What do artists know that an exhibition cannot say? A new book from Sternberg Press sets out to answer that question by handing the alphabet to the artists themselves. The Voice of the Artist(s): Another Vocabulary, edited by cultural producer Gabriela Galceran with a foreword by Chus Martinez, will be published in Europe this November.

The book gathers responses from 26 artists, each invited to choose a word beginning with a different letter of the alphabet and to answer it through video. The responses are organised into five chapters — Human Condition, Power+Politics, Geopoetics, Agency+Language, and Ritual+Care — a structure that lets the artists' own terms set the agenda rather than a curator's essay. The format owes something to the video work itself: the answers arrive as moving image first, then as printed reflection, so the book reads as a record of a process rather than a set of finished statements.

The premise is that artistic thinking is a form of knowledge in its own right, not merely an illustration of ideas developed elsewhere. By asking artists to speak in their own words and images, the book treats the studio, the rehearsal room and the field as places where thinking happens, and argues that what happens there matters beyond the gallery wall.

The volume will be distributed in the United States through MIT Press from February 2027. For Sternberg, a London publisher of art and cultural criticism, it continues a long-running interest in the artist's voice — this time arranged, quite literally, from A to Z.