Lemaniana: Reflections on Other Scenes is the catalogue of a collective exhibition at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève celebrating the diversity of the contemporary artistic production in the Léman region.
The exhibition is the result of a call for projects, launched in autumn 2020, based on an open conception of the territory, with the aim of bringing together artists of different background who are either temporarily or permanently linked to the cross-border region of the Lake Léman basin, irrespective of training or education.
Rich in illustrations and texts, the catalogue allows us to navigate through the universe of nearly 60 artists, including artist duo and collectives, bringing to light new connections and opening our gaze to fresh interpretations of the world – a world deeply shaken by recent events. Current news – whether we are talking about racism, divergent political powers, gender identity or the pandemic and its confinements – give the project a truly contemporary nature.

Edited by Andrea Bellini.
With essays by Mohamed Almusibli, Andrea Bellini, Roxane Bovet, Patrick de Rham, Jill Gasparina and Stéphanie Moisdon.
Artists: Sonja Aboussouan, Mathilde Agius, Jérôme Baccaglio, Lucas Ballester & Oélia Gouret, James Bantone, Jacopo Belloni, Mabe Bethônico, Yann Stéphane Biscaut, Aurélie Blanchette Dubois, Vivia Braitano, Francesco Cagnin & Lorenza Longhi, Loucia Carlier, Stefania Carlotti, Salomé Chatriot, Adrien Chevalley, Alfredo Coloma, Jeremy Dafflon, Francesco De Bernardi, Caterina De Nicola, Azize Ferizi, Félix Gagliardi, Louisa Gagliardi, Annabelle Galland, Gabriele Garavaglia & Miriam Laura Leonardi, Virginia Garra, Elisa Gleize, Deborah Joyce Holman, Lauren Huret, Inner Light, Luc Joly, Kayije Kagame, Monika Emmanuelle Kazi, Shiva Khosravi, Quentin Lannes, Shuang Li, Hunter Longe,  Soraya Lutangu & Ali-Eddine Abdelkhalek, Evariste Maïga, Lucia Martinez Garcia, Lou Masduraud, Lamya Moussa, Johanna Odersky, Valentina Parati, Leonardo Pellicanò, Jessy Razafimandimby, Real Madrid, Anouk Reichenbach, Delphine Reist, Diane Rivoire, Christian Schulz, Rose Siebke Winckler, Terat Thanaworrawatniti, Ambroise Tièche, Remy Ugarte Vallejos, Marco Walpen, Sarah Watson and Mayara Yamada.

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Terra Remota

Polaroïds by Julien Carreyn, 2021.

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For the first time, this publication unites the English language work of Zampa di Leone with two sequences of comic strips and caricatures titled “Deep Europe” and “In the Arse of the Balkans”. Zampa di Leone wanted to offer a radical critique of the colonial tendencies embedded within the discourse of “Balkan” and “Eastern European” contemporary art as it had been articulated during the 1990s and 2000s in global cultural centres, first and foremost in Germany and Austria. The anonymous collective was mostly active in Serbia and Europe between 2001 and 2011, and produced a significant number of comic strips that were circulated at events and through internet forums or mailing lists.

This publication has been printed on the occasion of THE DREAMERS, 58th October Salon, Belgrade Biennale 2021, within the frame of the Reading Room bookshop. The comic strips are accompanied by Boris Buden’s text “The Madman Is Sleeping with the Lunatic”, which was first published in 2003 — a reminder of the historical context and the Balkanist discourse that served as a backdrop to Zampa di Leone’s activities.

Edition: 300

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Frequent readers of zweikommasieben will know that the creative processes we highlight in our magazine are an eclectic gathering of influences that result in varied creative practices. This plurality informs a question we have repeatedly asked ourselves: what might be the common denominator connecting all the dots? For this issue, we would like to make the case for the discursive potential of personal experiences.

Once the personal is taken seriously, anecdotes provide major insights into an artist’s practice. A portrait on producer Malibu taps into memories of popular culture and traces musical experiences from her childhood to highlight the dedication she brings towards composing melodies and using samples. In their essay, the duo Space Afrika assembles recollections of their daily lives in north-west England to frame their artistic output over the years.

Highlighting subjective perspectives allows for the differentiation of what might appear similar at first. Both the collaboration of Andreas Bülhoff and Marc Matter featured in “Soundtexte” and the interview with Tygapaw refer to the use of poetry. The former condense language to its most basic units and present them as rhythmic building blocks for DJs. Taking a different approach, Tygapaw asked a poet to be the narrator of their album, expanding the tracks by embedding an additional layer of meaning.

zweikommasieben #23 also wishes to make visible the full range of its contributors. Annotations in the margins gesture towards the intuitive processes characteristic of this magazine: from an initial interest in an artist and their work, to the experience of exploring it in the context of a conversation, and to collaboratively reflect on text and photography with various people.

