ART

Haytham El-Wardany - How To Disappear

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956793691 Acqn 29248
Pb 10x15cm 64pp 1ills £5.35

This publication proposes a set of aural exercises that show readers how to disappear, reappear,
join a group, or leave a group. Its annex is a lexicon of some of the sounds that dwell in or are
banished from the middle-class household.

If this book had been titled something like "How to listen" or "How to be all ears", the title would
have been appropriate to the content and directly explained the book's focus. Why, then, does
the title prefer to obscure its subject rather than reveal it, running counter to a title's traditional
function? The reason is that this book is grounded in the experience of the unseen listener.
Speakers are seen when they speak, whereas listeners recede into the background of the scene
dominated by speakers. Listeners spend a long time listening to that around them, and hope to
maintain their wallflower position when they speak - their speech having no need to take front row
or appear in the spotlight. The title of this book conceals its subject in a desire to protect the
listener from returning to the spotlight once he or she has left it.

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Iman Mersal - How To Mend: Motherhood And Its Ghosts

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956794254 Acqn 29246
Pb 10x15cm 166pp 5ills £8.95

In How to Mend: On Motherhood and its Ghosts, Kayfa ta's 4th monograph, Iman Mersal
navigates a long and winding road, from the only surviving picture of the author has with her
mother, to a deep search through what memory, photography, dreams and writing, a search of
what is lost between the mainstream and more personal representations of motherhood and its
struggles. How to mend the gap between the representation and the real, the photograph and its
subject, the self and the other, the mother and her child.

If I'd been more aware and someone had asked me about "my mother's picture" I would have
shown them the bird she'd stitched onto the canvas herself. It is not aesthetic vision or skill that
summons my mother's presence in this canvas, but the slight punctum the bird gives me. I get
nothing of this sort from our studio portrait. The bird's eyes are always looking at me, as though
they belong to her. The bird. Motionless. For whose sake my mother sat and stitched by the
window where the light came in, each pinprick a symbolic laceration in the process of its
embodiment: cuts by the hundred to make it whole.

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 ART

Natascha Sadr Haghighian - How To Spell The Fight

Sternberg Press 2018 ISBN 9783956794537 Acqn 29247
Pb 10x15cm 80pp 36ills £5.35

How to Spell the Fight follows a thread that has been running through our fingers from centuries
past till the present day, morphing from the tangible string figures that join our hands in childhood
to the more elusive computational algorithms that engage our fingers today. Following this line of
inquiry through various twists and turns, a conversation about collective agency emerges with the
aim of rethinking current paradigms of cognition, education and power.

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