📘 New Book Release – Beyond Caring: Para-hosting as Curatorial Escape
What can established art institutions learn from small-scale, self-organised art spaces? In Beyond Caring: Para-hosting as Curatorial Escape, Paul O’Neill introduces para-hosting – a cooperative curatorial methodology grounded in generosity, invitation, and self-organisation, without institutional absorption.
Moving between critique, speculation, and proposition, the book rethinks host–guest relations, publicness, and power within contemporary art institutions. Para-hosting becomes a form of curatorial escape – opening transformative possibilities beyond fixed roles and entrenched institutional structures.
Part of the On the Curatorial series, this publication revisits debates around the curatorial that emerged in the early 2010s, asking how curatorial practice can respond to today’s social, political, and ecological crises. Edited by Carolina Rito, the series brings together established voices and emerging curators to develop new conceptual tools for contemporary curation.
✍️ Paul O’Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer, and educator, and Artistic Director of PUBLICS in Helsinki – a curatorial agency, library, event space, and reading room.
#floatingoperapress #pauloneill #onthecuratorial
We’re very excited to see an excerpt from Aruna D’Souza’s Imperfect Solidarities featured alongside other essential texts in Curating & Repair, newly published by 1000 Words.
If you’re in London, don’t miss the book launch at The Photographers’ Gallery:
📍 The Photographers’ Gallery 16 – 18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW 🗓 12 March 2026 ⏰ 6 – 8 pm
And if the excerpt leaves you wanting more, the full edition of Imperfect Solidarities is available via our website, through distributors, and at your local independent bookshops.
Two books on solidarities in our difficult times.
→ *Imperfect Solidarities*
By Aruna D’Souza @invisible.flaneuse
Published by @floatingoperapress in 2024
Can empathy deliver political change? Does art that elicits emotional identification with others take us where we need to go? Writer and art historian Aruna D’Souza offers observations pulled from current events as well as contemporary art that suggest that a feeling of understanding or closeness based on emotion is an imperfect ground for solidarity. Empathy—and its correlate, love—is a distraction from the hard work that needs to be done to achieve justice. Rather, D’Souza contends, we need to imagine a form of political solidarity that is not based on empathy, but on the much more difficult obligation of care.
→ *Precarious Solidarities: Artists for Democracy 1974–77*
Published by @afterallresearch in 2023
Artists for Democracy formed in London in 1974 to give ‘material and cultural support to liberation movements worldwide’. Precarious Solidarities addresses the far-reaching actions of this group of cultural workers – whose personal/artistic trajectories span Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas – and the entanglement of artistic practice with transnational solidarities shaped by migration and political mobilisation.
@oscyhou reviews AGAINST MORALITY by ROSANNA MCLAUGHLIN @floatingoperapress including observations from his personal experiences as an artist in an era when “diversity” has been recuperated as capital:
“The fact of Palestine punctures the hypocrisies of Liberal Realism. For despite the art world’s rapacious libido for oppression, trauma, and identity, any recognition of the U.S.-sponsored Israeli genocide in Gaza has been met with severe establishment retribution—censuring, censorship, blacklisting. And what sustains this absurdity is a leaky, either/or thinking towards identity that precludes the real complicities in power that render all of us contradictory: that is, human.”
Further related reading includes @davidmvelasco for @equatormagazine “How Gaza Broke the Art World” @hannah_black___ for The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics “Like Knives in a Block” and @freeze_magazine for @ibraazlondon “Consensus Aesthetics: The Political Economy of Agreement in Contemporary Art”
As 2025 comes to an end, we’re looking back on a year we’re really proud of. From publishing two new books to receiving some of our strongest press coverage so far, it’s been a pleasure spending the year working with brilliant writers and thoughtful texts, and being part of wider conversations across the cultural world.
We’re incredibly grateful to our growing community of readers and supporters – your engagement and enthusiasm make this work possible, and we can’t thank you enough.
With 2026 just around the corner, we’re already gearing up to share news about upcoming titles and new projects. More soon – and as always, thank you for reading!
Thank you to Susanne Christensen (@susannetxt ) for featuring “Against Morality” in your contribution to Vagant (@vagant_red )’s 2025 roundup. We’re grateful for the inclusion – scroll below to read the English translation.
