Ghislaine Leung is a British conceptual artist. Born in Stockholm, Sweden to a father from Hong Kong and a mother from London, she was raised first in Reims, France and then in London, UK. She received a BA in fine art in context at the University of the West of England in 2002 and a master's in aesthetics and art theory at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University in 2009. Between 2004 and 2014 she worked at Tate and LUX, London. Leung’s first book was Partners (Cell Project Space, 2018). She lives in London.
Bosses
£ 11.99
Bosses
Ghislaine Leung
Few artists dig deep into themselves like this: an extraordinary insight into the process of producing art.
To make art is to understand how you are, to notice your prejudices and assumptions about value, to acknowledge your hand in an unequal world, and to recognise how you institute yourself – all while letting go of the outcome of work. Bosses replaces strategies of high performance with acts of trust. It is a book about doubt, about maintaining that condition and its untenable faith. About becoming a parent. Where individualism dissolves into dependence, ‘like when you get into a bath that’s the same temperature as your body, or when the summer comes and the wind touches your skin’.
- 978-1-9164250-0-2
- 15 b&w and 2 colour illustrations
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 104 pp.
- Paperback
- 05 September 2023
About the author
Endorsements (4)
The artist as receiver, giver, inquisitor, communicator. Leung’s writing is emotional and profound, engaging both the very personal and the mundane, the practical and the political. Few artists dig deep into themselves like this: an extraordinary insight into the process of producing art.
Artist as (girl) boss or maverick scab? The labour-gender question doesn’t stay put. Dialectics here grow as wildly and recursively as Ballardian botany. Leung ranges things seen, felt, sensed, thought and made against watertightness as form or as politics. The more gaps, the more space to remake reality.
I would call Bosses auto-factual. Leung accounts for work and life co-authored with facts, conjuring a prosaic and beautiful sociality. Her negations are profound, they hold and express the social apophatically. What is not here almost feels like a choice, and the thing convulses.
Some events you can never correct. One of them is childbirth. If you want to know, here it is.
Press (3)
Bourgeois Coldness
£ 13.99
Pre order in rile* books
Bourgeois Coldnesstrans. Grace Nissan
£ 13.99
Bourgeois Coldness
Henrike Kohpeiß
trans. Grace Nissan
Bourgeois coldness refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning – a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces – institutional and affective – stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning.
Canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten.
- 978-1-7395161-2-3
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 280 pp.
- Paperback
- September 2025
About the author
Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher in Berlin, working on social and political philosophy, critical theory, affect studies, Black studies and feminist philosophy. She regularly publishes work in academic journals and criticism in magazines. She organises and hosts events in Berlin, such as the conversation series ‘Feelings at the end of the world’ at Volksbühne. Bourgeois Coldness is her first book, and was published in German in 2023 by Campus Verlag.
About the translator
Grace Nissan is the author of The Utopians (Ugly Duckling Presse) and The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press), as well as the translator of War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions) and kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books). Their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were presented in the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as in the accompanying publication In the Face Of War (Isolarii). They are the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship to translate the Austrian poet Ann Cotten’s Banned! An Epic Poem into English.
Endorsements (2)
Foregrounding affect, this timely book provides an inestimable philosophical argument for the centrality of Blackness in critical examinations of capitalism’s violence.
Elegant and erudite in equal measure, this book will stand as a landmark diagnosis of the practices of denial in our time.
Press (2)
Upcoming (4)
| 10 November | Amsterdam | Henrike Kohpeiß launch |
| 06 November | London | Book launch Bourgeois Coldness, Historical Materialism |
| 04 November | London | Bourgeois Coldness launch, Housmans Bookshop |
| 02 October | Stockholm | Henrike Kohpeiß launches Bourgeois Coldness, Nord Books |