The books we collectively select are mostly published by independent presses and reflect the themes explored in our exhibitions and public programs. We are interested in a variety of disciplines, connecting contemporary art with poetry, literature, music, and theory.
Our collection of books introduces yet-unknown or recently translated international voices. To this end, each season, our guest artists and artists in residence also make a selection of books to acquire for our store. Their suggestions make lesser known references accessible to our local audience.
Books by Our Community of Artists
SIREN (some poetics)
Edited by Quinn Latimer
The catalogue of Amant’s landmark 2022 exhibition is now available in our bookstore.
SIREN (some poetics) examines what lies beyond borders and binaries—ancestral, technological, epistemological, literary, patriarchal, corporeal, emotional, or otherwise. Devoted to the voice—as aesthetic signature or the production of self and sound—and the avatar-like bodies we build and break around it, the exhibition considers technologies of myth and mouth, earth and alarm, gender and poetics. Through the work of approximately seventeen artists and poets of various generations and geographies, the show posits practices that employ a grammar of sign and sound systems, at once figuring, resisting, writing, and voicing the visual field.
Moving away from the cool, clinical, conceptual, and mostly two-dimensional exhibitions that have so often stood for language and poetry as a visual art practice, with the white cube standing in for the pale architectonic page, SIREN is situated in the dank earth and its kaleidoscopic ecosystems. Both human and nonhuman forms of language-making and poetics are put forth, from precolonial myth to ludic science fiction, the bootlegged oracular line to critical fabulation, fungal networks to gut bacteria, text to textile to poem to prism to algorithm. Indeed, the works on view in this book often emit and evidence a kind of parapoetics: poetry as opaque metabolic structuring, or as some wild surfacing.
Published by Amant + Dancing Foxes, 2024.
Außenprojekte / Projects for Outside
Isa Genzken
A dual German-English translation, Projects for Outside is a compendium of realized and unrealized outdoor sculptures, including buildings, monuments, memorials, parade floats, art museum facades, puppet stages, construction scaffolding, and playful, subversive interventions done to a bank building, a bridge, and wind fans, as well as much more, including, yes, the Rose series, among them Rose III, formerly belonging to the grounds of Zuccotti Park, now placed amidst the foliage and café seating in our very own Courtyard.
A fun fact on the Roses: “Although there are major similarities in all three, Genzken also subjected them to a process of phasing. From one version to the next, the flower head opens a little wider, and its color changes from the initial red to orange and then yellow.”
If you didn’t know, Jenna Bliss’s poem in the LED scroll produced for her exhibition Basic Cable and installed outside of Géza alludes to the sculpture’s trajectory post-9/11.
Published by Koenig Books, 2020.
Amant by SO-IL
LB 17 SO–IL AMANT is the seventeenth title in the LONG BOOK series, showcasing SO–IL’s recently completed project, Amant, in Brooklyn, New York. It includes essays by Amant’s CEO and founder Lonti Ebers as well as Martino Stierli and Job Floris.
The essays in the publication reflect on Amant’s architecture through SO – IL’s approach, process, and material choices. SO – IL developed Amant’s architecture at the urban scale and weaved it into the fabric of East Williamsburg, a neighborhood characterized by a mix of small businesses, workshops, night clubs, and storage facilities. In response to this environment, Amant comprises four buildings interspersed with a variety of public spaces, among them garden courtyards, a bookstore, and a café. Its architectural structures are simple and direct in nature. Informed by the industrial character of the neighborhood, the foundation is made of unusual materials for a cultural organization, including concrete brick and metal. Also included are exclusive architectural blueprints and sterling scenic photography by Iwan Baan, Naho Kubota, and Rafael Gamo.
Published by AMAG, 2023.
Cyberfeminism Index
Mindy Seu
Do you have a piece of the internet that no longer exists? A veritable tome of over 700 websites, articles, games, publications, ephemera, and more, Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index is a ripple in time that flowers in one’s hands like a CGI chrysanthemum.
Here is a book that—aesthetically, anyway—literally was brat before brat. Cyberfeminism Index is proving more and more evergreen by the year: a relic of Web 2.0 creation and curation opposed to the current era, where mega-corporations own most of the internet. It is an era where false news, vampiric AI, NFT offshore shell games, limitless advertisements, paywalls, and government surveillance threaten what once seemed to be a verdant expanse of resource-sharing and community-building for the marginalized. Seu’s book regroups in a hard media format in context as protest. It actualizes that utopian quality many fear to be lost forever. It is a seed silo for the present and the future of a decentralized, socialized sphere that serves modes of care and liberation, not normalized oppression. The best part is that it is easily accessible to all.
Mindy Seu launched this book at Amant in a lecture performance alongside the performance artist and Hex House founder Melanie Hoff in an event titled Cyberfeminism Index / sex is the world our desires reproduce on October 7th, 2023.
Published by Inventory Press (2023).
