28.04: “Mind The Gap”, Cazul101’s group show | Exhibition Opening @ Motto Berlin

Posted in Events, Exhibitions, Motto Berlin event on April 27th, 2022
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Image by Adriana Preda.


We are pleased to invite you to “Mind The Gap”, the three-days-opening of the Cazul101 group show featuring works of Dan Perjovschi, Anca Bucur, artistic duo SABA (Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu), Nicoleta Moise, Adriana Preda, Ioana Gheorghiu and Megan Dominescu.

28 April, at 6pm
@ Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68
10997, Berlin

Regularly using the subversive and progressive message in their practice, the artists are invited to reflect on the current political situation due to the high rise of extremist regimes in Europe and build a bridge between past and present, personal and political, highlighting the historical events that endangered the freedom of the individual.

The group show “Mind The Gap” is an alarm signal where image and text communicate to question and eradicate the toxic extremist behaviours experienced by the artists in the geographical space they develop their work.

After the three opening days, on 1st of May, from 7pm, the artist Dan Perjovschi will be present for an artist talk about the synthesis of the last years and the current situation in Europe.

Looking forward to seeing you!

Soggetto nomade. Various Authors. NERO

Posted in photography, politics on April 24th, 2022
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With an afterword by Rosi Braidotti, an introduction by Cristiana Perrella and Elena Magini and selected words by the photographers.

The book has been published in collaboration with Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci which hosted the eponymous show.

Soggetto nomade (Nomadic Subject) gathers, for the first time in one volume, shots taken by five Italian photographers between the mid 60s to the 80s. The photographs are giving glimpses on the way female subjectivity was lived, represented and interpreted back in the days, in a time of great social change in Italy. Years of transition from political radicalism to hedonism, the lead years were also years of great participation and civil conquests, mostly due to the feminist struggle. This book is a visual reflection on identity and representation departing from the extraordinary portraits of the trans community in Genoa by Lisetta Carmi (Genoa, 1924), followed by the portraits of actress, writers and artists by Elisabetta Catalano (Rome, 1941-2015); the feminist movements’ shots by Paola Agosti (Turin, 1947); women and young women captured by Letizia Battaglia (Palermo, 1935) in a Sicily disfigured by the mafia; to end with the photos of men who used to turn into women for a day, during carnival, in the small towns of Campania captured by Marialba Russo (Naples, 1947).

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Being Together: A Manual For Living. Grace Ndiritu. KRIEG

Posted in politics, writing on April 23rd, 2022
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Contributors: Philippe Van Cauteren, Pieter Vermeulen, Grace Ndiritu, Rafaela Lopez, Roberto dell’Orco, Jana Haeckel, Katleen Vermeir & Ronny Heiremans, Nathalie Boobis, Shayla Perreault, Edward Ball, Guadalupe Martinez, Stacy Suy, Ezra Fieremans.

Being Together: A Manual For Living falls in the lineage of publications such as The Journal of the Society for Education Through Art, which throughout the 1960s provided British art schools a window into experimental education. By contrast, Grace Ndiritu’s experience in creating radical pedagogies arose from a connected, yet unorthodox system of ‘self education’. In 2012, she decided to spend time living in cities only when necessary. She thus lived in rural, alternative and often spiritual communities, while expanding her research into nomadic lifestyles and training in esoteric studies, which she began after graduating art school. This research led her to visit Thai and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, permaculture communities in New Zealand, forest tree dwellers in Argentina, neo-tribal festivals such as Burning Man in Nevada, a Scottish Hare Krishna ashram, and the Findhorn Spiritual Community in Scotland. Such lifestyles forever transformed her ideas of education and have proven critical for her art, whether conducting teaching experiments with students, peers and the general public; some of whose voices appear in this publication. Ndiritu posits, “What does (art) education mean today?” and specifically, “What does an embodied (art) education mean in a time of pandemics and social unrest?”. Being Together: A Manual For Living attempts to answer these complex questions.

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Die Nacht Der Lebenden Toten. Hendrik Hegray

Posted in Zines on April 22nd, 2022
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Die Nacht Der Lebenden Toten
Hendrik Hegray
02.2019

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AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands. Niki de Saint Phalle. The Lapis Press

Posted in illustration on April 20th, 2022
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Provides the facts on how AIDS can and can’t be transmitted, and how to prevent the spread of this disease, in the form of a letter from a mother to her son.

Condition: fine. Minor shelf wear and signs of age.

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Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry. Sarah Shin, Rebecca Tamas (Eds.). Ignota Books

Posted in poetry on April 19th, 2022
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Spells are poems; poetry is spelling.

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.

Spells brings together thirty-six contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Contributors: Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Vahni Capildeo, Kayo Chingonyi, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Kate Duckney, Livia Franchini, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Ursula K. Le Guin, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh.

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Neology Issue 37. Christian Egger, Christian Kosmas Mayer, Yves Mettler, Magda Tóthová, Alexander Wolff (Eds.). ztscrpt

Posted in Journals, writing on April 18th, 2022
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Featuring contributions by Grossi Maglioni, Christian Egger, Michiel Huijben & Harriet Foyster, Brittany Tucker, Gong Zhang, Geoffrey Garrison, Michaela Eichwald, Eugenia Lai, Alix Eynaudi, Monika Grabuschnigg, Carina Luksik, Steven Warwick, Mirjam Thomann.



Edited and published by: Christian Egger, Christian Kosmas Mayer, Yves Mettler, Magda Tóthová, Alexander Wolff.

Chicago, Times, Plotter, Helvetica, DIN, Techno, Löhfelm, RR_02, Univers, Tiffany, Circuit, Memphis, Gringo, Zeus, The Mix, Princess Lulu, Pigiarniq, Paper, Libertine, Trixie, Déjà Vu, Auto, Rediviva, Acid, Wanda, Loraine, Hallo, Korpus, Spiegel, Zeitschrift, Fig, Museo, Lisa Fittko and Dyslexie are the 34 issues of the magazine founded in 2002 in Vienna by a group of Austrian, German and Swiss artists.

With 2 to 3 issues a year, the members of the team publish their magazine around their personal encounters and artistic interests.

Each issue present around fifteen contributions, in both texts and images. Artists, writers, scientists and specialists in all kind of fields are invited to contribute and intervene in a sober and efficient layout already acknowledged by the London Design Museum in its exhibition Best European Design 2005.

The focus of the editorial activity is organizing and assembling the contributions, including works and found footage by the editors, in order to create for each issue a strong and beguiling unity, amplified by the use of a different font for each issue. Each issue printed in black and white in an edition of 300 copies, is completed with a color centerfold poster by an internationally recognized artist (Kai Althoff, Elke Krystufek, Daniel Pflumm, Ayse Erkmen, Richard Hawkins, Amelie von Wulffen, Cameron Jamie, Renée Green, Jennifer West, Art & Language, etc…).

Apart of the publishing work, the team organizes for each issue a release party in a specific space, such as a panoramic bar, a wax museum, project spaces, other magazine’s editorial spaces, etc… inviting artists to perform or exhibit.

Broadening its network, the magazine gets invited into art spaces to which the team respond contextually: Multiple author wallpainting for a magazine fair, teamshow at Flaca in London, curated groupshow in Circuit, Lausanne, artists-in-residence in Copenhagen, lectures in galleries and workshops in universities, etc..

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Vacance / Vacancy #02. Yuki Aizawa, Hiroyoshi Tomite. the future magazine

Posted in photography on April 17th, 2022
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In October, 2021. Tomite temporarily returned to Tokyo from Berlin and wrote his thoughts and feelings during his three-month staying in Tokyo in his diary and photographs, and Tokyo-based photographer Aizawa took photographs of Tokyo after his return from Berlin. He also spent a full month in Sapporo from before Christmas in December to January, just before the outbreak of Corona. This book is a compiled edition of writings and photographs during that period.

The titles “Vacance” and “VACANCY” are derived from the same etymology, and are ironically translated into positive words for the era of the corona pandemic.

Edition of 200, numbered

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Free/Apples (7″ vinyl). YS & Alex Bienstock. ERF Records

Posted in music, Vinyl, vinyl on April 16th, 2022
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High gloss jackets with resin stickers on the front. Each copy comes with two double-sided paper inserts featuring drawings by Alex Bienstock & Johanna Owen.

Limited to 30 copies.

Alex Bienstock aka ‘Doctor-of-fine-artz’ aka ‘Dummy-data-in-the-omni-cringe’ is a ‘Post-Artist’ Get with the program & read the manifesto ‘We, the post-artists’ if you want to understand.. or in this case overstand – www.alexbienstock.com/files/we-the-post-artists.pdf – An answer to your disenchantments in creative pursuits? Remember that your day job is art. Here’s something to unravel – As a post artist – forget about ‘pedigree, money, laborious ambition, or skill – the only things that matter are ideas, attitude, seduction, compulsive will and unfettered energy’

‘I would say that I work from a mentally amoral place, people can think of it what they want. Sometimes it’s just a feeling and I just need to make something so I can look at it. I try not to judge what I am doing. I want to embarrass myself more, and entertain myself. Occasionally I think I am doing something smart, but to me nothing is smart. Sometimes what I’m saying is like a thank you and a middle finger at the same time. Sometimes I am confusing a message’ – Alex Bienstock

These two cuts emerge as dense atmospheric dirges. A syndicate of sound & stream-of-consciousness spoken word deliveries caught in the flow-state, probing and riding the sensor ’Poetic logic in chaos’ A seepage of information, jumbled buzz words, thoughts & statements, humor & doom. Processings from the overload, floating in the concentrated sonic space of elucidated pathos. A vivid monologue in fleet, where nothing lands on concrete. It doesn’t matter what it ‘means’, as long as we can get between things.

After a call for collaboration at the tail end of 2020, these vocals were screen captured by YS from one of Bienstock’s now Zucc’d instagram profiles. This release is a diverging path from his project ESCBAS, in which Bienstock forms many groups with different concepts and people. “This is done even if collaborators used shared material differently for their own purposes, or sees the project as something completely different. The philosophical purpose of doing this is to create and support an anarchic anything-goes mentality. The result is an etheric and intimate collective, with works remaining highly personal and singular. Works that are post-genre at it’s core and meta-schizophrenic in it’s post-ironic awareness” These recordings eventually became – ‘Free’ & ‘Apples’ – Available digitally and on a limited edition run of 7inch Records. A sound of the times – Bless

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Simulacrum – Jrg. 30 #2 Dirt. Various Authors. Simulacrum

Posted in magazines on April 15th, 2022
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Since time immemorial dirt has been conceived of as both out of place matter, along the understanding offered by Mary Douglas, as well as a tool of oppression. Through a far reaching treatment of dirt and the system of relations this word implies, this issue embarks on a quest for perspective in our understanding of human and more-than-human relations.

DIRT then becomes an opportunity to wonder about dirt in all its forms. What falls under the scope of DIRT? How is this concept used and to whose benefit? What should we change in both our conceptions of, as well as our relations to, dirt? What imaginations of dirt open up new speculative insights? And especially, what dirt will we leave behind us?

Attending to these and many more fascinating questions, the ten contributors to this issue explore the possibilities of dirt as a transient category. DIRT thus maps a constellation of approaches through which we may conceive of dirt and negotiate our relationship with it. Featuring interviews, reviews, authorial work and poetic treatments, this issue approaches DIRT as both a natural and cultural phenomenon.

Introducing the issue are the words and images of Anna Patzak, whose oneiric poems evoke a revelry of childhood memories and sensory experiences of scavenging dirt. Following hand in hand, Niels Gercama’s Ibuprofen is a tale of blurring boundaries, in which the daily grind of childhood is spent among all kinds of dirt and adulthood hovers around like a ghostly presence, prying into our world with its intrusive fingers.

In Hardnekkig vuil by Lies Defever, dirt becomes a metaphor for the childhood memories of a family’s colonial history. Through the ruins of a personal archive, we are ushered into the intimate, entangled present of a life in decay. The bodily dimension of dirt introduced by Defever is taken up by Seline Westerhof in De Walgelijke Vergankelijkheid van de Mens. This review of Sally Mann’s What Remains (2000), discusses the photographer’s work on a US body-farm, an establishment for the scientific study of decomposing human bodies. In her treatment of Mann, Westerhof focuses on both the beauty of bodily decay as well as its many regenerative potentials. Foregrounding the issue of soil, Westerhof reminds us of the freedom that is to be found in foregoing the dictatorship of perfection and control we demand of life and terrestrial bodies.

The issue of control is a central tenet of Annanova van Kanten’s The Devil’s Advocate: The Ethics of Consensual Cannibalism. In this thought provoking essay, van Kanten introduces us to the legal gap in which a case of modern day, consensual cannibalism fell in the early 2000s. By exploring the historical origins and etymology of cannibalism, van Kanten identifies this practice as originating from a process of marked othering deeply imbricated within histories of coloniality and power. In her advocating in favour of consensual cannibalism, the author makes a clever use of the theories proposed by Hobbes, Bentham and Berlin, in order to reflect upon the issues of power, consent, disgust and the right to personal determination in present society.

The second essay of this issue, Soil Entanglements, presents us with an analysis of the documentary Kiss the Ground (2020). In her critical take on the narrative proposed by the film, Emily Rhodes makes the case for a more aware appreciation of earthly soils and their needs. Proposing to understand this more-than-human category as being composed of living organisms, and of humans as being themselves humus, Rhodes foregrounds the work of Rosa Marie Mulder in Art as Humus. Through a framework informed by the work of Donna Haraway and Vandana Shiva, Mulder reviews artistic efforts that exemplify the significance of composting as both a speculative and practical practice, thus providing an inspiring range of interactions between more-than-human species and humanity.

These interactions and the set of relations stemming from them are the basis of Semâ Bekirović’s work. In her interview with Simulacrum, the Amsterdam based artist and curator discusses her approach to dirt, as well as her method and artistic practice. Focusing on interspecies communication and the need to accept our own reality as beings made of dirt, Bekirović encourages us to conceive of dirt as a transient space of generative practice.

Likewise oriented towards dirt’s positive potential for present and future practices, is Lizan Freijsen’s conception of dirt. In this last contribution, the artist and designer discusses with Simulacrum her life-work with molds, fungi and stains. Sharing details of her passion for these more-than-human organisms, Freijsen closes this issue by reminding us of the importance of ruins and their necessity for building the future, spurring us to think well and deeply about what kind of dirt we should leave behind.

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