Unbidden Tongues #3.1: Adrian Piper is a poster to accompany Unbidden Tongues #3: Adrian Piper: Necessary Questions. This poster, housed in the archive of Kunstverein München and announcing Piper’s exhibition there in 1992, was reprinted in February 2022 on the occasion of Unbidden Tongues’ participation in On and Off the Grid, a yearly program of presentations and events dedicated to various form(at)s of publishing at the Schaufenster am Hofgarten, Kunstverein München.

More information on the original exhibition can be found here.

Edited by Rhea Anastas with contributions by RoseLee Goldberg and Adrian Piper

Adrian Piper: Performing Objects I Have Been, 1972–2018 is a collection of documents from, or potentially relevant to Adrian Piper’s performance Some Reflective Surfaces (1975–76) edited by art historian and curator Rhea Anastas. In this early live piece, Piper dances under spotlights to Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’, additionally staging video feedback and filmed images of herself dancing, and two sound recordings – ‘Respect’ itself, and a voice-over narrative. Some Reflective Surfaces was produced in New York in the Fine Arts Building, New York University in 1975 and then at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976. The performance has not been staged since. The documents of Some Reflective Surfaces include writings by, and audio transcripts of Piper. The publication is illustrated with photographs of Piper’s performances and other works.

Performance artist Linda Montano invited other performance artists to consider how early events associated with sex, food, money/fame, or death/ritual resurfaced in their later work. The result is an original and compelling talking performance that documents the production of art in an important and often misunderstood community.

Among the more than 100 artists Montano interviewed from 1979 to 1989 were John Cage, Lorraine O’Grady, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Stuart Sherman, Martha Rosler, Joan Jonas, Faith Ringgold, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Meredith Monk, Adrian Piper, Carolee Schneemann and Chris Burden. Her discussions with them focused on the relationship between art and life, history and memory, the individual and society, and the potential for individual and social change.

Consisting of an internal report written by conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper in 1998, Necessary Questions takes Wellesley College, Massachusetts—where she was then on staff—as a case study in institutional racism and neglect. As such, the report could be read simply as an administrative document, though one drenched in meticulously clear advice that could still be, despite being written twenty-three years ago, taken up on a glaringly universal level. Yet the role it went on to play in Piper’s life proves it’s not just a context-specific document, but an all-too-real example of exactly what it stood against: the ways in which the langue of protocol and the false façade of civility are utilised as tactics to ensure that one stays in their place.

It is the third title from Unbidden Tongues, a series edited by Isabelle Sully that focuses on previously produced yet relatively uncirculated work by cultural practitioners busy with questions surrounding civility and civic life—particularly so in relation to language.

The publication Mobil, autonom, vernetzt, Kritik und ökonomische Innovation in Ephemera der Konzeptkunst, 1966–1975 deals with the advertisements and exhibition announcements printed by Jan Dibbets, Adrian Piper, Daniel Buren and Eleanor Antin between 1966 and 1975. These ephemera – simultaneously works of art, advertising instruments, and documentations for artistic actions – are exemplary for the communication-based, flexible, and mobile practice of conceptual art. A 2015 interview with Barbara Preisig discussing ephemera can be found here.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition I’M NOT A NICE GIRL! Eleanor Antin, Lee Lozano, Adrian Piper, Mierle Laderman Ukeles at K21 Düsseldorf.

The point of departure for the exhibition is a series of documents that have rarely or never been shown before – letters, concepts, and photographs from the Archive Dorothee and Konrad Fischer which chronicle contacts between the internationally influential gallerist Konrad Fischer and Lucy R. Lippard, as well as women Conceptual artists from the late 1960s and early 1970s such as Eleanor Antin, Hanne Darboven, Agnes Denes, Adrian Piper, Lee Lozano, Charlotte Posenenske, and Alina Szapocznikow.