Full content:
-interviews with Bass Clef, Crystalmess, Flora Yin-Wong, Grand River, Ikonika, Jabu & Daniela Dyson, Meemo Comma, and Tygapaw
-portrait on Malibu
-essay by Space Afrika
-Contributes by Jessika Khazrik and Sara Berts
-columns: Soundtexte (poetry), “Art Review” (art review), and We are Time (photography)

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Box with six new A5 publications including: Ibis, Tchéring, Les Pharmacies du Sacré Cœur I, Blin, Mimosa, Les Pharmacies du Sacré Cœur II with three 10×15 photos.

Edition of 20 copies.

Numbered and signed by the artist.

Published by Motto Books; Crèvecœur; Anywave.

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How do we create ideas, paths, and actions for a more sustainable world? How can art function as a catalyst for change? The project Sustainable Societies for the Future is founded on some of today’s most complex and urgent challenges. This publication, released on the occasion of the concurrent exhibition on view at the Malmö Art Museum and a number of seminars and events, directly addresses issues surrounding how cities and human settlements can be transformed into inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable environments.

The statements in this book feature individual and collective contributions by artists and scholars from the Nordic and North American art scenes to awaken discussion, reflection, and perspectives that reflect sustainable pathways for the world. Designed by Olga Prader, the navigation of each text is conceptually categorized through a visual lexicon that follows the mission of the 11 Global Goals set out by the UN, including biodiversity, housing, and gender equality, health and safety, and environmental justice, among other key issues.

We are at a point where sustainability alone is not sufficient. As the pages within Sustainable Societies for the Future suggests, contemporary art can serve as a key speculation into how issues of ecological challenges, access to and preservation of natural resources, social exclusion, balance of economy, forms of protest, and collective responsibilities can be approached via a political and social lens.

The exhibition Sustainable Societies for the Future runs at Malmö Art Museum from 1 February to 23 May 2021.

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The publication delves into Dani Gal’s trilogy produced between 2011 and 2018. Each film approaches the complexities of historical accounts between ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ in the context of German, Jewish and Arab histories from a different ‘blind spot’ in historical knowledge. Cinematic tools are applied to illuminate and stage these undocumented aspects of real historical events.

Contributions from Sabeth Buchmann, Burcu Dogramaci, Noit Banai and Sa’ed Atshan are accompanied by visual and literary material and references from Gal’s extensive research practice.

Night and Fog (2011) is a re-enactment of the night of 31 May 1962, based on an interview Gal made with Michael Goldman-Gilad, a Holocaust survivor and Israeli police officer, who had undertaken the secret mission of scattering the ashes of Adolf Eichmann into the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea after he was captured in Argentina and brought to trial and executed in Israel.

As from Afar (2013) is a fictionalised account of a meeting between Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to bring Nazi criminals to justice, and Albert Speer, the chief architect of the Third Reich, using the letters they exchanged throughout the 1970s as a basis for the dialogue.

White City (2018) revolves around the complex character of Arthur Ruppin, a German Jew and one of the founders of the Zionist Settlement who promoted co-existence with the Palestinians before the establishment of the State of Israel; the film traces his visit to the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, and his 1933 meeting with Hans F. K. Günther, the leading German eugenicist of the time who became a major influence on National Socialist race theory.

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“I also don’t know the five new federal states and, if I want to film there, I have to have a leading figure. It is the profiteer, development aid worker and missionary all in one. He breaks into the accession area from the West in army strength. The film is about such a salesman.” –– Harun Farocki, 1990/91
HaFI 014 publishes a typescript and archival materials related to the television film Hard Selling (1991) by Harun Farocki. For this unfinished project, Farocki documented an Adidas sales training in East Berlin in 1990. In the period after July 1991 he accompanied a West German Adidas salesman on his trade tour through Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Thus, Farocki explored the operational details of introducing the logic of free market in a country formerly trained in planned economy. Although the broadcast of Hard Selling was announced in the program booklet of the DFF—the successor to GDR television—for 13 November 1991, it did not take place. The TV-station was dissolved six weeks later.

The artist Elske Rosenfeld follows the film stills, fragments of conversations and announcement texts of Farocki’s Hard Selling. She mobilizes the figure of the “window” as a frame to transpose the languages and gazes at shop windows, screens and trainers into a poetic-analytical editing. In the resulting text/image essay Rosenfeld updates her ongoing archive of gaze-images. An editorial note by Doreen Mende introduces HaFI 014.

