Pages #8: When Historical

Pages is a bilingual -English and Farsi- magazine that aims to function as a platform for exchange, dialogues and projects: a place for collaboration between artists and writers from Iran and elsewhere. The magazine’s interest lies in the socio-political flows within spaces of urban and everyday life.

The diversity of contributions expand and even transgress the geographically bound subjects and subjectivities, as they often develop, return, change and interact with one another from one issue of Pages to the other. It emphasizes on localities and it is the intricacy and dissonances within local currents that give way to chains of meanings, relations, differences and exchange.

Pages is a project initiated by Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, both artists living in Rotterdam. However, activities regarding the magazine are organized from both Rotterdam and Tehran, platforms from which all communications and exchanges take shape and place.

In Issue #8:

What determines our place in history? If it is the past, there we also find the material support with which we reconstitute our historical place. Our relation to history remains retrospective, but also anticipatory.

Events begin with a break from history. But they soon are recaptured by it and fetishized as historical triumphs or failures. Still something remains of past events that, although conditioned by history, is irreducible to it: a surplus that finds way to our time, something out of time that forces us to actively anticipate a renewing in past events.

With contributions by:

– Dariush Moaven Doust / Machinic Life
– Alireza Rasoulinejad & Saleh Najafi / Minor/Major [conversation]
– Norman Klein / Imaginary Future and the Archive [interview]
– Gerald Raunig & Roberto Nigro / Molecular Revolution and Event
– Saleh Najafi / Hope Against Hope
– Sven Augustijnen / Coincidences of History: Reflections on E’mile Meurice’s ‘Sketch for a psychologial study of Leopold II’
– Jalil Ziapour, Houshang Irani, Gholam Hossein Gharib / Excerpt from Khoroos Jangi magazine, 1949-50
– Performance in Iran [conversation] with Neda Razavipour, Jinoos Taghizadeh, Shahab Fotouhi, Bavand Behpour, Amir Mobed and Mahmoud Bakhshi

128 Pages
English / Farsi
Graphic Design by LUST

D €10

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Wonders of the Volcano. Salvatore Arancio.

Wonders of the Volcano is the first artist’s book by Salvatore Arancio, published by NERO in collaboration with Federica Schiavo Gallery.
Wonders of the Volcano is a faithful reconstruction of a Victorian era book that is part of Arancio’s own collection and the source of some of his etchings. The original volume, printed in London presumably in the second half of the 19th century, was written by Ascott R. Hope and comprises 11 original illustrations in black and white.
Salvatore Arancio has re-elaborated the book’s original images, altering their scientific and documentary function, and added 8 plates to the final section of the volume. The text from the first edition has instead been reprinted in its entirety, and the book’s material and typographic characteristics are identical to the original.
The volume by Ascott R. Hope is an impassioned piece of research into the naturalistic wonders of volcanoes and of the geo-telluric phenomena related to them. The inexact geology of the late 19th century mixes here with landscape descriptions so ingenuous that they transform the underlying romanticism into loose and enthusiastic popular adventure literature. The most impressive natural phenomena – registered at that time not only in Italy, but also throughout Europe, South America, in the Indian east and across the entire Mediterranean basin – are described with all the imprecision of a vague science. In this book, the inductive method overlaps with the deductive, making space for oral testimonies, fairytales and superstitions, all philologically inventoried.
It is not by chance that Salvatore Arancio has chosen to work within a context that is “science-fictional” avant la lettre. The ambiguous alterations that the artist has brought to the original images do not merely evidence the book’s original nature, but, decontextualizing it, reinvent an inexistent past that oscillates between mythology and fantasy.
Such a rehabilitation of the past bears a twofold temporal valence: it looks back in order to go forward. Indeed, by means of this enigmatic booklet, Arancio reverses the very direction at the heart of the concept of innovation – scientific innovation, if we look strictly to the contents of the book; artistic, if we consider the entire conceptual operation – evidencing an “innovative” past on the one hand, and on the other a future that never occurred. And it is precisely into this temporal fissure, tinged with nostalgia, that Arancio drops his hypnagogic, unconscious and apocalyptic imaginary, letting it fluctuate in a spatiotemporal field that belongs neither to the present, nor to the future, nor to our past.
Wonders of the Volcano is accompanied by an insert containing a critical essay by Michael Wilson, editor and freelance critic, and a text on the relation between mythology and geo-telluric phenomena written by Luigi Piccardi, Researcher at the C.N.R. – Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources, Florence.

