Selena Kimball
Book Projects brings together published books and essays in three experimental forms — parafiction, collage novels, and what I'm calling object essays — a body of work developed collaboratively, across disciplines and over time.
Parafiction
Objects are material facts and representation itself--scientific or otherwise--is conjured
"Catalogue of Colonial Debris: A Parafictional Collection"(working title) Edited by Selena Kimball and Alyssa Grossman Bloomsbury Visual Arts — in preparation
An intervention into the genre of the museum catalogue, this volume takes as its starting point a collection of ordinary rocks gathered from Indigenous lands in the early 1900s by a Swedish ethnologist, currently stored in the Gothenburg Museum of World Culture. At the heart of this book is the editors' own parafictional collection-- a new, alternative inventory of objects, comprised of Grossman's textual redescriptions of the rocks and images of Kimball's material recreations of them, which she made using discarded scraps of packaging. Responses from a wide range of contributors — scholars, artists, and writers — are woven throughout the volume in dialogue with this new collection of parafictional objects. What emerges is a collective proposal for anti-colonial ways of knowing the material world. See also: Catalogue of Correspondence, below.
Catalogue of Correspondence Anthropology and Art pamphlet series, Royal Anthropological Institute, 2023
[LINK]
This pamphlet is the first iteration of a decade-long collaboration between visual artist Selena Kimball and anthropologist Alyssa Grossman. It centers around a parafictional collection of an overlooked collection of rocks gathered from Indigenous lands in the early 20th century, now held in the archives of the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden. Working in response to the collection — Grossman through archival research and fieldwork, Kimball through visual and material reconstruction — the two introduce the language of friendship, reflexivity and intuition into institutional practices of scientific categorization. Interrogating what gets classified, and how words and images re-structure knowledge, this project is an experiment in feminist archival practice. [LINK] See also: Catalogue of Colonial Debris, above.
Collage Novels
Prose and visual image, made in dialogue
"The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks"
Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, 2024 — translated from the Polish by Ursula Phillips Originally published in Polish as Niedokończone życie Phoebe Hicks, Słowo/obraz terytoria, Gdansk, 2013
A collage novel tracing the fictional life of Phoebe Hicks — medium, fraud, feminist, lunatic — through 19th-century Providence at the height of American Spiritualism. Kimball's collages, composed from archival photographs, run as a parallel visual narrative equal in weight to the text. The second collaboration between Taborska and Kimball, following The Dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz.
Phoebe's story is a delightful postmodernist mix of fiction and history, hovering delicately between parody and mystery... — Robert Coover
This book – atmospherically interspersed with collages by Selena Kimball – stays with you long after the seance is over. — Mathilde Montpetit, The Berliner
It is a story about women's powers…About the eroticism hidden behind Victorian morality. About our desire for the extraordinary. — Kinga Dunin, Journal of Opinions
"The Dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz"
Midmarch Arts Press, New York, 2007 — translated from the Polish by Danusia Stok. Originally published in Polish as Senny żywot Leonory de la Cruz, słowo/obraz terytoria, Gdańsk, 2004. Published in French as La Vie Songeuse de Leonora de la Cruz, translated by Véronique Patte, Éditions Interférences, Paris, 2007. Published in Spanish, translated by Xavier Farré, with a preface by Valeria Luiselli, Auieo Ediciones, Mexico City, 2014
The first collaboration between Taborska and Kimball — a collage novel tracing the invented life of Leonora de la Cruz, a 17th-century Spanish Carmelite nun whose prophetic dreams made her the secret patron saint of the French Surrealists. Part scholarly hoax, part surrealist fiction, the book inaugurated a long practice of collaborative narrative between the two artists.
Taborska's book, with collages by Selena Kimball, proves the ongoing power of the surrealist imagination. Somnolent, visionary, transgressive, magical — Leonora de la Cruz will ensure her place in the pantheon of surrealist women. A stunning addition to the literature of surrealism.
— Whitney Chadwick
Fictional heroines whose internal visions are projected externally through art, conditioned by the scientific contexts of their eras. — New Literature from Europe
Object Essays
An experimental essay form in which attention to a single object generates subject and structure
“Atlas of Air”
In Post Pandemic Imaginaries, edited by Les Robert and Alyssa Grossman. London: Bloomsbury, in press.
"The Atlas of Air" pairs photomontages cut from New York Times skies with a written meditation on air, and it’s imaginary edges.
“Using Collage to Rearrange Historical Narratives”
Interview with Anton Ginzburg.
BOMB Magazine, September 20, 2023.
“Beyond the Edges of the Screen: Longing for the Physical ‘Spaces Between’”
With Alyssa Grossman.
Anthropology in Action, vol. 28, no. 3, 2021, pp. 1–11.
A collaborative essay about zoom as a site—and embodiment, loss, and longing for physical space, written during the pandemic.
“Atlas of Everyday Objects—In the Age of Global Social Isolation”
With Pascal Glissmann.
Design and Culture, 13:1, COVID-19 Dispatches, March 2021.
A collaborative reflection on ordinary objects as repositories of meaning under conditions of isolation.
“Object America: The Model 500 Telephone”
With Pascal Glissmann.
Public Seminar, April 2018.
An interdisciplinary reimagining of America through one of its most iconic designed objects.
“What Comes After the Letter”
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, vol. 43, no. 1, 2018.
An essay on Sophie Calle's documentary practice that runs in parallel with an experimental email archive, together exploring the intersection of conceptual art, lived experience, and representation.
“Selena Kimball”
Interview with Anne Doran
Tricycle, Spring 2015, p. 28.
An interview about “The Flowers of J.F. Rock,” a project inspired by photographs of Tibet from the 1920s and ’30s.