Elske Rosenfeld, born 1974 in Halle/S. (GDR), works in different media and formats. Her primary focus and material are the histories of state-socialism and its dissidences, and the revolution of 1989/90. Documents and archives are starting points for organising spaces in which these hi/stories can come to be present. Her ongoing project “A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures” investigates how political events manifest and come to be archived in the bodies of their protagonists.

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„Auch kenne ich die fünf neuen Bundesländer nicht und muss, wenn ich dort filmen will, eine Leitfigur haben. Es ist der Geschäftemacher, Entwicklungshelfer und Missionar in einem. Er bricht in Armeestärke vom Westen aus in das Beitrittsgebiet ein. Im Film geht es um einen solchen Verkäufer.“ –– Harun Farocki, 1990/91

HaFI 014 publiziert ein Typoskript sowie Archivmaterialien, die im Bezug stehen zu dem Fernsehfilm Hard Selling (1991) von Harun Farocki. Für dieses nicht zuende gebrachte Projekt filmte Farocki im Jahr 1990 eine Adidas-Verkaufsschulung in Ost-Berlin. In der Zeit nach dem Juli 1991 begleitete er einen westdeutschen Adidas-Vertreter auf seiner Handelstour durch Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. So erforschte Farocki die operativen Details der Einführung der Logik des freien Marktes in einem ehemals planwirtschaftlich organisierten Land. Obwohl die Ausstrahlung von Hard Selling im Programmheft des DFF – dem Nachfolger des Fernsehens der DDR – für den 13. November 1991 angekündigt ist, kam es nie dazu. Der Sender wurde sechs Wochen später aufgelöst.

Die Künstlerin Elske Rosenfeld folgt den Filmstills, Gesprächsfragmenten und Ankündigungstexten von Farockis Hard Selling. Die Figur des „Fensters“ (im Sinne von frame) dient ihr als Instrument, um die Sprachen und Blicke auf Schaufenster, Bildschirme und Turnschuhe poetisch-analytisch zu montieren. In ihrem Text/Bild-Essay aktualisiert Rosenfeld ihr fortlaufendes Archiv von Blick-Bildern. Eine editorische Notiz von Doreen Mende führt in HaFI 014 ein.

Elske Rosenfeld (geb. 1974, Halle/S.) forscht als Künstlerin, Autorin und Kulturarbeiterin zur Geschichte der Dissidenz in Osteuropa und zu den Ereignissen von 1989/90. Ausgehend von historischen Dokumenten und Archiven organisiert sie Räume, in denen diese Geschichte/n gegenwärtig werden können. In ihrem aktuellen künstlerischen Forschungsprojekt “A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures” untersucht sie den Körper als Austragungsort und Archiv politischer Ereignisse.

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Published by Motto Books

Catalogue of Theodora Allen’s solo exhibition Saturnine
Kunsthal Aarhus
14.05–18.07.2021

On a summer evening in July 1610, under the humid Padua sky, Galileo peered through his crude telescope to discover the rings of Saturn, the furthest planet then known. While Galileo set his sight on Saturn, it came into view slowly. Ancient Greek and Roman theory, and later medieval psychology, had correlated four planets with each of the elements and temporal ‘humours’; Jupiter’s persuasion prevailed in the blood and affected a sanguine nature; Mars ruled aggression; the moon was cause for an apathetic disposition. The fourth and final humour, inspired by ringed Saturn, was responsible for melancholy. It is for this reason we have the term ‘saturnine’ to describe sadness. The sight of Saturn is one of sorrow.

Kunsthal Aarhus presents Saturnine, the first institutional solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based contemporary artist Theodora Allen. Interweaving the artist’s emblematic use of symbols, the exhibition engages with a history of Saturn, the celestial body said to have been the cause of a melancholic disposition – from ancient myth and the Middle Ages through to the present. At times appearing as itself, a large ringed orb, and at others as affect, the figure of the planet joins Allen’s representations of recurrent motifs that are informed by cultural and emotional influence.

Alongside Saturn, depictions of markers such as serpents, wildfires, moths, hourglasses and hallucinogenic plants present a language that is seen rather than uttered. Within the emblematic tradition – a form positioned squarely between visual arts and literature, grappling equally with both image and text – Allen’s compositions exist as propositions of impossibilities. As concepts, they transport the viewer elsewhere: into different times, different narratives. Steeped in mythmaking and iconography, the paintings are resonant with the visionary work of poets and painters in early Symbolist graphic arts, as well as resurgences of this aesthetic in the zeitgeist of 1970s California, addressing cyclical, enduring themes of human versus nature that withstand in our contemporary moment.

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