120 x 180mm, 100 pages, full colour printing, perfect bound, 2019

Edited and with a text and interview by ANTHONY DOWNEY

Michael Rakowitz’s I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze charts the historical context and aftermath of a concert that never happened. In 2009, the inimitable Leonard Cohen was scheduled to perform at the Ramallah Cultural Palace in Palestine. As a result of the cultural boycott of Israel, the concert was canceled but the story, as Rakowitz’s eponymous work amply demonstrates, did not end there. Conjoining the cultural histories of Palestine and Israel and the ethical dilemmas faced by performers and artists alike in the face of political intransigence, this volume brings to light the research that went into this multi-faceted work and plots the future arc of its yet-to-be completed trajectory.

Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973, New York) is an artist living and working in Chicago. His work has appeared in venues worldwide including dOCUMENTA (13), MoMA PS1 and MoMA, Castello di Rivoli, the 10th and 14th Istanbul Biennials, Tirana Biennale, and the National Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt. He has had solo exhibitions at Tate Modern in London and Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin. He is the recipient of the 2018 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (Visual Arts category), a 2008 Creative Capital Grant, and awarded the Fourth Plinth commission in London’s Trafalgar Square which was unveiled in the spring of 2018. His first US museum survey, titled Backstroke of the West, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in September 2017. A traveling survey of his work will be shown at Whitechapel Gallery in London and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Torino in 2019. Rakowitz is Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

Anthony Downey is Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa (Birmingham City University). He is currently a Co-investigator on AHRC and GCRF–funded research projects that focus on cultural practices, education, and digital methodologies in Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan. He sits on the editorial boards of Third Text and Digital War, respectively, and is the series editor for Research/Practice (Sternberg Press, 2019–ongoing).

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