D € 20

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Andrew Kerr. Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

In 1999, Inverleith House presented an exhibition open to all artists living and working in Scotland, called ‘Absolut Open’. The 29 artists chosen to exhibit were selected from submissions by over 350 artists, spanning several generations and encompassing every artistic medium and style. A few of the artists represented were already well-known at the time, but most were not. One of the strangest and most scuccessfuil works in the exhibition was a cardbopard sculpture made by Andrew Kerr, a young artist who had only just graduated from Glasgow School of Art. It took the form of a ‘cast.’ taken from another sculpture – the Garden’s ‘Slate Cone’ (Andy Goldsworthy, 1990; resting on the gallery floor like an upturned carapace it was positioned so that both could be viewed simultaneously by looking out of a window towards the hawthorn tree near which Goldsworthy’s sculpture was sited.

whilst Kerr’s sculpture appeared temporary, inmprovised and possibly even slightly irreverent, both forms demonstated an affinity with nature and culture respectively. Born in 1977, Kerr is one of the younger members of an internationally recognised generation of artists who have made exhibitions for Inverleith House in recent years, including Karla Black, Douglas Gordon, Jim Lambie, Victoria Morton, Tony Swain, Hayley and Sue tompkins and Cathy Wilkes.

The exhibition will feature new and recent work and is Kerr’s first major museum exhibition in Scotland, following a major solo exhjibition in 2009 at the Kunstverein in Bremerhaven, Germany and other recent solo exhibitions in Cologne and Glasgow.

Catalogue

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Edit #57

Komplizierter Spaß seit 1993, hellwach, seltsam, einzigartig: Edit ist eine der einflussreichsten Literaturzeitschriften im deutschsprachigen Raum. Dreimal im Jahr lässt sich hier Neues entdecken und Altes neu entdecken. Namen oder Kategorien sind dabei weniger wichtig als der individuelle Umgang mit den bewährten Möglichkeiten oder den Grenzen von Literatur – sollte es die geben.

Olga Grjasnowa – Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt
Konstantin Ames – sTiL.e(ins) Art und Weltwaisen
Miron Białoszewski – Gedichte
Nyk de Vries – Prosaminiaturen LESEN
Felicia Zeller – Helme aus Holz LESEN
Georg Leß – Gedichte
Matthias Senkel – Fidye
Vier Gedichte
Elfriede Czurda, Michael Lentz, Ferdinand Schmatz und
Christian Steinbacher mit Anagrammen zu einem Gedicht
von Carlfriedrich Claus
Bildteil
Fabian Bechtle – The Maximum Force of the Future
Exkurs: Amerikanische Essays
John D’Agata – Was dort geschieht
Nikil Saval – Wall of Sound
Rivka Galchen – Fallbeispiele einer Medizinstudentin aus der psychiatrischen Notaufnahme in East Harlem, Winter 2002
Yara Flores – Spiritus Duplex
Joan Didion – Blaue Stunden
Wayne Koestenbaum – Heideggers Geliebte
David Shields – Mögliche Postkarten von Rachel aus Übersee
David Foster Wallace – Weg von dem Gefühl, von allem bereits ziemlich weit weg zu sein

Geschäftsführung: Mathias Zeiske
Redaktion: Jörn Dege, Kerstin Preiwuß und Mathias Zeiske

D 5€

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Gastronomica #11:4

The journal of food and culture

D € 16

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Apartamento #8

Featuring: Marcelo Krasilcic, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Beda Achermann, Faye Toogood,Rafael de Cardenas, Brian Janusiak and Elizabeth Beer, Pilar Benitez Vibart, Cosimo Bizzarri Michael Stipe, David John, Victoria Camblin, Julie Cirelli, Thea Slotover, Ben Rivers,Patrick Parrish, Athena Currey, Alexander Heminway, Makoto Orui, Valentine Fillol-Cordier Plus: everyday life kids supplement with Olaf Breuning, Phillipe Parreno, Javier Mariscal and Mike Meiré

