Eloise Hawser

To coincide with the launch of our new exhibition Eloise Hawser: Lives on Wire, the ICA Bookshop has put together this fascinating reading list. All titles are available online or in our bookshop on The Mall.

Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
Jane Bennett
£15.99
Political theorist Jane Bennett focuses on the need to address the importance of nonhuman factors in events through exploring the need for a green materialist ecophilosophy. Engaging with concepts from the likes of Nietzsche, Darwin and Deleuze, Bennett theorizes that, through analysis of both human and nonhuman forces, we can cultivate more responsible, ecologically-sound politics.

Ruins of Modernity 
Julia Hell & Andreas Schonle
£18.99
Our obsession with ruins helped to pave the way for modernity, be it through representation in art and literature or through reflection brought on by spectacle. Ruins of Modernity brings together writings on the concept of the ruin, from Tolstoy's response to the destruction of Moscow in the fire of 1812 in War and Peace, to post-war architecture and the urban-industrial ruins in Detroit.

Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness
Elizabeth Farrelly
£13.95
Award-winning critic Elizabeth Farrell discusses the eco-footprint of our 'superfluous superfluity'. The book addresses our obsession with the gigantism from human spaces to human consumption, our relationship with the superficial and how we fail to abandon such habits despite knowing the consequences.

On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
Susan Stewart
£15.99
Susan Stewart’s 1984 essay On Longing looks at how everyday objects are used to perceive versions of the world. Drawing on semiotics and from psychoanalytic, feminist and Marxist criticism, she addresses the representation of metaphor through scale and how the idea of the 'souvenir' reflects experience in time and space.

Traces of Modernity
Dan Smith
£9.99
Taking four examples from the nineteenth century (the Crystal Palace, the Albert Memorial, the Pitt Rivers Museum and H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine) Dan Smith looks at how the spectacle helps shape our perception of display, commodity and legacy, as well as our ideology of the relic through 21st-century perception of 10th-century spectacle.

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World
Timothy Morton
£18.50
Hyperobjects, according to Timothy Morton, are things so vast that they make the notion of things redundant in the first place. In his book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, Morton looks at global warming as a dramatic example of a 'Hyperobject,' and discussed how global warming impacts our experience of arts, philosophy and politics. ■

Eloise Hawser: Lives on Wire runs 1 July - 6 September 2015.