Imagine Otherwise
2 primary works • 3 total works
Book 2
A critical biography of artist Magda Stawarska via a series of journeys—from the streets of Istanbul to the canals of Venice and across the waters of Zanzibar.
For nearly two decades, Polish-born, UK-based artist Magda Stawarska has explored the threshold of memory, the sanctioned shape of history, and the active experience of listening. Through sound and performance, moving image, photography, painting, and printmaking, the artist unfolds overlooked and contested narratives of the past through her practice of “inner listening”.
Stawarska’s distinct approach to artmaking often begins with explorations of cities. Traversing self-directed routes, the artist has often been compared to a flaneur—moving through each site, cultivating a rhythmic score that reveals a densely layered urban topography. These situated scenes become the basis for a distinct form of language—one of conjured imaginaries. The artist and her carefully chosen collaborators unbuckle the seams of the aural landscape, using personal reflection and language, which the artist uses to create installations that constellate active feelings.
These processes evolve, layer upon layer, in the studio and in the public realm, illuminating a palimpsest of dissonance: A discordant score that pierces the very concept of time. In this book, author and curator Omar Kholeif, offers an introductory field guide into the artist’s practice. Structured as a travelogue through Stawarska’s various journeys, readers will venture from the streets of Istanbul to the canal sides of Venice to the waters of Zanzibar. The second volume in the Imagine Otherwise series, Kholeif argues that in Magda Stawarska’s art, one can find the specificity and detail of the ocular in the field and tempo of listening.
Concluded with an afterword by Turner-Prize winning artist, Lubaina Himid CBE RA.
Published by Sternberg Press in collaboration with artPost21
For nearly two decades, Polish-born, UK-based artist Magda Stawarska has explored the threshold of memory, the sanctioned shape of history, and the active experience of listening. Through sound and performance, moving image, photography, painting, and printmaking, the artist unfolds overlooked and contested narratives of the past through her practice of “inner listening”.
Stawarska’s distinct approach to artmaking often begins with explorations of cities. Traversing self-directed routes, the artist has often been compared to a flaneur—moving through each site, cultivating a rhythmic score that reveals a densely layered urban topography. These situated scenes become the basis for a distinct form of language—one of conjured imaginaries. The artist and her carefully chosen collaborators unbuckle the seams of the aural landscape, using personal reflection and language, which the artist uses to create installations that constellate active feelings.
These processes evolve, layer upon layer, in the studio and in the public realm, illuminating a palimpsest of dissonance: A discordant score that pierces the very concept of time. In this book, author and curator Omar Kholeif, offers an introductory field guide into the artist’s practice. Structured as a travelogue through Stawarska’s various journeys, readers will venture from the streets of Istanbul to the canal sides of Venice to the waters of Zanzibar. The second volume in the Imagine Otherwise series, Kholeif argues that in Magda Stawarska’s art, one can find the specificity and detail of the ocular in the field and tempo of listening.
Concluded with an afterword by Turner-Prize winning artist, Lubaina Himid CBE RA.
Published by Sternberg Press in collaboration with artPost21
Book 5
An enchanting convening of texts and images, diaries and epistles celebrating a unique voice and ongoing dialogue around the erotics of art.
Beginning with the artist’s own words from what remain of annotated sketchbooks, this intimate volume journeys from Beirut through Paris to Venice, California, recording the impulses of an atypical, spellbinding character whose voice helped to shape mid- and late-twentieth-century modernism.
Born in Beirut in 1931, the only daughter of the first post-independence president of Lebanon Bechara El Khoury, Huguette observed the blossoming of Lebanon’s creative and cultural scene as Beirut become a metaphorical jewel and the seat of many conjured mythologies. Following her father’s death, and now married to Frenchman Paul Caland and with three children, she completed her first painting in 1964 and informally enrolled in art and design classes at the American University in Beirut (AUB). During this formative period she began a lifelong friendship with the bold and brilliant artist, educator, gallerist, and author Helen Khal. In 1970, Caland left Beirut for Paris and there began one of her most storied collaborations, with the fashion designer Pierre Cardin who invited her to design a series of dresses and caftans. Having relocated again to Venice, California, in 1987 she became a doyenne of the Los Angeles art scene, regularly hosting fellow artists at her home, including Larry Bell, Chris Burden, and one of her dearest comrades, Ed Moses.
For Caland, the body was an unceasing point of obsession and a centrifugal point of investigation. Lithe in outline, her art—erotic compositions on paper, expressive collages, layered self-portraits, and her celebrated "Bribes de corps" paintings cumulatively manifest a composite image of a body in perpetual motion. Hers is a figure that refuses to be contained by logic or ideology, a self that is not prescribed by others but instead open to all of life’s possibilities, its people, and their interpretations.
Copublished by artPost21
Beginning with the artist’s own words from what remain of annotated sketchbooks, this intimate volume journeys from Beirut through Paris to Venice, California, recording the impulses of an atypical, spellbinding character whose voice helped to shape mid- and late-twentieth-century modernism.
Born in Beirut in 1931, the only daughter of the first post-independence president of Lebanon Bechara El Khoury, Huguette observed the blossoming of Lebanon’s creative and cultural scene as Beirut become a metaphorical jewel and the seat of many conjured mythologies. Following her father’s death, and now married to Frenchman Paul Caland and with three children, she completed her first painting in 1964 and informally enrolled in art and design classes at the American University in Beirut (AUB). During this formative period she began a lifelong friendship with the bold and brilliant artist, educator, gallerist, and author Helen Khal. In 1970, Caland left Beirut for Paris and there began one of her most storied collaborations, with the fashion designer Pierre Cardin who invited her to design a series of dresses and caftans. Having relocated again to Venice, California, in 1987 she became a doyenne of the Los Angeles art scene, regularly hosting fellow artists at her home, including Larry Bell, Chris Burden, and one of her dearest comrades, Ed Moses.
For Caland, the body was an unceasing point of obsession and a centrifugal point of investigation. Lithe in outline, her art—erotic compositions on paper, expressive collages, layered self-portraits, and her celebrated "Bribes de corps" paintings cumulatively manifest a composite image of a body in perpetual motion. Hers is a figure that refuses to be contained by logic or ideology, a self that is not prescribed by others but instead open to all of life’s possibilities, its people, and their interpretations.
Copublished by artPost21
Travel from the monasteries of rural Armenia to the exhibition halls of MoMA in the first comprehensive monograph of Iranian American artist Sonia Balassanian.
In this deeply personal portrait of Sonia Balassanian (b. 1942, Arak), an Iranian American artist of Armenian descent, author Dr. Omar Kholeif weaves together poetry, memoir, and historical anecdote to trace the contours of Balassanian’s world.
With a career spanning more than five decades, Balassanian is known for her multidisciplinary, politically charged practice that spans painting, poetry, photography, video, installation, performance, and drawing. At the heart of her corpus are colorful, large-scale, lyrically abstract paintings that she began in the 1960s. In the 1980s, after she had moved to New York, her work took a political turn following the Iranian Revolution. Balassanian drew newfound attention for Hostages: A Diary (1980), an installation of drawings that mapped the experience of following the Iran hostage crisis from the United States, and for Cauterized Literature (1987), a mixed-media series of burnt books mounted on canvas that comments on censorship in Iran.
Balassanian lives and works between New York and Armenia. This is the first comprehensive monograph of her art and life.
Published by Sternberg Press in collaboration with artPost21
In this deeply personal portrait of Sonia Balassanian (b. 1942, Arak), an Iranian American artist of Armenian descent, author Dr. Omar Kholeif weaves together poetry, memoir, and historical anecdote to trace the contours of Balassanian’s world.
With a career spanning more than five decades, Balassanian is known for her multidisciplinary, politically charged practice that spans painting, poetry, photography, video, installation, performance, and drawing. At the heart of her corpus are colorful, large-scale, lyrically abstract paintings that she began in the 1960s. In the 1980s, after she had moved to New York, her work took a political turn following the Iranian Revolution. Balassanian drew newfound attention for Hostages: A Diary (1980), an installation of drawings that mapped the experience of following the Iran hostage crisis from the United States, and for Cauterized Literature (1987), a mixed-media series of burnt books mounted on canvas that comments on censorship in Iran.
Balassanian lives and works between New York and Armenia. This is the first comprehensive monograph of her art and life.
Published by Sternberg Press in collaboration with artPost21