120 Days of Sodom

Cape Town, South Africa: Erdmann Contemporary, 2015. First printing. 177 pp., 11.75 x 8.25 inches (oblong quarto). Sewn signatures glued into blind-stamped card covers, published in an edition of 350 copies; this is one of 95 copies with unique printed card dust-jackets illustrating one of the images from the book on the front, and an excerpt of text on the back. New.

Artist Manfred Zylla was born in Germany in 1939, and since 1970 has lived and worked in South Africa and Germany. A major figure in the South African resistance art of the 1980s, he is well-known for his work critical of apartheid and for his conceptual and performative approaches to exhibition. This compelling book reproduces in full color a series of 120 paintings made in 2012, influenced by the writings of Dante, the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and in particular Pasolini's infamous last film, Salo, in which De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom is enacted as a portrait of Italy under fascism. The paintings are accompanied by thirty-three short texts, ranging from poems and song lyrics to short plays and essays, most in English but others in German, French, Spanish, Afrikaans, Chinese, and Romanian, by artists, activists, and academics.