Pharmakon
Teju Cole
MACK
'I am writing this note while you’re still asleep. It’s still early enough that I can open the windows in my room. By the time you read this, I’ll be at work. Please pardon the strange formality of writing to you when I could just have said to you in person what I want to say. But since I have failed to say it, it is reasonable to conclude that I am having some difficulty speaking.’
Bringing together a sequence of subtle and disquieting photographs with a dozen compact short stories, Pharmakon is a surprising new work from the singular mind of Teju Cole. The photographs were taken across the globe and extend the oblique point of view he developed in Fernweh (2020). Interspersed among the images are texts that emerge like intimate signals from our age of crisis, mining further the exquisite linguistic control that characterizes Cole’s novels Open City (2011) and Tremor (2023). The result is a work of strange beauty that startles and consoles in equal measure.
OTA bound buckram paperback
21.5 x 28cm, 200 pages
ISBN 978-1-915743-39-8
February 2024
€50 £40 $50
The signed edition will be signed by the artist on press.
‘Each successive image has to have the simultaneous feeling of being unanticipated and of being right.’ Interview in Granta
‘A book carrying significant political weight.’ 1000 Words
‘[The] photographs display what has become Cole’s signature aesthetic: a soft, milky, pastel palette in a uniform exterior light, and a glancing, over-the-shoulder look at everyday detail.’ Burlington Contemporary
‘Pharmakon the images, like the pages of a visual diary, follow and bear witness to his various journeys and wanderings around the world. Once again the sequence intertwines the photographs with a dozen stories, almost small parables or prophecies.’ Doppiozero
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