It’s going to snow soon
Hutong Pimp
&
Cai DongDong

Opening Saturday Nov. 23, from 4pm

@ Motto Berlin, Skalitzerstr. 68, 10997 Ber

The plot of the novel ‘The Sublimes‘ revolves around seemingly unmotivated murders committed by the main character, Fyodor Sonnov. However, Fyodor, while committing these senseless crimes, pursues a specific goal: to understand the eternal mystery of death through “empirical” means. He perceives the visible world as an illusion. Fyodor unexpectedly encounters a group of Moscow intellectuals and metaphysicians, whose existence awakens in him greater interest than the characters of his mundane life. This acquaintance shapes the plot of the novel.

The theme of ‘The Sublimes’ is murder for the sake of penetrating the mystery of the soul of the murdered, and thus into the otherworldly realm. The author reveals the depth of philosophical searches through a brutal, often painful prose that can be horrifying upon re-reading. At the same time, Mamleev’s aspirations have a positive foundation: by diving into darkness, he seeks to manifest the light of the human soul and foster its growth.

The first versions of the novel ‘The Sublimes’ appeared in samizdat in 1966. At that time, there could be no question of an official publication of the novel in the USSR, even though there was nothing “political” about it; the novel did not meet moral and ethical criteria. Later, when Yuri Mamleev presented this novel to a major New York publishing house, the response was harsh: “The world is not ready for this book.” The novel was officially published for the first time in Chicago in 1980 in a version shortened by a third, titled “The Sky Above Hell.” “The world is not ready to read this novel. And I would not want to live in a world that would be ready to read this novel,” a New York critic remarked about the abridged version of ‘The Sublimes’.

Yuri Vitalyevich Mamleev, also Mamleyev or Mamleiev (Russian: Юрий Витальевич Мамлеев, 11 December 1931 – 25 October 2015), was a prominent Russian novelist who began writing in the 1960s and won the Pushkin Prize in 2000. He is considered the founder of metaphysical realism as a literary genre. His best known work, The Sublimes (Russian: Шатуны), was a samizdat novel published in 1966 and translated into English in 2014 by Marian Schwartz.

Mamleev was also well known as the founder of the Yuzhinsky Circle, an occultist, underground literary salon based out of his shared apartment on Yuzhinsky Lane in central Moscow. The illegal literary salon attracted many non-conformist and anti-Soviet artists, writers, intellectuals, and poets, including the future philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, Yevgeny Golovin, and Geydar Dzhemal. He was deeply interested in Hindu and Buddhist doctrines and went on to lecture at Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris and Moscow State University. Following Mamleev’s immigration to the United States, Golovin took over leadership of the group.

In 1974, Mamleev left the USSR and emigrated to the United States where he taught at Cornell University until the fall of the Soviet Union. Post-dissolution, he returned to Moscow where he continued to live and write until his death in 2015.

This post is related the upcoming film screening of director Valentina Bek’s documentary, ‘News from another world,’ about Mamleev within the framework of the cinema club and Film Association K1NO1.

NEWS FROM THE OTHER WORLD
a film by Valentina Bek about the writer Yuri Mamleyev

Friday Nov 15, 7pm

Screening

+conversation with Valentina Bek

NEWS FROM THE OTHER WORLD
a film by Valentina Bek about the writer Yuri Mamleyev

Friday Nov 15, 7pm

Screening

+conversation with Valentina Bek
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Motto – 38 rue du Vertbois – 75003 Paris
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“A family portrait of the Mamleyevs in a tight interior of a small Moscow apartment is an experiment in metaphysical documentary filmmaking. Yuri Mamleyev, the author of a great prose about Russian chthonic tradition. His wife, translator Maria Alexandrovna Mamleyeva, flips through a photo album with the pictures of Parisian and American exile. But the eerie time reverberates somewhere near these scenes of unpretentious coziness, in the editing voids and the disturbing hum of the abstract soundtrack.” – Andrey Kartashov

The event is organized within the framework of the cinema club and Film Association K1NO1 Paris.

Information about the most famous novel, ‘The Sublimes’ by Yuri Mamleyev, can be found here

Truly Blessed tells a powerful visual story about a community’s response to discrimination, both racial and religious. Chris Suspect came upon this unusual community by chance. He met Bilal Ali after a taxi hit Ali on the streets of Georgetown in Washington, DC. Suspect photographed the accident and sent him the photos for his lawyer to use. A few months later, Bilal invited Suspect to photograph a private party at a non-descript restaurant in Dupont Circle. At the time, Suspect had no idea he would be introduced that night to an empowered community of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender African Americans.

