Library

Documents of Contemporary Art. Magic (ed. Jamie Sutcliffe, 2021, Whitechapel Gallery, London)
This volume brings together writings by artists, magicians, historians, and theorists that illuminate the vibrant correspondences animating contemporary art’s varied encounters with magical culture, inspiring a reconsideration of the relationship between the symbolic and the pragmatic. Tracing its various emergences through the shadows of modernity, the circuitries of ritual media, and declarations of psychic self-defence, Magic deciphers the evolution of a “magical-critical” thinking that productively complicates, contradicts and expands the boundaries of our increasingly weird present. 

Christina Oakley Harrington, The Tradewell’s Book of Plant Magic (2023, Weiser Books)
In The Treadwell’s Book of Plant Magic, author Christina Oakley Harrington – founder of the renowned Treadwell’s Books in London – focuses exclusively on the magical powers attributed to the plants. She has sifted through hundreds of traditional sources to create a rare compendium of the “old ways” in which plants have been used to achieve love, win competitions, become invisible, gain good luck, achieve success, receive protection, and more. The book also offers practical updates to the old uses, which the modern reader will find easy to carry out. The Problems and Solutions section suggests the appropriate plant or plants for almost any circumstance one could face in life. Each spell is carefully cited to its traditional source to aid the reader in further study.

Jeremy Harte, Cloven Country. The Devil and the English Landscape (2023, Reaktion Books, London)
Harte – a curator at Bourne Hall Museum in Surrey – has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the diverse sources of England’s traditional tales and proves himself to be an authoritative guide. From the demon who appears as a fearsome figure hurling stones, gouging out valleys and heaping up hills, or as a sinister black-clad huntsman with his fiery-eyed hounds howling across Bodmin Moor, to ideas about how a woman’s wit is better than a man’s when it comes to besting the lord of darkness, Harte takes his reader on a devilishly entertaining tour of England and its richly storied landscape. (The Guardian)

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (2004, Blomsbury Academic, London)
Adorno retraces the historical evolution of art into its paradoxical state of “semi-autonomy” within capitalist modernity, considering the socio-political implications of this progression. Some critics have described the work as Adorno’s magnum opus and ranked it among the most important pieces on aesthetics published in the 20th century.

Bruno Latour, Down to Warth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2018, Polity Press, Cambridge)
The present ecological mutation has organised the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalisation into a nightmare for most people. This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World  (2013, The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)
The world as we know it has already come to an end and global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects” – entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.

Dear Earth. Art and hope in a Time of Crisis (2023, Hayward Gallery, London)
This exhibition catalogue accompanies the exhibition of the same name, curated by Rachel Thomas at the Hayward Gallery, London, 2023 and presents artistic responses to climate emergencies and explores themes such as care, hope, interdependence, emotional and spiritual connections and activism. It highlights the ways in which artists are helping to transform and deepen our psychological and spiritual responses to the climate crisis, and aims to encourage empathy and political and social activism in the reader. The exhibition, which featured 15 artists from around the world, explored the interdependence of ecologies and ecosystems and our emotional connection to nature.

Extrodæsia. Encyclopedia Towards a Post-Anthropocentric World (2019, Typotex, Budimpešta)
The encyclopaedia Towards a Post-Anthropocentric World, in Hungarian and English, is a large-scale interdisciplinary project conceived by three artists, Rita Süveges, Gideon Horváth and Anna Zilahi, working within the xtrorealm art group. The book is based on an interdisciplinary (artistic) approach and defines concepts such as the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. The collected texts are accompanied by Rita Süveges’ prints, which represent an organic union of theoretical knowledge and artistic representation.