Publications

The first issue of the journal (SIC), published in October 2006, combined articles on the history of modern and contemporary art with a cross-disciplinary artistic intervention by Olivier Foulon. The articles were written by the journal’s five founders and reflected their respective interests. They had no unifying thread, but did point up certain shared preoccupations. Each issue of the journal (starting with the second one) focused on a question or problem to be discussed by the featured contributors. Our founding principle remained the same: to give an artist carte blanche and the last word on the layout as well as the choice of format and paper for each issue of the journal.

In 2009 and 2010 we published the proceedings of four conferences, using the same layout for each of them. But each cover was designed by a different artist whose work had a special connection to the topic of the conference in question. We diversified our publishing activities early on, coming out with our first artist's book in 2010 and a monograph in 2011. Sophie Nys was then asked to come up with specific names for each current and future series, as we have consistently adhered to our commitment to involve artists in the editorial process and to challenge the conventional categorization. So the proceedings were called Mut Zum Druck, the artists' books Soft Alfabet and the monographs and catalogs Pinceau.

Continental Rift was the name of a subsequent series about the interaction between and mutual influence and cross-fertilization of artistic practices and theories in Europe and the Americas in the second half of the 20th century. The Vase series was created to provide a home for miscellaneous essays on everything from film theory to anthropology. It was named after these lines from a poem by Uljana Wolf: "a vase is a vase is a vase and it's the same / for any word that's deeper than wide.”