“In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where l am. You know the way to the place where I am going.” John 14:1-4

“Sometimes it is only through photographs that we can see the sacred in the secular, or the secular in the sacred. This collection, Truly Blessed, uses photography to forge a conversation between the sacred black church and secular sexual/erotic spaces, capturing sites where the body, mind, and spirit converge. Suspect’s attention to the subtlety of the performances of everyday people-engaging in rituals of their own choosing-illustrates the diverse and dynamic realities of being black and queer in America.
I was fortunate to be a founding minister at The Community Church of Washington, DC (UCC), the church that is so well-defined in this text.
I had left the DC metropolitan area by the time of this chronicling of sacred-secular aspects of black queer life. However, while in the ministry at the “Community Church,” I always felt conflicted to literally dance in the sanctuary, after a night of dancing and sweating in the streets. My queer peers and I were taught early the separation of the church and the street, the necessary division of the secular and the sacred. In many ways, being in a church where all were welcomed-where queer met straight, trans met bi, and men met women, we were already in a cultural world far different than what we had historically been given within larger and more mainstream black churches. Dare I say, while we may have sometimes felt a degree of shame or conflict—in mixing our sacred and seculars—we all felt the harmony between the spiritual and sexual, as both energies were charged by bodily need, passion, and improvisation. Every now and then the riffs at the DJ booth inside the Bachelor’s Mill would parallel the scratch of the drums behind the pulpit. Indeed, as Suspect shares images of folks engaged in a spiritual worship experience sometimes in the midst of giving devotion to a higher power, sitting in a pew, caring for children, hugging tightly, or speaking from the pulpit-we are offered a look into a word that may be familiar to some and foreign to others.
Likewise, as we move into the clubs and homes, we are presented with bodies who speak sexuality and desire in many ways some standing and watching, some moving, some in drag, some in masturbatory bliss, some posed in a moment of intimate dance, and some ready for the camera while others are unaware of its presence. The way that these scenes of sacred-spiritual and secular-sexual expression still exude the plurality and porousness of community, allows this work to color Black queerness in all its shades.” – Jeffrey Q. McCune, Forward

Author: Chris Suspect

Publisher: King Koala Press

Order here

Join us with King Koala Press in Berlin on Tuesday, Nov 12, from 7-9 PM for a presentation of ‘Truly Blessed’, a compelling visual narrative exploring community responses to racial and religious discrimination.

Published by King Koala Press, this book features a foreword by Jeffrey Q. McCune, PhD, and includes an extensive interview with Chris Suspect by Ibarionex Perello, host of The Candid Frame. With a testimonial from Guggenheim Fellow Maggie Steber, ‘Truly Blessed’ uses photography to bridge the sacred Black church and secular erotic spaces, highlighting the convergence of body, mind, and spirit. This work acknowledges the complexities of the “sacred” while celebrating the unapologetic existence of the sexual-secular-sacred trinity in the Black queer community.

Meet and greet, book signing and photo exhibition.

Order here

“Books not only describe their own contents but also the eras in which they were created.
Conceived as a color inventory, this publication gathers a selection of titles that I have dealt with, exhibited, and produced since the early 2000s. Many of these books came to me; I did not seek them out, but provided them a home. For me, books are an archive of ideas and their materialization, a mapping of my engagement with the material world.
I appreciate objects that can be held, traded, and hidden. They allow me to contemplate, negotiate, and share art without the need to seek out the fetish of the original.
The collection does not showcase the most beautiful or best books of their time. It consists art books on themes, colors, and production techniques, all of which have piqued my interest in one way or another.
The objects in this book were collected, exhibited, and re-contextualized in various forms within my long-term project Salon für Kunstbuch.
I have read some of them, while others served as models for new works. I have traced them, catalogued them, woven tapestries from their covers, and marked their ownership status.
Books are objects that lead their own unique lives.”

