Andrew Ross’s reflections on his experience of combining activism with writing offer guidance about how to meet political obligations and seize opportunities when presented with events of historical significance. We don’t get to choose the time we live in, nor the conditions which determine our agency. What are our responsibilities to the world we’re given, not only to interpret and understand it but also to change it? How can we look at the past as an inspiration while remaining responsive to the urgent demands of the present?

Claire-Louise Bennett explores the surreal portraiture of Dorothea Tanning. A chance encounter with an exhibition of Tanning’s works in Madrid reawakens a kinship between the surrealist artist and the author. Falling in and out of the artist’s life and paintings, she recollects the rebellious internal worlds and nascent creativity that defined both their childhoods.

Will Ashon looks to David Hockney’s portrait “My Mother, Bolton Abbey”. The image is a joiner, a photo-collage, of Laura Hockney made in 1982. Ashon creates a collage of his own, interviewing ten women of different ages and rearranging their responses; the result is a celebratory chorus and homage to the thoughts and memories that flourish when we lend our attention to an artwork.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have produced five drawings for Afterlife. Each fabric portfolio consists of one original and a booklet containing four offset reproductions of the remaining drawings. This edition speculates on a blank beyond reach by depicting various figures in transit, from one edge to the other, from birth to death.

This edition consists of two books and a vinyl disk. The first book contains emails about the vinyl’s arduous path to fruition and the second serves as an appendix – an accumulation of the emails’ attachments (diagrams, renderings, sound file references) and images of vinyl cutting tests, alongside archival material from the artist’s studio.

This book combines two kinds of imagery. It pairs together Beam of Light, Kiki Smith’s drawings from the Vision Hour collages, with Seton Smith’s photographs of Hangzhou and the Pedder Building in Hong Kong. Page after page, one is confronted by alternating moods, either shifting towards the marvel of nature or sliding into cloistered spaces. It suggests ancient dichotomies, like heaven and hell, body and soul, decomposition and growth.  

The root formation of a tree overpowers a concrete sidewalk. The thriving organic network evokes nature’s resilience against injustice.

The self-administered justice the artists refer to is an Adlerian psychoanalytical technique of, figuratively, spitting in the client’s soup; a method which squashes a patient’s delusion by exposing its underlying motivations.

The artist has divided a €500 note into 50 equal parts, implying that currency is worthless if it cannot be distributed. However, as one kind of value is nullified, the artist creates another.

The image indicates, by referencing the movement’s strident black and red flag, that justice can only be envisioned from an anarchic standpoint.

Golnaz Fathi repeats a line from the thirteenth-century poet, scholar, and mystic – Rumi. Although Fathi’s practise is also full of colourful and abstract works, the pages shown here are of elegantly restrained, almost geometrical, refrains which give Rumi’s language space to resonate. The book is handbound in silk, with a red calfskin spine in the Bradel-style.

This book contains unique works of ink and stitched calligraphy which mark an encounter between the artist and the fragmented remaining writings of Sappho. Dengo uses expressive illegibility to engage with the loss of the poet’s work. The book is bound in wood, hand-painted and comes in a perspex case with an opaque spine.