For the last two decades, Josephine Meckseper has created large-scale installations, sculptures, paintings, and films that simultaneously expose and encase signifiers such as advertisements, political imagery, and everyday objects to form an exploration into the collective unconscious of our time. The artist’s exhibition at the Frac des Pays de la Loire is her first major institutional survey show in France.

This beautifully designed monograph exhibits Elisabeth Wild’s kaleidoscopic and vibrant collages. Using cutouts of commercial imagery from glossy magazines, Wild composes a dimensionless reality that is witty yet menacing, ancient yet immortal. Imagining figures that are structural and anatomical, her work presents a shimmering dream logic.

In this provocative intellectual biography, architectural historian Mark Wigley makes the surprising claim that the thinking behind modernist architect Konrad Wachsmann’s legendary projects was dominated by the idea of television. While architecture is typically embarrassed by television, preferring to act as if it never happened, Wachsmann fully embraced it.

In 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork for espionage. This incident is the focus of Heba Y. Amin’s The General’s Stork, an ongoing project that investigates the politics of aerial surveillance—against the backdrop of biblical prophecies, drone warfare, and colonial narratives—from a bird’s-eye view.

In Exhibition-ism, theorist and artist Mieke Bal develops the idea that exhibiting is a significant form of the contemporary. In an exhibition, visitors are in the actual company of artworks that can perform. Looking at art as process, Bal makes the case that the being-together-in-time of an exhibition visit encourages and, if the curation is well thought-out, can heighten the sense of the contemporaneity—art being more capable of this than anything else.

The way we see the world has changed drastically since NASA released the “blue marble” image of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. No longer a placid slow-moving orb, the world is now perceived as a hothouse of activity and hyper-connectivity that cannot keep up with its inhabitants.

Addressing the current upswing of attention in the sciences, arts, and humanities to the proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch called the Anthropocene, this book critically surveys that thesis and points to its limitations.

Jill Johnston—cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon—was renowned as a writer on dance, especially on the developments around Judson Dance and the 1960s downtown New York City scene, and later as the author of the radical-feminist classic Lesbian Nation (1973). This book collects thirty texts by Jill Johnston that were initially published in her weekly column for The Village Voice between 1960 and 1974.

Following the tradition of classical theories of painting based on exchanges with artists, Isabelle Graw’s The Love of Painting considers the art form not as something fixed, but as a visual and discursive material formation with the potential to fascinate owing to its ability to produce the fantasy of liveliness.

Quinn Latimer’s arresting writings find expression in literature and theory as well as contemporary art and its history. This collection of Latimer’s recent essays and poems examines issues of genealogy and influence, the poverty and privilege of place, architecture’s relationship to language, and feminist economies of writing, reading, and art making.

One common feature of the wave of recent revolutions and revolts around the world is not political but rather architectural: many erupted on inner-city roundabouts.  In thinking about the relation between protest and urban form, Eyal Weizman starts with the May 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, the first of the “roundabout revolutions,” and traces its lineage to the Arab Spring and its hellish aftermath.

This collection of essays by Martin Herbert considers various artists who have withdrawn from the art world or adopted an antagonistic position toward its mechanisms. Providing a counterargument to this concept of self-marketing, Herbert examines the nature of retreat, whether in protest, as a deliberate conceptual act, or out of necessity.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Hans Ulrich Obrist but were afraid to ask has been asked by the sixteen practitioners in this book.

In Hito Steyerl’s writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in.

Objects in This Mirror posits a polemical defense of intellectual and cultural generalism and curiosity. The collection of essays rewardingly navigates such diverse subjects as the writings of W. G. Sebald and Roland Barthes to the history of cravat-tying manuals and the search for a cure to the common cold.