Author: Bernhard Cella

Publisher: Salon Für Kunstbuch

Order here

“Body to book” is an upcycling project that explores the relationship between the human body and books. It comprises six sculptures assembled from coat fragments and books, each covering a naked body. This arrangement invites explorations of sensuality and intimacy and encourages direct interaction with the subject. Through calling us to examine the subtle interactions between the body and the books, it offers new perspectives for artistic, philosophical and personal reflection on matter, media and the human condition.

Author: Bernhard Cella

Publisher: Salon Für Kunstbuch

Order here

Presentation: 9 November 2024, 3—9 pm

Vit Havránek in conversation with the artist (5pm)
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Motto – 38 rue du Vertbois – 75003 Paris
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“body to book” is an upcycling project that explores the relationship between the human body and books. It comprises six sculptures assembled from coat fragments and books, each covering a naked body. This arrangement invites explorations of sensuality and intimacy and encourages direct interaction with the subject. Through calling us to examine the subtle interactions between the body and the books, it offers new perspectives for artistic, philosophical and personal reflection on matter, media and the human condition.

Bernhard Cella  lives and works in Vienna and Trieste. Recent and past exhibitions include Color Inventory Booklaunch, Secession, Vienna (2024); Location Advantages, Vesch, Vienna (2024); Systema, Marseille (2024); Radical Matter, dieAngewandte, Vienna 2024; Xhibit – Various Exhibition Practices, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (2024).

Vít Havránek is an art historian and curator with a focus on contemporary art and critical studies. Since 2019, he has served as Vice-Rector at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and currently resides at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. From 2002 to 2019, he was the director of tranzit.cz15(12.5%), part of a network of organizations active in five Central and Eastern European countries. He has also worked as an external editor for JRP Ringier and curated or co-curated exhibitions of various scales on different continents, including In the Matter of Art in Prague, U3 Triennale in Ljubljana, Jakarta Biennial 2017, and Manifesta 8. He is a co-founder of the group PAS, and his articles have been published in books and catalogues by JRP Ringier, Centre Pompidou, MoMA, MIT Press, Sternberg Press, and others.

ED4M
Zine presentation and Screening ‘Making of ED4M’

November 8th, 2024
Screening starts 7 pm

+conversation with the artist with K1NO1
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Motto – 38 rue du Vertbois – 75003 Paris
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The main character is the electric train type ED4M, one of the most common in Russia since the mid-90s. This small detective story unfolds on newsprint, featuring carriage vestibules, doors, handles, and wanted persons. It immerses the audience in the realm between the living and the dead, accompanied by the sound of wheels clattering, exploring space, ritual, collective recognition, and personal experience. The Tbilisi weekly sports newspaper served as the prototype for this book.

ED4M (Electric train Demikhovsky, type 4) is a series of Russian DC electric trains produced from 1996 to 2016 at the Demikhovsky Machine-Building Plant. The first batch with increased comfort was manufactured for the Moscow Railway between 1999 and 2000. During this period, ED4 and ED4M models became the most significant electric trains for local purposes.

Zine features photographs by Ivan Anisimov taken between 2019 and 2022 before he left Russia. Further shooting was continued by his son Danila, who took four rolls of 35mm film in winter 2023. Zine design by Aeona Melnikova.

Screening is a documentation of the printing process of a zine in a print facility, Tbilisi.

Ivan Anisimov was born in Pereslavl-Zalessky, Russia, in 1988. For more than 10 years, he has been engaged in documentary film and photography, collecting archives from lost photographs and videos. He has carried out several photographic projects and is now based in Paris, France.

The event is organized within the framework of the cinema club and Film Association K1NO1 Paris.

Order zine here.

ED4 (Electric train Demikhovsky, type 4) is a series of Russian DC electric trains produced from 1996 to 2016 at the Demikhovsky Machine-Building Plant for the railways of Russia and the states of the republics of the former USSR.
In the period from 1999 to 2000, the first batch of electric trains with an increased level of comfort were manufactured. This batch was by order of the Moscow Railway, and was necessary for the implementation of local flights. In 2000, the first set of AC electrical equipment for ED9M electric trains was supplied by Electrosila OJSC. It was from these deliveries that the active introduction of the equipment of this company into production began. During this period, trains of the ED4 and ED4M models were the most significant and widespread electric trains used for local purposes.

The book features photographs by Ivan Anisimov taken between 2019 and 2022 before he left Russia. Further shooting was continued by his son Danila in accordance with the list provided by his father. In total Danila took four rolls of 35mm film in winter 2023.

Order here.