Imagine Otherwise Series

An enchanting convening of texts and images, diaries and epistles celebrating a unique voice and ongoing dialogue around the erotics of art.

“The madness that spun me into Huguette Caland’s art the first time around felt as if falling off a rollercoaster headfirst into a mountain of frosting. Surrendering to the sumptuous curve of pink hues, they gradually began to tessellate forming an orbit, a tender crossing of blue.”

Lebanese-born artist, Huguette Caland (1931–2019) was a path-breaking figure in late modernism. The only daughter of the first Lebanese president, Bechara El Khoury, she produced a singular body of art that spanned media and continents. Working for more than five decades, her art is recognized for its embodied aesthetic and its unique sensuality.

In this searching critical biography, author and curator, Omar Kholeif, disentangles the seeming madness, velocity, and the interiority of Caland’s life.
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Both an epistolary memoir and a biography, Kholeif interleaves the affective experience of encountering the artist over a period of 18 years, as readers are summoned on a journey through clouds of bristling color. Here, Caland’s fields of light are set to lyric prose and poetry, fashioning a scene for looking at and experiencing the erotics of art anew.

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