This year’s longing for new horizons
Most of us will probably emerge from 2025 quite anxious and exhausted by war and misfortune in the world. In the art world, waves of emotion are building up that lead to a kind of institutional self-sabotage. Here, rigid concepts arise from a notion that art is first and foremost a political tool with the primary mission of creating justice in the world. Worse, political activism seems to be accompanied by a certain drought of ideas.
The American art critic Dean Kissick, who in 2024 published the Harper’s essay “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art,” said in June 2025 in an interview with Kunstkritikk’s Louise Steiwer: “I’m not saying that art shouldn’t be political. I’m talking about a certain type of very hollow and performative, actually fake, political art that has become enormously dominant. I don’t think it’s a conservative or reactionary position to criticize these.”
Not long after the publication of Kissick’s essay, the London-based art critic Rosanna McLaughlin published a pamphlet entitled Against Morality on the small Berlin-based publishing house Floating Opera Press. In this contribution to the publisher’s Critic’s Essay Series, she calls for art that “transcends simple moralizing in order to speak to the complex and messy reality of what it is to be alive” – and that call is not hard to subscribe to, is it? We put on our sunglasses with anticipation and look towards 2026: Will some new ideas and possibilities emerge?
#againstmorality #rosannamclaughlin #floatingoperapress #criticsessayseries #susannechristensen
What a thrill to see not one, but two of our titles appear in the latest issue of The Whitney Review of New Writing @thewhitneyreview . Huge thanks to Kevin Champoux @kevinchampoux and Oscar Yi Hou @oscyhou for their pieces on “A Queer Theory of the State” and “Against Morality.” We’re always happy to see our books finding new readers.
#FloatingOperaPress #criticsessayseries #aqueertheoryofthestate #samuelcloweshuneke @schuneke #againstmorality #rosannamclaughlin #whitneyreviewofnewwriting #kevinchampoux #oscaryihou
📚 NEW SERIES: On the Curatorial
More than ten years ago, the idea of “the curatorial” emerged from an intense debate about what it means to curate exhibitions. The On the Curatorial series revisits the consequences of that discussion today – asking whether we need new curatorial tools to engage with deepening social, political, and ecological crises.
Edited by Carolina Rito, professor of creative practice research at Coventry University and executive editor of Contemporary Journal, the series brings together voices from different generations of curators: those reflecting on how their practices have evolved, and those shaping new conceptual approaches to curation today.
The first title, On Discourse and the Curatorial by Mick Wilson, explores how the impulse to transform exhibition experience into words – rooted in the salon culture of three centuries ago – remains central to contemporary curatorial practice.
Available now!
#OnTheCuratorial #MickWilson #CarolinaRito #FloatingOperaPress
Thank you to Franklin Einspruch for his deep and insightful review of “Against Morality.” Read the full piece via the link in our bio.
@dissident.muse@theartsfuse
#againstmorality #floatingoperapress #rosannamclaughlin #franklineinspruch #theartsfuse #criticsessayseries
A little star power for “Against Morality” ✨ Rosanna McLaughlin’s book appears in Travis Diehl’s new Libra Season piece. Snippet below – full read in bio.
@spike_art_magazine@ilikehowyouseetheworld
#againstmorality #rosannamclaughlin #floatingoperapress #criticsessayseries #spikeartmagazine #travisdiehl #libraseason
What does it mean to stand together when agreement isn’t easy? In this clip, writer and critic Aruna D’Souza @invisible.flaneuse discusses her 2024 book “Imperfect Solidarities,” exploring the complexities of coalition-building, activism, and art.
#arunadsouza #imperfectsolidarities #floatingoperapress #criticsessayseries
Huge thanks to everyone who joined us at ICA London for the official UK launch of Against Morality. We were thrilled to see such an incredible turnout and to hear so many thoughtful questions from the audience. Special thanks to Dean Kissick @deankissick for an insightful conversation with Rosanna, and to the ICA team for their generous support!
#againstmorality #rosannamclaughlin #deankissick #icalondon #floatingoperapress #criticsessayseries