D € 12

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May #7

Olivier Zahm, “I think it’s time to break off…” / Hervé Legros, Preface (Documents sur l’art, no 2, 1993) / interview with Olivier Zahm / Stephan Geene, Wishing to be in Paris, led to be in Berlin or different ways to escape the nineties / Axel Huber, visual insert / Catherine Chevalier, interview with Roberto Ohrt / Maija Timonen, Looking the part – The Empty Plan by Anja Kirschner and David Panos / Clara Schulman, Gerard Byrne, “In San Francisco they say, “Flash on it”” / Karl Holmqvist, Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan / François Aubard, Richard Prince, American Prayer / Rob MacKenzie, Emily Sundblad / Elisabeth Lebovici Henrik Olesen, La maculée conception Henrik Olesen, The Immaculate Conception Karl Holmqvist Rirkrit Tiravanija, The days of this society is numbered / Vincent Romagny, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, The duplication of Dedobbeleer / Scott Portnoy Christopher d’Archangelo, Contrary to Intuition, Let’s Begin with an Image / limited edition: UNITED BROTHERS (Ei Arakawa & Tomoo Arakawa).

Conceived as a collective space in which to develop thoughts and confront positions on artistic production, May magazine examines, quaterly, contemporary art practice and theory in direct engagement with the issues, contexts and strategies that construct these two fields. An approach that could be summed up as critique at work – or as critique actively performed in text and art forms alike.
Featuring essays, interviews, art works and reviews by artists, writers and diverse practitioners of the arts, the magazine also intends to address the economy of the production of knowledge – the starting point of this reflection being the space of indistinction between information and advertisment typical of our time. This implies a dialogue with forms of critique produced in other fields.

D € 12

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Rollo Press™

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Agma Magazine # 5

FEATURES
STUDIO Pino Pascali in his studio in Boccea, Rome, as never seen before
ARCHIVE Mark Rothko’s landmark exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1961
COLLECTION Gian Ferrari Collection in Villa Necchi Campiglio
ADVERTISE Dwan Gallery at its best
DEPICTION Maurizio Cattelan’s pigeons seen through Maurizio Cattelan’s eyes

EXHIBITIONS
SOL LEWITT A Wall Drawing Retrospective, MASS MoCA, Massachussetts
DAMIÁN ORTEGA, Kurimanzutto Gallery, Mexico City
JEFF WALL The Crooked Path, The Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels
BILL BOLLINGER The Retrospective, ZKM, Karlsruhe
OLIVER LARIC Kopienkritik, Skulpturhalle Basel
IGNACIO URIARTE Works, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao
SYSTEMS, ACTIONS AND PROCESSES 1965–75, Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires
ROY LICHTENSTEIN Entablatures, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

€ 15

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Commerce By Artists

Commerce by Artists documents a fascinating and sweeping range of artists’ projects produced since the 1950s by Canadian and international artists who have sought to engage, rather than merely represent, the commercial world of which they are a part.

Encompassing canonical works such as Yves Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1958), Seth Siegelaub’s Artist’s Contract (1971), and Lee Lozano’s Strike Piece (1969) — as well as innovative and rarely-documented works like Keith Obadike’s Blackness for Sale (2001), Kelly Mark’s In & Out (1997-ongoing until 2032), and Ben Kinmont’s Sometimes a Nicer Sculpture Is to Be Able to Provide a Living for Your Family (1998-ongoing) — Commerce by Artists is a comprehensive document of artworks that take the form of transactions and exchanges of value.

Edited by Luis Jacob

Includes contributions by:
agent.NASDAQ aka Reinhold Grether, Zeigam Azizov, Clegg & Guttmann, Carole Condé & Karl Beveridge, Isabelle De Baets and Hendrik Tratsaert, Jorge di Paola, Hu Fang, Elizabeth Ferrell, Gerald Ferguson, Andrea Fraser, Coco Fusco, Hans Haacke, Jens Hoffmann, Luis Jacob, Mary Kelly, Yves Klein, Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, Jane Crawford, Frances Richard, Richard Manning, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Helen Molesworth, Keith Obadike, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Beatrix Ruf, Andrea Rosen, Martha Rosler, Reid Shier, Julian Stallabrass, Julia Steinmetz, Heather Cassils, Clover Leary, Neil Thomas, Calvin Tomkins, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Cédric Villate

2011
Art Metropole Toronto Canada
386 pp.
26.5 x 20.5 x 3 cm.
1.674 Kg
softcover
ISBN 978-0-9809184-4-1

€ 58.50

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