Mieke Bal Book order

"Up into the unknown" is the phrase the architects Colin Fournier and Peter Cook came up with for the futuristic architecture of the Kunsthaus Graz. To this day, this is to be understood as an invitation to explore the limits of the imagination and to test alternative ideas and utopias in a laboratory for art. Since 2003, the Kunsthaus has been an institution without a collection. Today it claims to be a museum. With its architecture of hybrid spaces, site-specific invitations to confrontation and the mission to be a production site for contemporary art, the Kunsthaus Graz is a space and place of potentiality and otherness. Blueprint for a Museum is to be understood as a draft for a museum, a blueprint that simultaneously reflects abstract categories of the institution and resonates with concrete programme concepts. The publication thus follows the idea of experimentation that the Kunsthaus Graz has embodied since its foundation.

In this rich, highly illustrated book, Mieke Bal takes us on a journey through the range of her work, using the concept of image-thinking as a point of connection between cultural analysis and artistic practice. Sharing a lifetime of experience of writing about art, making films and installations, as well as curating exhibitions, she shows us how these may be brought into dialogue with insights from theory. Bal teaches us how to think with images, but also how to write and think – as artists and writers – about our own creative work. This is Mieke Bal at her most personal and her best.

A major survey of Dame Laura Knight, first female Royal Academician and popular British artist of the 20th century.Laura Knight (1877–1970) was one of the most famous and popular English artists of the twentieth century. She was the first woman to have a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, in 1965. In the following decades her realist style of painting fell out of fashion and her work become largely overlooked. A new generation has rediscovered her work, finding a contemporary resonance in her depictions of women at work, of people from marginalized communities and her contributions as a war artist.This beautifully illustrated book, which accompanies a major exhibition at MK Gallery, provides an overview of Knight's illustrious from her training at Nottingham Art School at the age of 13 and her time in North Yorkshire and Cornwall, to her visits to traveller communities and a segregated American hospital. It also features her circus, ballet and theatre scenes, paintings of women during the war and her late paintings of nature.The selection of over 160 works combines celebrated paintings with less known graphic and design works, including ceramics, jewellery and costumes that reflect the artist's enduring interest in the everyday activities of people from all walks of life.

Narratology in Practice draws on various cultural domains to explain the ways in which theory illuminates the presence of narrative.

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. This essay considers recent shows of Bal's own video work, and is framed by observations on contemporary sculpture's response to classics of the form. 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.

This book emphasizes the importance of production politics, or struggles in the workplace between workers and their employers, for understanding migrant labour regimes in Asia and the Gulf. Drawing from a study of Bangladeshi construction workers in Singapore, as well as on comparative material in the region, Bal shows that migrant labour politics are significantly influenced by the specific form of production politics as well as their variable outcomes. In contrast to contentious politics approaches, this book sheds light on the extent to which migrant labour regimes can be contested by workers and civil society groups and explains the recent rise in migrant labour unrest in the region.

In her thirty-fifth book, the eminent Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal (*1946 in Heemstede) explores the new language that Indian artist Nalini Malani (*1946 in Karachi) has been developing since early this century with her shadow plays. The result of Malani’s new art is an extremely powerful application of the idea of the (multiple) moving image—past, present, and future. An iconic, politically engaged art form that has made waves at exhibitions such as Paris, Delhi, Bombay at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2011), Documenta (13) in Kassel (2012), and Scenes for a New Heritage at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2015–16). Mieke Bal conducts a unique dialogue between five of Malani’s shadow plays and theoretical issues concerning art. It examines the complexity, layering, and multiplicity of images, thoughts, sound, and movements: technologies and poetic fragments, narratives and archives, as effective politically as it is artistically. Exhibition: 18.3.–18.6.2017, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

How to Construct a Time Machine' is an exhibition of over 25 historical and contemporary artworks that explore how artists play with media in innovative ways to transform our experience of time. Artists John Cage, Katie Paterson, On Kawara, Mark Wallinger, Nam June Paik, Catherine Yass, and the Lumiere Brothers.

Danish artist Trine Sondergaard's oeuvre is marked by a precision and a sensibility that co-exist with an investigation of the medium of photography and its boundaries. Sondergaard's new volume brings together three recent series exploring stillness and introspection. In Stasis different historical time periods and materials meet.