A few minutes’ walk from the Montparnasse tower in Paris resides a unique place for queer and feminist knowledge. On your way to the top floor of a building inside a small and charming cobblestone courtyard you are greeted by entangled vines, an awning of trees, and a spiral staircase. You enter a spacious and quiet reading room bathed in natural light. Its name suggests its enlightening mission: AWARE. Cofounded in 2014 and directed by curator and art historian Camille Morineau, it is a non-profit organization with a research and documentation center dedicated to women and non-binary artists, feminist art, and queer history from the sixteenth century to the present. A dizzying number of well-arranged publications – each testifying to the presence of narratives and voices so often suppressed – rest on tall yellow bookshelves that stand like sentinels in front of white and green walls. Over 3000 solo and group exhibition catalogues, essays, monographs, research papers, reviews, and books await your daring hands. Here are brief descriptions of five of them.

Black Looks: Race and Representation by bell hooks (South End Press, 1992). Photo: Keren Lasme

Black Looks: Race and Representation by bell hooks (South End Press, 1992)

Being among those who brought the question of race and marginalized identities into feminist theory, bell hooks (1952–2021) is one of the most important voices of intersectional feminism. This book of twelve essays was published at a time when multiculturalism was gaining momentum in US public discourse. It dissects the violent mechanism of representation and how visual culture constructs and perpetuates racial and gender stereotypes. hooks invites us to understand representation as a site of transformation and resistance.

An Archive of Love edited by Nour Regaya and Dalia Al-Dujaili (Middle East Archive, 2023). Photo: Keren Lasme.

An Archive of Love edited by Nour Regaya and Dalia Al-Dujaili (Middle East Archive, 2023)

This Arabic- and English-language photobook is a tender balm for the soul. Mapping emotional landscapes of everyday life in the Middle East and North Africa, each page gently reminds us of the ubiquity and all-encompassing power of intimacy and affection. It brings together the street photography of several image-makers from the 1960s to the present, creating a collection of whispers, laughter, excitement, and yearnings that defy colonial and patriarchal narratives around what it means to love and be loved.

We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold by Faith Ringgold (Little, Brown & co, 2005). Photo: Keren Lasme

We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold by Faith Ringgold (Little, Brown & co, 2005)

One of the many notes on and of freedom inscribed in a handwritten style on one of Faith Ringgold’s most celebrated quilts, Tar Beach (1988), reads: “I will always remember when the stars fell down around me and lifted me up above the George Washington Bridge.” The quilt graces the cover of this edition of Ringgold’s memoir, in which the artist (1930–2024) uses images and words to chart her journey as an artist, activist, and storyteller. These engaging and instructive stories of struggle and triumph speak of Black feminist creativity and fugitivity while asserting art-making as a revolutionary act of self-determination.

Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art by Magdalene Odundo, Jareh Das, Ozioma Onuzulike and Moira Vincentelli (Two Temple Place, 2022). Photo: Keren Lasme.

Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics & Contemporary Art by Magdalene Odundo, Jareh Das, Ozioma Onuzulike and Moira Vincentelli (Two Temple Place, 2022)

Body Vessel Clay is the catalogue for an exhibition of the same name that took place in London and York in 2022. From the starting point of the work of Nigerian potter Ladi Kwali (1925–1984), it examined the work of Black women from the 1950s to present day who have used clay in their filmmaking, performance, painting, and sculpture practices. Many of these artists, such as Magdalene Odundo, Jade Montserrat, and Shawanda Corbett, seem to have produced profound political statements by using clay as a metaphor for embodiment, resilience, and creative agency.

Dialogue Transatlantique: Perspectives de la pensée féministe noire et des diasporas africaines by Djamila Ribeiro and Nadia Yala Kisukidi (Anacaona, 2021). Photo: Keren Lasme

Dialogue Transatlantique: Perspectives de la pensée féministe noire et des diasporas africaines by Djamila Ribeiro and Nadia Yala Kisukidi (Anacaona, 2021)

This work is an exchange on Black feminist thought between two Afrodiasporic women thinkers, one from Brazil and the other French with Congolese roots. As a bridge between different intellectual spaces, their conversation challenges monolithic understandings of feminism and centers often marginalized experiences. As the publisher puts it, Djamila Ribeiro and Nadia Yala Kisukidi question their relationship with knowledge, activism and the debates that pervade Brazilian and French public spaces. They insist that Black history is not only a history of struggle but a history of thought.

Keren Lasme is an artist, writer, and literary curator whose work is concerned with mythopoetic identity formation, knowledge activation, and the use of fiction and imagination as spatiotemporal technologies for inner and outer worldbuilding. Her art practice engages with collective care, engaged pedagogy, and the politics of pleasure while using the collective memories and imagination archived in African literatures as praxis.