This is the very first book on the influential American choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell. In an entertaining, far-reaching conversation with curator Daniel Baumann, Harrell covers all of his choreographies and performances, as well as his influences, successes, and failures, addressing how he transforms and transgresses the history of dance.
This book offers the first comprehensive overview of Anna Franceschini’s practice. Organized around recurring themes, it explores animation, the body, machines, ghosts, desire, and windows through commissioned contributions and selected writings. Its associative structure reflects her interest in repetition, transformation, and unstable images.
This book accompanies 5 Works, Lydia Ourahmane’s first institutional solo show in Italy, staged at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation in Venice and curated by Polly Staple, during the 61st Venice Biennale, and includes newly commissioned texts and images that further contextualize the artist’s practice and work.
Museums of Tears extends Francesco Vezzoli’s 2024 exhibition at Museo Correr, Venice, combining historical works and new commissions to explore antiquity, emotion and illusion. Conceived as an artist’s book rather than a catalogue, it transforms the museum guide into a hybrid archive and portable museum of memory, beauty and mourning.
A project by Fondazione In Between Art Film, edited by Carla Subrizi, Paola Ugolini, and Maria Alicata, this illustrated volume investigates the cinematic, documentary, and video output of women artists and filmmakers operating in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, situating their research at the intersection of artistic experimentation, politics, society, and technology.
A multifaceted perspective on contemporary sculpture that explores the practices and concepts of the medium through different approaches. The publication interweaves works by Yu Ji, Bronwyn Katz, Dan Lie, Trương Công Tùng, and Luana Vitra, with essays by Federico Giani, Sohrab Mohebbi, Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga, Chiara Nuzzi, and Anne Reeve.
Edited by Daniel Baumann
Trajal Harrell in conversation with Daniel Baumann
Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
Co-published with Kunsthalle Zürich
2026, English, softcover, 11 × 18 cm, 184 pages
ISBN 979-12-82771-00-9
This is the very first book on the influential American choreographer and dancer Trajal Harrell. It takes the form of an entertaining, far-reaching conversation on the entirety of his choreographies and performances—hence its title of “Catalogue Raisonné.”
Since starting out on his prolific career in 1999, Harrell has presented his work worldwide and in a variety of contexts, on scales both large and small: from renown theaters to international festivals, libraries to public panels, prestigious little art galleries and museums to Kunsthalles and biennials. The long list includes, among many others, the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum in New York, the Barbican Centre in London, the Schauspielhaus Zürich, the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Münchner Kammerspiele, the Fondation Cartier Paris, the Festival d’Avignon, and the Manchester International Festival.
The conversation with Swiss curator Daniel Baumann unfolds along the multiple trails blazed by Harrell’s career. It brings into sharp focus not only the artist’s interests and influences but also his own creative practice, encompassing both successes and failures. With disarming frankness and a tangible sense of vulnerability, Harrell walks the reader through the history of dance: He explains how he fought with it, how it has shaped him (and vice versa), and how he has gradually carved out a space of his own within it.
Harrell gained international acclaim for his seven-year project Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church. Across eight different versions, he imagined an encounter between 1960s Harlem voguing and early downtown postmodern dance. These different choreographies share a sense of historical speculation: What would have happened in 1963 if someone from the voguing ballroom scene had come down to the Judson Church in Greenwich Village to perform alongside the early postmoderns? The voguing dance tradition refers to the competitive balls that were staged in Harlem dance halls, beginning in the 1960s. These were a form of social performance practiced primarily by African American and Latino gays, and trans people. One of the main elements of voguing is the performing of social and gender identities through fashion, movement, and behavior. At the same historical moment, in the 1960s, the pioneers of postmodern dance broke with the traditional representations of classical and modern dance, becoming interested in dance without artifice and concerning themselves instead with “authenticity.”
This is only one of several dance forms that, throughout his career, Harrell has investigated in order to transform and transgress the history of dance. By engaging with Hoochie Coochie, the culture of fashion and runway, butoh, and the dances of Greek Antiquity, Harrell challenges us to re-think dance from a multiplicity of different and sometimes conflicting perspectives.
