Kona Books

06/09/2026

*NEW IN* Beyond the Manosphere – Masculinities Today

A critical and multifaceted examination of contemporary masculinities, as explored through the works of some thirty artists from different generations.
What does it mean to be a man today? This question has become increasingly urgent with the rise of the ‘manosphere’, a loose network of online spaces where a brash, misogynistic masculinity is asserted that, to many, feels threatening. Fueled by the spread of Trumpism, this brand of masculinity has become increasingly mainstream. The artworks in Beyond the Manosphere – Masculinities Today explore masculinity as an agent and performance of power – but also as a lived reality that can be conflicting, banal, unsteady, and tender. They approach masculinity as a broad and layered phenomenon, beyond dominant clichés. 

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibitions at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 2026, and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, in 2026-2027.

Texts by Hannah Black, Melanie Bühler, Judith Butler, Maurits de Bruijn, Amanda van Hesteren, Gianni Jetzer, Tetsumi Kudo, Reba Maybury, Sands Murray-Wassink, Asa Seresin, Rein Wolfs and/und Bruno Zhu.

A number of works have been created especially for the exhibition. Reba Maybury shifts power relations in a work based on Leo Gestel’s Reclining Nude (1910). Jasmine Gregory’s new work from the Investment Piece series underscores how wealth continues to be framed as a white and male privilege. Sven Gex examines how contemporary culture shapes new templates of masculinity by creating “characters” derived from influencers, content creators, celebrities, and actors. Hamishi Farah’s new portrait of  Wolfgang Tillmans reflects on the artist as a prototype of a new, successful masculinity that emerged in the 2000s.
 
Editor: Melanie Bühler
Design: Sabo Day
Format: 21 x 26 cm (hardcover)
Year: 2026
Publisher: Bierke Books

Bierke Verlag Melanie Bühler Reba Maybury

23/07/2026

*Available at our bookshop* kyklàda.press

kyklàda.press is a publishing experiment directed by artist David Bergé and situated in the archipelago of the Aegean Sea. kyklàda.press takes the form of a series of compact and unlaminated books, each emerging from one central theme—exploring embodied, situated, and material approaches to writing. Five to six contributors from different disciplines craft each book together, relaying knowledge derived from lived experiences on islands: archaeologies of moods and emotions, rituals of everyday life and struggle, human geographies, and critical history. kyklàda.press functions both as a site of knowledge production and a space for interdisciplinary artistic experiment. With 13 titles currently available, the series continues to expand its catalogue as an evolving counter-culture archive engaging with island ecologies, materialities, and temporalities.

kyklàda.press

25/06/2026

*Available at our bookshop* to love and devour, Tolia Astakhishvili

The artist’s book to love and devour by Tolia Astakhishvili was published on the occasion of the inaugural exhibition at the new site of the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation in Venice, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

The book, produced in close collaboration with the Lorenzo Mason Studio, brings together drawings, paintings, and archive images composed directly amid the cracks, wounds, and skin of a building located in the historic center of Venice, which served as the artist’s studio for a number of months. Through processes of transformation of the space, addition and subtraction, expansion and contraction, Astakhishvili has created a project shot through with a deep sense of disruption, distortion and fragmentation—a feeling of uncertainty that is reflected in the way in which visitors to the installation are given the freedom to move around, without having to concentrate on a center or to follow a pre-set route. Appropriately, then, the book takes the form of a stream of images, in which the spaces and materials of the building (wood, glass, dust, mold, bricks, concrete, plaster …) enter into a dialog with the drawings, paintings, sculptures, collages, and photographs made by the artist herself and the other invited artists, including Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Zurab Astakhishvili, Thea Djordjadze, Heike Gallmeier, Rafik Greiss, Dylan Peirce, James Richards, and Maka Sanadze.

The book also features a new interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Edited by Tolia Astakhishvili and Hans Ulrich Obrist
Texts: Tolia Astakhishvili, Hans Ulrich Obrist
Design: Lorenzo Mason Studio
Publisher: Lenz Press
Year: 2025

Tolia Astakhishvili Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation Lenz Press

19/06/2026

Last chance to see Gift to Irma

Image:
Elene Chantladze
თავისუფალი ხატვა (Free drawing), 2023
gouache on paper
28 × 20 cm 
30 × 40 cm (framed)

Kona Books presents facsimiles of Chantladze’s poetry alongside notebooks and text fragments that reflect her working process. Publications containing her writing, including Stories for Children (LC Queisser, Tbilisi and Saxpublishers, Vienna, 2023), are on view, expanding the context of her work and its relation to the rehearsal of language through “free drawing”, copying, and repetition. The display also includes photocopies of her works and an exhibition poster from her solo exhibition As in a Melody or a Bird’s Nest (Kunsthalle Zürich, 21.01.2024), which the artist reworked and painted over — gestures closely tied to her writing practice, where revision, editing,
and archiving become ongoing attempts to return to and reorient the works she has created.