A Worm’s Eye View from A Bird’s Beak
Raven Chacon
The Diné Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, musician, and artist releases a landmark career-first monograph. A Worm’s Eye View from A Bird’s Beak is a lush survey of output where the earth, beyond all ‘American’ classification, is communicated with and activated by the artist’s ludic will and post-Cagean ingenuity, breaking tradition to score better means of assembly for us all. Landscape becomes an expanded field for sound, sculpture, and performance. Here’s a score for you:
“Establish the protocols necessary for the next defense / Amplify the call / Gather the players, new or existing and establish their roles / Determine the parameters of allyship with people and with the land / Move to another site needing protection but continue your actions here / Together, define your actions. Maintaining the camp, defending the land and water and sky, and so on / Everyone leaves in radiating lines, with purpose.”
Chacon staged American Ledger No. 3 and Three Solos at Amant in association with Triple Canopy on June 15th, 2023. The performance included Chantal Michelle, Riven Ratanavanh, Aeir Ricks, Laura Hughes, Melodie Stancato, Quinn Dixon, Selena Liu, Michelle Hyun Kim, Sam Christopher, Kinlaw, Grace Villamil, and Sydney Spann.
Published by Sternberg Press (2024).
Goodnight Sweet Thing
Cristine Brache
Where would you disappear to if you could? Artist and filmmaker Cristine Brache’s second collection of poetry is a taut tessellation of style and substance where constructs of the female body / psyche, mortality, and power dynamics are central on the docket of an aesthetically refined inner life. The poems are visceral, sexual, biting, intelligent, concise, and crystalline. They are intimate as diary, stark and humid as a Florida marshland. A poem from the book as an excerpt: “A vision, not very nice to me in person. / An error in printed text. / Scour poems for answers: / tornado / tsunami / blizzard, / fire. / I will vanish. / A door, / in another room, / in the dark.” Take this book with you.
Brache launched this book at Amant, reading alongside Natasha Stagg, hannah baer, and Mara McKevitt on July 13th, 2024.
Published by Anonymous (2024).
Sculptor’s Notebook
Pushpamala N
Sculptor’s Notebook was written as the artist’s dissertation towards her Master’s in Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in Vadodara, India. It is presented here in a facsimile format as the first entry to the (Fine) Arts Dissertations Series care of the Bangalore art-book publishing outfit Reliable Copy. The founders of Reliable Copy, Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian, conduct an interview with the writer and artist about her process and trajectory since her graduation, more than 40 years later.
Pushpamala N saw the dissertation as a part of her artistic output and took the form of the personal diary to create it. She felt it was appropriate to do this, because at the time it seemed to her no one took the practice of writing a dissertation at her school seriously, but rather as a formality. She reflects on early intake of the feminism of the day, nationally and internationally. She talks about her rise to fame alongside her very first show. She talks about alter egos. She talks about how she was advised to take up sculpture from a professor; that to sculpt is an act of mental and not physical strength, enabling her to play with the conceptual in terms of materiality. It’s good to look back and see how you’ve grown, isn’t it?
Reliable Copy is an art book press and research practice based in Bangalore, India. They were artists in residency at Amant in Spring 2024.
Published by Reliable Copy (2024).
Cuentos de Cuentas
Carla Zaccagnini
Cuentos de Cuentas brings together six recollections from Carla Zaccagnini’s childhood in Brazil and Argentina in the 1980s that are relayed by a narrator who questions her own ability to adequately remember what happened. Each episode is structured around a specific object—a tent, a jar, a vest, a dollar bill-that is pivotal in enabling secret economic transactions. Ultimately, they bring the reader to ask: How can we really determine value? How can we distinguish what is true from what is false? Zaccagnini’s texts are punctuated by childhood drawings, magazine and press clippings, and photographs from her family archive.
Published by Amant + K. Verlag, on the occasion of Carla Zaccagnini’s exhibition at Amant, 2022.
Inserts in Real Time: Dora García Performance Work 2000-2023
Dora García
Inserts in Real Time chronicles Dora García’s prolific and unique performance practice timelines thus far. The opening flyleaf of the volume presents trees drawn in pencil, each branch bearing a name of a work and the year it was made. The trees are still growing. This visual metaphor underscores a practice that extends through time, thoroughly nourished by authors and artists past and present, the exemplary care of these spaces that have helped the practice root, as well as the intuitive brilliance and conceptual acumen of García herself. The earth is radically feminist, deeply psychological, firmly literary, the clay is red, good-humored, and lightly mystic.
Dora García’s trilogy of films was shown in Revolution, fulfill your promise! (2022) and in Amor Rojo (2023).
Published by M HKA + K. Verlag (2023).
NAN VANT SOLÈY LA
Abigail Lucien
NAN VANT SOLÈY LA, or IN THE BELLY OF THE SUN, in the author’s words, melds “through creative nonfiction, poetry, and the printed image the playful and purposeful self-actualization of a bicultural queer identity while navigating grief as a landscape to address themes of (be)longing, futurity, and place.” Be Oakley, founder of GenderFail, gives Abigail Lucien a verdant full color book field printed in risograph to display a connective tissue of intersex butterflies, letters, their own sculptures, found objects, photographs of ecology, economy, and so much more.
Abigail Lucien was a Studio & Research resident at Amant in Spring 2023.
Published by GenderFail (2023).
Static Range
Himali Singh Soin
“The stamps in this book are lickable,” says the final page of Static Range, which comes wrapped in a poster poem on newsprint called “LETTER TO THE MOUNTAIN.” The poem touches on the CIA’s mission and attempt, during the Cold War, to install a plutonium-powered antenna on Nanda Devi, a patron mountain of the Himalayas in India. The mission failed when the nuclear generator was lost in a strong winter storm. The fallout has resulted in ecological trauma to the region, both phantom and actual. This project, belonging to a larger exhibition of the same name, is an effort to probe and reconcile that history on multiple levels.
Himali Singh Soin was a Studio & Research resident at Amant during Spring 2023.
Published by Subcontinentment Books (2022).
Amant Picks
Love and Money, Sex and Death
McKenzie Wark
When did you realize that you wanted to change in a major way? Communist-hearted scholar McKenzie Wark shrugs and dives sharply with her serrated critical spirit into the genre of trans* memoir to assess and wrestle against a mid-life crisis, turning the issue on its head when she undergoes coming out as a trans woman her late fifties.
She begins by grappling with early memories of her home in Australia interlaced with her mother’s tragic early demise. Wark takes on an epistolary mode to engage with actual family as well as trans sistren past and present, alive and dead, mythical and literal, including Greek goddess Cybele and other trans-coded deities, lovers, friends, and other chosen family members. She writes in the second-person point of view, an angle to perceptive writing that she believes provides a new aperture for trans-specific writers. She resists stock-standard academic rationales. She queries if past lovers would love her if she transitioned earlier. She gives philosophical tips for bottoming. She makes in-roads into presenting her photography. And yes, of course, she dishes about and upon the locales and concomitant scenes that come with raving in New York and abroad.
Published by Verso Books (2024).
Playboy
Constance Debré
Debré’s novel Playboy represents the first part in a critically acclaimed and award-winning trilogy that chronicles her personal volta at the ripe age of 43: she dissolved her marriage and abandoned her legal career and the trappings of upper-class life to become a lesbian, fight for custody over her son, and be a writer.
In fact, in a Monique Wittig-like quote from an interview with Granta, Debré says: “It was a bit like Saint Augustine and his conversion. In the same week, I had sex with a girl, and I had the feeling that I could write. I had this incredible feeling that I could catch things, that life was there to be caught.” This text’s relationship with a discovery of truth is the snuggest & excoriating bond present. No one is spared, not even herself. This is not autofiction, this is a pumice stone to the face of one’s personal reality, straight (well! perhaps not), no chaser. Writing like this means one puts skin in the game.
Published by Semiotexte (2024).
Your Love Is Not Good
Johanna Hedva
In an art world whose function is often predicated on exploitative dynamics and blurry boundaries, Johanna’s characters struggle to love and to make a way for themselves amid it. In a manner that recalls the absurdist Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, Johanna’s characters strive to ‘fail better,’ or die trying. Those efforts are at worst entertaining and at best enlightening.. If no one in life gets out alive, how could your aim be better in regards to the love you would want to give to yourself or others?
The novel is a field to explore the means that whiteness as default distorts the world around it, how queerness can complicate and liberate one regarding desire, and how art’s use value is helping us cope or navigate an uncertain and chaotic world.
Published by And Other Stories (2023)
Transgender Marxism
Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke
The authors of Transgender Marxism advance Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels’s concept of dialectical materialism to a frontier they did not foresee. Trans* people of all variants have always been here but were not widespread for many reasons that negated their existence: racism, sexism, colonization, religion, and more. This book is the first of its kind. It exists to theoretically reveal and wrestle with those reasons for the larger goal of improving the lives of everyone. The means to find these reasons are very simple, even if you are not trans.
Published by Pluto Books (2021).
Choir
Eugene Lim
Long Take - Issue 1
With Choir, Eugene Lim resurrects ghostly and sometimes extreme voices that linger in Sung Tieu’s Infra-Specter exhibition: from the bodies that encountered the discomfort of her metal stools, to the voices gathered on U.S. Army PSYOP tapes in the war in Vietnam that shaped Sung’s thinking, to rants about fossil fuel extraction connected to her new body of work made for the exhibition at Amant (spring and summer 2023). Choir both functions as an autonomous piece of fiction and as an accompaniment to the exhibition.
Long Take is a new triannual series co-edited by Amant and Bushwick-based independent publisher Wendy’s Subway. Annual subscriptions to the series are available for $25 via Wendy’s Subway’s website.
Published by Amant + Wendy’s Subway (Summer 2023).
Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family
Sophie Lewis
Full Surrogacy Now is about the politics of pregnancy as activism and philosophy. It is an overdue, deeply nuanced critique of surrogacy in a late capitalist world that repurposes the gestational labor of pregnant persons (and those adjacent to them) as an extension of the gig economy. Sophie illuminates new networks of interdependence for surrogacy along a queer, abolitionist axis.
Sophie Lewis led our learnshop titled To Build, We Must Destroy: Futures of Care, alongside M.E. O’Brien.
Published by Verso (2022).