studied ceramics and poetry before moving to New York in 1968 and taking up painting. A pioneer of infusing abstract painting with influences from craft traditions and popular culture (especially rock music and California's beach culture), Heilmann is one of the most important yet still underrecognised artists working today. This publication explores Heilmann's approach to abstraction from two distinct but interrelated perspectives: the formal and the personal. The personal is reflected in the title Looking at Pictures, named after a section in the artist's memoir The All Night Movie (1999), in which she writes, `Each of my paintings can be seen as an autobiographical marker', clearly represented here through works that relate to moments in the artist's friendships, memories of places where she has lived or spent time and her love of music and film. The juxtaposing formal aspect of her work is also explored, most evidently in her early paintings of grids and squares rendered in primary colours and in works that are based on architectural or interior planes, such as doors and mirrors. As well as new essays by Lydia Yee (Chief Curator, Whitechapel Gallery) and Briony Fer (Professor of History of Art, University College London), and writings by the artist on key works, the publication will feature 100 beautiful full-colour illustrations of paintings, works on paper, furniture and ceramics from Heilmann's five-decade career.