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The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and interior place Han Kang wrote it whilst living in Warsaw, though in the book the city is never named explicitly Instead it is only a white city, white for its snow and white for its stone ruins In an interview with Granta, Kang said that when writing this book, she imagined her prematurely dead sister had lived and visited the city ‘in my place’   Photographs are interspersed throughout In some, a woman appears, her face obscured by shadow In others, only her hands are visible She holds a child’s gown She holds a pebble-like object covered in salt The photographs are of white objects, but in contrast to the white pages, they are startlingly grey The specks and splashes of whiteness are surrounded by shadow The woman seems trapped in darkness Who is this woman supposed to represent? The narrator? The ghost of the sister? The novelist Kang? All or none of the above?  The literal answer is that they are photographs of a performance by Kang, shot by the photographer Choi Jinhyuk But within the pages, they seem to carry the spirit of characters — and the novelist herself   The text is a loose collection of thoughts, scenes, and images Few are longer than a page They are gathered into three sections — ‘I’, ‘She’, and ‘All Whiteness’ ‘I’ follows the narrator considering the colour white and describes her sister’s passing ‘She’ imagines the sister’s life Some subsections describe what the sister might have done—having an X-ray, finding a pebble, attempting to befriend a dog Others contemplate white things—seagulls, a dead butterfly, a lace curtain   Both ‘I’ and ‘She’ are pensive and slightly sorrowful At first, this similarity is disorienting: it is hard to see where one perspective ends and the other begins Slowly, the reader realises that this muddling is the point The concern of the narrator is not whether the sister would have been a vastly different person, but what it means to replace one life with another Her mother would not have

Long before the advent of ‘fake news’, Martha Rosler was teaching us how to think critically about documentary imagery and reporting Irrespective, the artist’s first survey show in 18 years, opens with the towering, floor-to-ceiling photomontage Cargo Cult (1966–72): an image of dock workers unloading stacks of shipping boxes, doctored so that each container is covered with a photograph of a generically beautiful white women applying makeup The work presents Western beauty standards as a traded material, and a load women are expected to carry It also highlights the modus operandi of Rosler’s practice, treating media as material: an approach as relevant today as it ever was   Irrespective contains work from across Rosler’s five-decade career, including the now-famous photomontage series, House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967–72), in which images of domestic interiors from glossy magazines are spliced together with brutal photographs of the Vietnam War Originally, Rosler handed out photocopies of the collages at anti-war protests First Lady (Pat Nixon) appropriates a photograph of the First Lady standing in the White House taken for the popular lifestyle magazine, House Beautiful She smiles serenely at the camera, wearing a yellow dress and jacket that match the colour of the walls Rosler has replaced a painting in a gilded frame, hung above the fireplace, with a photograph of a woman’s disfigured body In another work from the series, Cleaning the Drapes, a thin, smartly dressed woman photographed for an advertisement demonstrates the ease of use of a vacuum cleaner She pulls open a curtain as she cleans to reveal soldiers in trenches Due to technological advancements in photography, the Vietnam War was the first to have images from the front-lines circulating in real time, entering American homes on television screens, as well as in newspapers and magazines Rosler’s collages are a reminder of how desensitised Western audiences have become to pictures of violence Today our screens, billboards and news publications are littered with violent imagery, and it’s hard to imagine how shocking the introduction of Vietnam War visuals were to the register of everyday life   Rosler revisited House Beautiful following the US invasion