Room for Reading / ‘Myths of the new future’

Saturday 17 May 2025 18:00
Saturday 19 July 2025 19:00

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Our Room for Reading offers further reading and recommendations directly from the artists included in ‘Myths of the new future’. Visit our library at Florence Street during the exhibition to browse their selections.

Taysir Batniji

In ‘Disruptions’ (2024), Taysir Batniji collects fragmented screenshots taken between 24 April 2015 and 23 June 2017 during several WhatsApp video conversations with his mother and family in Gaza. Settled in Europe and unable to return to his homeland for years, this digital commons provided a crucial meeting ground for Batniji and his family: a digital space nonetheless shaped and destabilised by the same forces affecting the artist’s relatives in everyday life.

Hans Belting, ‘Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science’(2011) and Andrey Tarkovsky, ‘Time Within Time: Diaries 1970-1986’(2019).

By Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Taysir Batniji selects ‘Memory of Forgetfulness’ (1982, English translation, 1995) “I always had the feeling that he was the poet who expresses in words what I try to express with forms” says Batniji.

Read ‘Memory of Forgetfulness’ here.

He also selects Palestinian novelist, Akram Musallam’s ‘The Dance of Deep-Blue Scorpion’ (2021). “There is a lot of “(auto)derision in this book” says Batniji, “and a strong artistic dimension through the figure of the father who has lost his leg accidentally. This missing leg, and emptiness / absence in general, becomes a metaphor for Palestinian loss and dispossession.”

In French, Batniji selects ‘Diplopie’ (2009) by curator and photograhy historian, Clément Chéroux and Arlette Khoury-Tadié, 'Une enfance à Gaza (1942-1958)' (2002). Batniji says "the author describes a period which ends few years before my birth. Reading this story captured the reality of Gaza with far more clarity than I had understood it in my mind before".

Also in French, is Edward W. Saïd and Seloua Luste Boulbina, 'Dans l'ombre de l'Occident / Les Arabes peuvent-ils parler?' ('In the Shadow of the West / Can Arabs Speak?') (2011). Watch ‘The Shadow of the West’ written by Edward Said and directed by Geoff Dunlop here and read an interview with Seloua Luste Boulbina here.

By Hans Belting, ‘Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science’ (2011) and ‘Time Within Time: Diaries 1970-1986’ by Andrey Tarkovsky (2019). Belting’s book examines the use of perspective in Renaissance painting and its mathematical origins in Baghdad in the eleventh century, exploring the ramifications this has had on how we as viewers look at art in the present day.

‘Time within Time’ is both a diary and a notebook, maintained by Tarkovsky from 1970 until his death. Intense and intimate, it offers reflections on Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and others. Batniji describes Tarkovsky’s diaries as “powerful testimony full of poetry…and the strong determination to pursue writing and filming despite censorship, restrictions and disease”. Read it here.

Dora Budor

Dora Budor’s ‘Continent’ (2023) assembles materials relating to the exhibition of the same name at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2022. The publication provides different perspectives on the project while also acting as an autonomous object within Budor’s broader body of work. Central to the book are four texts that elaborate on the exhibition in different ways by curator and writer Richard Birkett, Amelia Groom, architect and historian Robin Evans Budo, and the director of Kunsthaus Bregenz, Thomas D. Trummer.

Jesse Darling

‘VIRGINS’ (2021)is Darling’s first chapbook, a collection of poetry published by London based publishers Monitor Books. Described by Anne Boyer as “poems [that] sing from the scrappy corners where life still lives”, ‘VIRGINS’ brings stories of a cast of characters and presents them here as snappy vignettes.

M.E. O’Brien & Eman Abdelhadi,‘Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072’ (2022) and John Berger, ‘Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance’ (2005).

Darling also recommends two books for our Room for Reading: ‘Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072’ (2022) by M.E. O’Brien & Eman Abdelhadi and ‘John Berger’s – Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance’ (2005).

‘Everything for Everyone’ is a speculative fiction novel, imagining interviews with revolutionaries in a not-so distant future. Their stories outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.

A collection of essays by the English writer and painter John Berger, ‘Hold Everything Dear’ reflects on the political at the core of artistic expression and at the centre of human existence . The essays ponder the traumas of various conflicts at the start of the 21st century, meditating on the far extremes of human behaviour.

P. Staff

Derek Jarman, ‘Chroma’(1994), Johanna Hedva, ‘On Hell’ (2021) and Rosie Stockton, ‘Fuel’ (2025).

“Nocturnal sick bed missives, oil fields, Dungeness, black tar, broken bodies, feathers, hacking, freedom, domination, longing; domesticity and love, and the third house to the ninth house, kissing, sexting; colours of grief, blushes of apocalypse, blindness; i need unbroken speech. revolutionary letters. first hand accounts, temoignage, martyrs. violent systems of love.”

P. Staff

P. Staff selects Derek Jarman’s ‘Chroma’ (1994); ‘On Hell’ by Johanna Hedva (2021) and ‘Fuel’ by Rosie Stockton (2025).

Written a year before Jarman’s death, and as his eyesight was failing, ‘Chroma’ is an intensely personal work exploring the uses of colour from the medieval to the modern, with evocative memories from Jarman’s life. ‘On Hell’ by Johanna Hedva tells the story of an ex-con whose body is broken by American empire. It is a novel about escaping and the myths that trick and resist totalitarianism. In ‘Fuel’, Rosie Stockton showcases capitalism’s quiet shaping of our day-to-day lives. Exploring themes of labor, desire, gender, and loss, Stockton’s poems trace the emotions and structures that define us.

Read Johanna Hedva on P. Staff here.

Published following Staff’s installation ‘The Foundation’ (a touring exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, London; Spike Island, Bristol; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane), this book, published in 2015, documents the eponymous work by Staff - a film installation exploring queer intergenerational relationships negotiated through historical materials and shot at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles.

Details

In conjunction with our projects, exhibitions and events, Room for Reading offers artists we work with an opportunity to contribute to The Common Guild library and share the books and resources that have influenced their artistic practice.

Every artist’s selection is added to The Common Guild’s expansive reference library of artist books, catalogues, and cultural and critical theory.