The book I’m holding is sturdy like a rock, but appears as vibrant gradation, like a spear of light in a prism or the memory of a peacock in flight. I thumb open the tome guided by one of three ribbons, each a different shade of red, to mark the start of something, or an eager return. Inside I find lines of instruction, but also many other kinds of lines, some that give itinerary (“Journey inward toward new exteriors”) or produce questions (“What are the heroics of a lack of heroic qualities?”). Other lines are drawn to simply stretch open the mind. I’m describing here the physical properties of Lucy Ives’s newest volume, three six five prompts, acts, divinations (an inexhaustible compendium for writing), out this spring on Siglio, which is an abundance of things, depending on how you choose to use it, including a marvel to behold.

In the dim blue hue of an office light, we see a pair of eyes gloss over a floor strewn with dead, bloodied bodies. The eyes shudder and look out somewhere, into the middle distance; not at the walls of the conference room that enclose them, not directly at the glow of a computer screen. Below, a pair of hands continues to maniacally hit a keyboard. These furtive movements belong to Claire, played by the inimitable Kayije Kagame, the protagonist of filmmaker and artist Valentin Noujaïm’s chilling 2024 short film, 'To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion' (2024), who we watch, sit alone, but not alone, become like stone, or statuary, in her dark, corporate chamber. What does she see? For nearly a decade, Valentin Noujaïm, who grew up in France as the child of Lebanese and Egyptian emigres, has been making films about the erasure of peoples and histories by the construct of empire and the bleak façades of “progress” erected in their stead. Le Défense, the looming business district to the west of Paris, built on razed shantytowns, gives the name to a trilogy of short films by Noujaïm (2022-25), each of which fuses documentary technique with mythic narrative to mine and undermine the monument’s rotting foundations.

There is no vacancy in this world, no void, no vacuum. This is one thing I learn when I encounter the artwork and read the essays by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa. Every moment in life is durational, and every image we happen to see within it, an unfolding reel through which the social world is rehearsed, or composed, or erased, or betrayed, or determined. What do we desire from images? Whose lives are risked? In his installations and exhibitions, as in his precise, angular writing about art and photography, Wolukau-Wanambwa guides his viewers and readers into the darkly layered logics of idolatry, difficulty, and exposure that undergird photography’s capacity to represent black and gendered bodies, and the violent regimes of white supremacy and patriarchy that produce them.  I first saw Wolukau-Wanambwa’s work in person as part of the 2021 iteration of Greater New York at MoMA’s PS1, where a suite of images and objects were displayed against an entirely black background. Vivisecting the space was AMWMA (2021), a free-standing wall on either side of which was hung two, nearly identical life-size photos of the actor Anna May Wong.