As CARA’s programs unfold across exhibitions, fellowships, publications, public programs, and alliances, the bookstore offers a foundational intellectual ground where many of the institution’s research lines meet, expand, and create new links. It moves with time, remaining responsive to the questions, artists, histories, and materials that shape CARA’s work. CARA's bookstore is a porous, accessible space of welcome and orientation where visitors begin to engage with the ideas that shape our work.
Our selections span theory and poetry, artists' writings, critical essays, and experimental publications, alongside zines, records, and children's books. Multilingual and translated works are woven throughout, reflecting CARA’s commitment to knowledge that moves across geographies, languages, and ways of thinking.
The collection draws from an evolving range of interconnected themes—critical theory, poetics, radical pedagogies, feminist and queer thought, Indigenous and decolonial perspectives, ecology and land politics, diaspora, and displacement Rather than separating these fields in categories, the books are placed in conversation across shelves and tables, creating moments of resonance and friction across disciplines, perspectives, and voices. Selection is guided by the strength of ideas, concepts, and histories. Older and out-of-circulation books remain integral to our selection; relevance is independent of publication date.
In conversation with CARA's exhibitions, fellowships, and publishing programs, and by the bibliographies—explicit and implicit—of the artists and thinkers we work with, the bookstore functions as a responsive, research-driven ecology of thought. Here citation is an ethical and poetic gesture: a practice of thinking in relation rather than fixed territories, of relation across and through difference. Reading, listening, and thinking unfold here collectively, shaped by a guiding question drawn from the thought of Yanomami philosopher Davi Kopenawa: How can we dream not only about ourselves?
Explore CARA Publications here.
Bookstore Hours
Wednesday–Saturday 11am – 6pm
Sunday 12 – 6pm
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays