Kate Fowle

In 2011, Independent Curators International (ICI) launched Sourcebook, a new publication series with a focus on artists and their practice, offering a fresh perspective on political and cultural issues impacting and inspiring the artistic process. Each volume is edited by an artist, from a selection of his or her own archive, and is comprised of images, documents, articles, letters and newspaper clippings. For the second Sourcebook in the series, ICI has invited conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg to cull his archives, stored between his family home in Cleveland and his studio in Los Angeles. Articulated around nine important works spanning the breadth of the artist’s practice from 1978–2012, the publication delves into the primary material that Ruppersberg uses as his medium: popular culture ephemera, newspapers, magazine covers, snapshots, home movies, educational slides, advertising and posters. This material becomes the visual registry that is reconfigured in numerous Ruppersberg projects.

How artists have examined the legacies of American-led military engagement in Iraq The 1991 Gulf War marked the start of a lengthy period of American-led military involvement in Iraq that led to more than a decade of sanctions, the 2003 Iraq War, and ongoing repercussions throughout the region. Though the Iraq War officially ended in 2011, artists have continued to examine these conflicts and their impacts. Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011 charts the effects of these wars on cultural production in Iraq and throughout its diasporas, as well as responses to the wars in the West, revealing how this period was defined by unsettling intersections of spectacularized violence and new imperialisms. The exhibition features more than 80 artists and collectives, including Afifa Aleiby, Dia al-Azzawi, Thuraya al-Baqsami, Paul Chan, Harun Farocki, Guerrilla Girls, Thomas Hirschhorn, Hiwa K, Hanaa Malallah, Monira Al Qadiri, Nuha al-Radi and Ala Younis. This catalog features newly commissioned essays by Zainab Bahrani, Rijin Sahakian, Nada Shabout and McKenzie Wark alongside texts by exhibition co-curators Peter Eleey and Ruba Katrib. Excerpts from period journals by artist Nuha Al-Radi and anonymous blogger Riverbend detail life in Iraq over two decades of war, sanctions and occupation. Reprinted essays from Jean Baudrillard and Serge Daney provide additional context, delving into the effects of the conflict upon media and visual culture.

Spanning 60 years, this publication surveys the art, editing and curating activities of London-based, Pakistani-born artist Rasheed Araeen (born 1935) for the first time, presenting an expansive artistic practice that has had a profound influence on generations of artists, writers and thinkers. Whether as a pioneer of Minimalist sculpture, a publisher of magazines at the forefront of postcolonial thinking like Third Text (founded 1987) or as an abstract painter drawing inspiration from the art of the Abbasid period, Araeen has consistently sought to realign the understanding of Modernism imposed by the hegemonic discourses of the West. Bringing together newly commissioned essays by leading art critics and historians, documentation from the artist's archive as well as an extensive survey of Araeen's work, this publication offers the opportunity--long overdue--to assess Araeen's impact as an artist and thinker.

A comprehensive study of one of the most versatile artists and acute observers of our time, who fuses art and fashion American artist Sterling Ruby works in a large variety of media, including sculpture, ceramics, painting, and video art. Ruby is influenced by a wide range of sources, including marginalized societies, maximum-security prisons, modernist architecture, artefacts and antiquities, graffiti, waste and consumption, and urban gangs. Through these, he examines the psychological space where individual expression confronts social constraint.

This anthology of newly commissioned texts presents a series of detailed examples of the different kinds of knowledge production that have recently emerged within the field of curatorial practice. The first volume of its kind to provide an overview of the theme of research within contemporary curating, "Curating Research" marks a new phase in developments of the profession globally. Consisting of case studies and contextual analyses by curators, artists, critics and academics, including Hyunjoo Byeon, Carson Chan and Joanna Warsza, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Olga Fernandez Lopez, Kate Fowle, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Liam Gillick, Georgina Jackson, Sidsel Nelund, Simon Sheikh, Henk Slager, tranzit.hu, Jelena Vestic, Marion von Osten and Vivian Ziherl, and edited by curators Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson, the book is an indispensible resource for all those interested in the current state of art and in the intersection between research and curating that underlies exhibition-making today.