This Is Not a Book
First Edition 2023

Concept, text, and performances: Nima Nikakhlagh
Translator: Samad Chiniforoushan
Designed by Iman Tash
ISBN: 979-8-9884604-0-4
Publication Date: Jun 2023
Book Format: Paperback
List Price: USD $11.11

Publication Description:

This Is Not a Book is a multimedia experimental performative publication, an anthology of performance descriptions and personal essays that uses the theatrical concept of performance and everyday interactions to create social engagement and political resistance. The title of this publication “This Is Not a Book” demonstrates the rejection and acceptance of the same thing at the same time. The work focuses on social consciousness, experience, and ultimately existence, and can itself be recognized as an embodied performance. All of the performance pieces described within were officially proposed in the United States of America over a period of four years (2018 to 2021)-to criticize imperialism, militarism, and digitalization-and each was rejected. Because each of these rejected performances was made and existed in the author’s mind, and belongs to this world and time, they were collected in this volume in order to generate practical conversation regarding contemporariness, art as social action and diverse approaches in the medium of performance art; to encourage the readers to rethink and expand the definition of performance art today, to experiment, again and again, and to perform something, to act, to participate. We can read in both words and actions. All readers are allowed to make use of This Is Not a Book, in whole or in part, in any way they wish, to return the rejected performance pieces to life, to perform them, or even to create their own version-their own action.

“This Is Not a Book” has been added to the Franklin Furnace Archive Artists’ Book Collection at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.