Floating Opera Press

Floating Opera Press is a Berlin-based publisher of contemporary criticism as well as select artists’ books. It aims to make new demands on critical inquiry into culture and politics and to publish underrepresented or historically silenced writers and artists. In this vein, Floating Opera Press launched the Critic’s Essay Series in 2021. The series gives voice to authors who subvert or replace normative modes of thinking through our cultural and political moment.

CIARÁN FINLAYSON

STEVEN WARWICK

In Perpetual Slavery, Ciarán Finlayson investigates the relationship of art to freedom in the work of Cameron Rowland and Ralph Lemon, who both use imagery of labor haunted and structured by the historical experience of slavery. Finlayson suggests that these two artists’ work overcomes the dichotomy between the recording and interpretation of history by making both the object of artistic experience, thereby providing a space to grasp the continuing effects of slavery.

CIARÁN FINLAYSON is a writer and editor based in New York. His essays have appeared in periodicals including Artforum and Bookforum and in several exhibition catalogs. He is the managing editor of Blank Forms Editions.

$15.00* paper 978-3-9823894-4-8

APRIL 108 pages  / 4.72" x 6.69" What is evil? How is it categorized, understood, and used? Surveying examples from cinema, music, and politics, Notes on Evil provides observations on the mechanisms by which societies construct enemies in a collective bid to expel their “problems.” But does the label of evil help rid us of social ills? Or does it just lead to superficial purges that distract us from deeper forms of inequity? The artist and writer Steven Warwick offers a series of notes on the overlapping social architectures that frame our current discourse on good and evil, seeking to chart a path beyond our collective impasse.

STEVEN WARWICK is an artist, writer, and musician based in Berlin. His multidisciplinary practice spans formats including albums, galleries, nightclubs, and print publications. Warwick’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, and Urbanomic.

$15.00* paper 978-3-9819108-7-2

2022 78 pages / 4.72" x 6.69" / 14 illustrations

KAREN ARCHEY

SKYE ARUNDHATI THOMAS

“Archey’s book articulates the possibility of a politicized art that goes beyond mere style without sacrificing the possibility of its appeal to a wider constituency.”

—art-agenda

Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The practice of institutional critique has responded to the social embeddedness of art institutions by looking at the inner workings of such organizations. Expanding the definition of institutional critique, Karen Archey develops a broader understanding of contemporary art’s sociopolitical entanglements, looking beyond what cultural institutions were to what they are and what they might become.

KAREN ARCHEY is curator of contemporary art at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She has organized solo exhibitions by artists Rineke Dijkstra, Catherine Christer Hennix, Steffani Jemison, Metahaven, Jeff Preiss, Charlotte Prodger, and Hito Steyerl. Archey is a contributor to several art publications, including Artforum and Frieze.

$17.00* paper 978-3-9819108-8-9

2022 116 pages / 4.72" x 6.69" / 14 illustrations “A much-needed document of resistance in a world

besieged by increasingly hostile forms of tyranny.”

—Asian Review of Books

Skye Arundhati Thomas reflects on the Indian protest movement that began in mid-2019 against xenophobic and casteist citizenship laws. This essay is a piece of political reportage told through the story of images and their afterlife. In the wake of the state erasure of these events, it asks what it means to remember and how words and imagery inscribe reality into history.

SKYE ARUNDHATI THOMAS is a writer based in Goa, India. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, the London Review of Books, Frieze, and ArtReview, among other places. She is an editor of the White Review.

$15.00* paper 978-3-9819108-6-5

2021 72 pages / 4.72” x 6.69” / 8 b&w illustrations

WILLIAM J. SIMMONS

KRISTIAN VISTRUP MADSEN

“A short, lively, thought-provoking search for a more encompassing queer art.”

—Kirkus Reviews

William J. Simmons offers novel ways of thinking about queer-feminist art outside of the critical-complicit and abstractrepresentational binaries that continue to haunt contemporary queer art. Queer Formalism proposes a new kind of queer art writing, one that skirts the limits imposed by normative histories of art, film, music, and culture more broadly. Artists addressed include Sally Mann, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Math Bass, Lorna Simpson, Laurie Simmons, Alex Prager, Lana Del Rey, Jessica Lange, and Louise Lawler.

WILLIAM J. SIMMONS is an art historian, curator, and writer based in Los Angeles. His work has been published in numerous magazines, edited volumes, and monographs. He is a contributing editor at King Kong Magazine and Flash Art.

$15.00* paper 978-3-9823894-0-0

2021 88 pages / 4.72" x 6.69" / 16 color illustrations In Doing Time, Kristian Vistrup Madsen deliberates on his correspondence with an inmate in a California prison named Michael. Over several years, this spawns a series of reflections about the politics of solidarity and appropriation but also about writing and what happens when life is turned into art. This book is a portrait of a friendship interpolated by great difference and of a fearful time in which experience and identity are everything, and thinking not enough.

KRISTIAN VISTRUP MADSEN is a Berlin-based writer. He holds degrees from Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Royal College of Art, and is a frequent contributor to magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, and Kunstkritikk.

$20.00* paper 978-3-9819108-4-1