Editorial Selection: 5 Books about Visual Arts, Image and Literature

By Sybaris

Every month, Sybaris’ team select five oustandig books, both in English and Spanish, that we consider relevant to reflect about the present of contemporary visual arts.

Here our selection in alphabetical order:

1. Cien del MUAC, 2021

Twelve years since the last exhausting review of Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo‘s (MUAC) art collection, Cien del MUAC is an exploration of this museum artistic and documentary heritage with te main objetctive to share with the audience one hundred pieces which are already a referent for both the collective imaginary and thinking. This volume gathers whe work of 96 artist and art collectives whose works have become key objects for the Mexican contemporary art history.

 

 

2. En una orilla brumosa. Cinco rutas para repensar los futuros de las artes visuales y la literatura, 2021

Edited by Mexican artist and writer Verónica Gerber Bicecci, En una orilla brumosa (Five ways to rethink the futurure of visual arts and literature) explores the possible futures of literature and its relationship with visual arts through thirteen speculative essays written by theoreticians, artists, poets and activists, like Hito Steyerl, Cecilia Miranda, Yasnayá Aguilar, Alicia Kopf, Juan Cárdenas, Maria Fusco, Ariel Guzik, Olivia Teroba and Ursula K. Le Guin.

 

 

 

3. The Agency. Readymades Belong to Everyone, 2021

In December 1987, at New York’s Cable Gallery, the French artist Philippe Thomas (1951–1995) opened his first agency, which he called readymades belong to everyone®. Soon afterwards, in September 1988, a second branch was established at the Claire Burrus gallery in Paris, with the equivalent French name les ready-made appartiennent à tout le monde®. This volume provides documentation of the project, along with a final previously unpublished interview by Thomas that enables readers to understand the coherence of his entire work.

4. The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues, 2021

Edited by András Szántó, The Future of the Museums: 28 Dialogues reflects a rapidly growing, changing, and varied museum landscape in which dynamic experimentation is happening worldwide, with institutions in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Australia often leading the way in developing new models. It is a sector experiencing a moment of reckoning about inequality and social justice, pressed to achieve more diversity in staffing, governance, programming, interpretation, and collections. The dialogues reveal the diverse ways in which the search is on for new sources of income, new ways to engage the public, new ways to run institutions.

5. Photography Off the Scale, 2021

Edited by Jussi Parikka and Tomáš Dvořák, Photography Off the Scale offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the scale and quantity of images in contemporary visual culture. From the mass-image to post-photography, AI to online visual culture, planetary diagrams to LIDAR, the breadth of topics is wide. The book emerges from our Operational Images and Visual Culture project (FAMU, Prague – and funded by the Czech Science Foundation, 2019-2023).