144 pages Edited by Stephen Burke Text(s) by Larissa Kikol, Stephen Burke, Friederike Häuser Foreword by Larissa Kikol Designed by Warriors Studio 24 x 16.8 cm Language: English Paperback Publisher: Self-Published 2025
Post Vandalism traces six years of research, encounters, and fieldwork since the launch of the now-influential Instagram account in 2019. What began as an instinct, a sense that something essential within urban visual culture remained undocumented, has grown into a far-reaching exploration of the artists who disrupt, reconfigure, and re-enchant the patterns of the modern city.
Moving between exhibitions, archives, online research, and countless conversations within the subcultures that shape contemporary urban expression, Stephen Burke brings together a constellation of works united by a shared spirit: playful yet subversive, improvised yet intentional, and deeply alive to the worlds they inhabit. More than a taxonomy, this book offers an empathetic, ground-level reading of practices that blur the lines between vandalism and art-making, presence and erasure, intervention and care.
Rich with photography, research, and new essays by Larissa Kikol and Friederike Häuser, Post Vandalism expands the vocabulary around urban action and aesthetic rupture. It celebrates the individuals and communities who transform the built environment into a site of experimentation, while inviting new conversations about authorship, illegality, public space, and the shifting politics of the street.
At once an archive, a manifesto, and a personal journey, this book looks closely at how artists break the grid, redirect its flow, and carry those gestures into new contexts. Uplifting in its curiosity and grounded in lived experience, Post Vandalism opens a vital window onto the hybrid practices reshaping contemporary visual culture.
Stephen Burke is an Irish artist, curator, and documentarian, and the founder of the Post Vandalism platform. His work has been exhibited across Europe and internationally, from Het Hem to Cromwell Place to the UNESCO-listed Völklingen Ironworks. Post Vandalism is his second book, following Buff (2017).