Curator of the display: Nina Akhvlediani in collaboration with LC Queisser
Exhibition design: Julie Dalsgaard Hvass
Posta Press Nina Akhvlediani Julie Hvass

12/06/2026

*NEW IN* Fish are folded into the sea just as the sea is folded into fish, Ariane Mueller Vienna Secession

What art can do in a contemporary world in crisis – that is the question that looms in every facet of the exhibition Fish are folded into the sea just as the sea is folded into fish by Ariane Mueller. In two separate spheres – war and peace – the show presents large landscape depictions and video projections that tell stories of collaborative action.The accompanying publication features excerpts from Ariane Mueller’s Abenteuerroman [Adventure Novel] (2010). In addition, the book contains a conversation between Mueller and curator Jeanette Pacher as well as texts by artist Henrik Olesen and poet Roger van Voorhees. A large-format poster with the picture Don’t expect a word of my own from me (2025) from the exhibition is included as an artistic intervention.

Texts: Ariane Mueller, Ariane Mueller/Jeanette Pacher (conversation), Henrik Olesen, Roger van Voorhees
Series design concept: Sabo Day
Graphic design: Sabo Day
88 pages
Languages: ENG / GER
Secession 2025
Publisher: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne

Ariane Mueller’s publication comes with a large-format poster to hang onto the wall. It depicts the painting ‘Don’t expect a word of my own from me’ (2025) which was exhibited in her solo show.

BuchhandlungWaltherFranzKönig

10/06/2026

Join us at I Never Read, Art Book Fair Basel
Kona Books will be part of this years edition

17-20 June, 2026


Viaduktstrasse 3
In the same new venue as .social.club

10/06/2026

*NEW IN* A Grammar Built with Rocks
Edited by Shoghig Halajian and Suzy Halajian

Featuring writing and artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, A Grammar Built with Rocks explores artists’ engagement with sites of physical dispossession and socio-ecological crisis, highlighting how creative research methodologies can serve as radically new place-making practices. The publication brings together a range of feminist-decolonial texts and visual contributions that explore how movement, transience, and improvisation offer alternative ways of being-together while being-in-place.

Contributors: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Fawz Kabra, Jheanelle Brown and Julien Creuzet, Carolina Caycedo, Ryan C. Clarke and Cauleen Smith, DAAR—Decolonizing Architecture Art Research with Nicola Perugini, Sandra de la Loza, Demian DinéYazhi’, rafa esparza, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Tia-Simone Gardner, Raquel Gutiérrez, Suzanne Kite with Mahpíy̌a Nážinn, Candice Lin, Jumana Manna, K-Sue Park, Christine Rebet, Susan Silton, and Asiya Wadud.
The book also includes a reader, with grounding texts, sources of inspiration, and research references, by Jason Allen-Paisant, Dionne Brand, Suzanne Césaire, Lisa Lowe, Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and K. Wayne Yang.

Edited with an introduction by Shoghig Halajian and Suzy Halajian
Design by Chris Lee
Softcover, 336 pages
Publisher: Wendy’s Subway

.halajian

09/06/2026

09/06/2026

More images from Gift to Irma

Kona Books presents facsimiles of Chantladze’s poetry alongside notebooks and text fragments that reflect her working process. Publications containing her writing, including Stories for Children (LC Queisser, Tbilisi and Saxpublishers, Vienna, 2023), are on view, expanding the context of her work and its relation to the rehearsal of language through “free drawing”, copying, and repetition. The display also includes photocopies of her works and an exhibition poster from her solo exhibition As in a Melody or a Bird’s Nest (Kunsthalle Zürich, 21.01.2024), which the artist reworked and painted over — gestures closely tied to her writing practice, where revision, editing,
and archiving become ongoing attempts to return to and reorient the works she has created.

Gift to Irma will run until June 20

Curator of the display: Nina Akhvlediani in collaboration with LC Queisser
Exhibition design: Julie Dalsgaard Hvass
Photo: