Yves Klein (1928–62) first traveled to Japan as a young man in 1952, motivated primarily by his interest in judo. During his 15 months abroad, Klein had numerous important creative and philosophical revelations that culminated in the launch of his artistic career upon his return to Paris.

Prepared in collaboration with the Yves Klein Archives, this volume details Klein’s relationship with Japan through nearly 150 archival documents, photographs and letters, inviting the reader on his journey from martial arts to fine art at the very beginning of his career. Along the way we learn of Klein’s important encounters with art critic Takachiyo Uemura, painter Keizo Koyama and design professor Masaki Yamaguchi. “Yves Klein Japon” provides essential insight into the origins of Klein’s oeuvre as both a groundbreaking visual artist and prolific writer whose short-lived career helped to transform postwar art.

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Locomotion is a one-off travel zine with contributions from art-related actors, engaging with modes and troubles of travel. Featuring contributions by Samar al Summary, Fully Funded Residencies, Burak Taşdizen, Azar Pajuhandeh, Ipek Burçak, Ada Karayel and Eren Ileri. It is a wandering around (im)mobilities of non-humans, artist residencies as a way of survival, road and driving memories, heatwaves and meltings, and commercial space travel.

Locomotion is designed by Ada Karayel, and co-faciliated by Eren Ileri. Illustrations are made by Goodnewsforbadguys.

The magazine comes with a sticker set; a fly and the Locomotion logo.

From Editor’s and Publisher’s Note:

“…When things started to resemble sci-fi dystopia, the absurdity of writing applications for artist residencies at that time has triggered us to have a look at the issue of traveling more deeply and we found ourselves digging up different holes that leave threads for you to connect…”

“…Before we came to the idea of making a magazine, we were speculating on various issues entangled with travel: the materiality of roads, and their related social meanings, debates that can be categorized as anti-travel or travel skepticism and slowing down, inactivity or motionlessness, and also the luxury of not-to-travel by choice…”

“…Since this publication took its start with the pandemic, attentiveness towards some of the matter that are partly in our bodies, and to others that are not, brought us to the word locomotion, which means not just the motion of the human and the living but also of the non-living and the non-human, of which you will find pieces scattered all over the magazine.”

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intervals and forms of stones of stars investigates a Nordic man-made beach landscape. Located near Copenhagen, Køge Bay Beach Park is a 7-kilometer-long recreational area reclaimed from the sea. While highly planned and regulated, the idea was to create a landscape that looked like wild nature. The book is a reflection of this anthropocene biotope, its botany, and its cultural context. Through a series of cameraless photographic registrations, Buhl maps the biotope’s flora, fauna, and particles and draws connections between the characteristics of the site and its photographic representation. Her photographs are inspired by the cameraless photographic works of W. H. Fox Talbot (1840s) and A. Strindberg (1890s); images created without a photographic lens, only by use of light and light sensitive surfaces. In the photographs, dust particles resemble the night sky and the wings of an insect look like a topographical map. The book contains the series of full-page photographs as well as a text of field notes and two conversations, with N. Bubandt, Professor of Anthropology, Aarhus University and with L. Gallun, Assistant Curator of Photography at MoMA, New York.

Nanna Debois Buhl is a visual artist who lives and works in Copenhagen and New York. She participated in The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, New York (2008-09), and received her MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2006). Her practice is a continuous investigation of historical and cultural knowledge through botany, animal life, imagery, and architecture. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Pérez Art Museum, Florida; SculptureCenter, New York; Art in General, New York; The Studio Museum, Harlem, New York; MSU Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Lunds Konsthall, Sweden; ARKEN Museum of Modern Art; Kunsthal Charlottenborg; Kunsthallen Brandts; Museum for Contemporaty Art, Roskilde; and Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark.

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With a text by Olaf Nicolai

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An artist book by Rune Andersson that explores potential strategies of escaping civilization,oppressors and/or reality.

Print: Offset and Risograph
Edition of 400

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Texts by Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Noura Al Sayeh
Taken at the height of the Assad days, the images of the photographer Giovanna Silva overlap in this publication with Syrian tourist guides’ images and texts, creating a net of intended and unintended relationships and time interconnections. As Pier Paolo Tamburelli writes in his essay, “Silva’s photo speak of time that is twice lost. […] When I look at them, I can smell that apparently eternal condition of no-change in Syria before 2011. I recognize the omnipresent, idiotic smile of Bashar – at the time still considered the gentle son of Hafez al-Assad (the ophthalmologist who lived in London and did not really wanted to leave to become a dictator and who finally had to substitute the nasty brother probably killed by Mossad). Now that the civil war has erased everything that belonged to that Syria, now that everything changed, I have the impression that that world is way more lost than many other episodes of the past. Both for Syrians and for foreigners the memories of the civil war will occupy all the space that could have been dedicated to these last twenty years of Syrian history. […] Not only are those moments gone, but they will not be remembered. The boredom of that period entirely disappeared in the cruel excitement of the war. The pictures are a strange homage to a lost world”.

€25.00

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Follow Me is a book created for the exhibition by Susan Philipsz in the city of Genoa. Designed on the basis of a contemporary Baedeker, this book offers an original itinerary in the city, read through the work of the Scottish artist, invited by the Museum of Villa Croce in conceiving an exhibition inside the historic center of the city. The book is thus a city-guide that links different places and times, and that also moves from the habit of moving, investigated as a typical phenomenon of the Grand Tour – and that is the origin of the term “tourism”.

Susan Philipsz (Glasgow, 1965) won the prestigious Turner Prize in 2010 and has presented her installations in 2007 at Skulptur Projekte, Muenster, in 2012 at documenta13, Kassel and in 2015 at the Istanbul Biennial. Susan Philipsz has gained widespread recognition in the international artworld for the sharp execution of her works, unique in their genre, based on the rigorous analysis of the history, memory, and traditions of a specific place that she transposes into immaterial architectures creating an introspective environment for the “viewer”. The universal narrative of loss, hope, and homecoming is conveyed through the reproduction of tunes and melodies that, blending with the genius loci, generate a subjective storytelling.

€25.00

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Fara Fara means face-to-face in Lingala and is a musical phenomenon deeply rooted in Congolese culture. Two groups play at the same time at adjacent locations, and the ones who play longest win. In times gone by, disputes were sometimes settled in this way; nowadays, it is more about musical leadership. A Fara Fara is a massive event attracting huge crowds, but it happens very rarely.

This book is about a film where a Fara Fara takes place in Kinshasa, a musical battle between the two major proponents of Congolese contemporary rumba. The film has not been made yet. It will be directed by the artist Carsten Höller and the film director Måns Månsson.

The book contains photographs taken during various preparatory trips, made since 2001 by Pierre Björk, Hoyte van Hoytema, Reed Kram, Armin Linke, Giovanna Silva, Patrik Strömdahl and the directors. The Swedish writer and music cognoscente Elin Unnes provided the text.

Concept: Carsten Höller
Graphic design: Christoph Steinegger/ Interkool
Text: Elin Unnes

PVC softcover, hot foil

€30.00

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I spent more than two months alone on a bicycle, travelling along the perimeter of the Italian peninsula, and then two weeks cycling around Sardinia. I put together hundreds of images of horizons which, day after day, came to form a chromatic stave of seas and skies. Finally, from the confines of my studio, image after image, I pieced back together a fair part of the Italian skyline. (A.R.)
Three years passed between the first journey around the peninsula, over the summer of 2011, and the second journey around Sardinia, in the summer of 2014. This book brings together the photographs that currently make up the work Orizzonte in Italia, starting out from the visual, graphical and theoretical notes that accompanied the artist.

Antonio Rovaldi was born in parma in 1975. The artist’s research moves around the relative themes and perceptions of spaces and landscapes, always showing the relations of the different materials used, like that of photography, video, sculptures and drawings. Since 2006 Rovaldi divides his time between Milan and New York. His recent solo shows include: Hirshhorn Museum Washington dc, The Goma Madrid, Museo MAN Nuoro.

Design: Alessandro Costariol & Antonio Rovaldi

Texts by Antonio Rovaldi, Luca Bertolo, Francesco Zanot, Leonardo Passarelli, Lorenzo Giusti, Pier Luigi Tazzi

Language: Italian / English

€30.00

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Jesus Days: Slide show and publication presentation @ Motto Berlin. 22.11.2013.

Jesus Days, 1978 – 1983
Photographs by Greg Reynolds

“In the late 70s and early 80s, I was a closeted gay man in his 20s working as a campus minister for an evangelical Christian student organization called the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. I struggled with my homosexuality. I was overwhelmed by grief and saw no option other than to repress my desires for sex and love. In 1978, a missionary friend gave me a 35 mm Pentax K1000 that she didn’t use. I knew very little about photography, but I loved taking pictures. It wasn’t my intention to document the American evangelical movement, but rather to take photographs of the people and places that were important to me. Now I see that the camera allowed me to say in pictures what I could never say in words.” 

From 19.00, slide show begins at 19.45

Motto Berlin
im Hinterhof
Skalitzer Str. 64
Berlin 10997