Catalogue of Steve Bishop’s solo exhibition ‘Start Over Every Morning’ (2019) at Kunstverein Braunschweig:

In his artistic practice Steve Bishop explores how mental states can be materialized and conveyed in space, through installations often involving personal belongings and mementos. By subtly distorting familiar, often intimate domestic scenarios, Bishop creates intermediate worlds in which concepts of time are suspended, and clear boundaries between private and public space, exhibition and non-exhibition are blurred.

In the exhibition, we encounter the remnants of a celebration recently passed. Constructed in the main room is a simple white kitchen, which surreally extends over the entire length of the space. Here the profoundly everyday nature of the counter meets the attempt to grasp abstract concepts of infinity. A blankness pervades the room which is punctuated by a few scattered objects: leftover cake is carefully stowed away in Tupperware boxes, recordings of jazz instrumentals drift out from a radio, and outside garden furniture is already tucked in under its plastic cover. A longing to preserve fleeting situations repeatedly arises, no matter how temporary the moment might be. In a second room, found photographs are framed together with pages of text taken from a largely forgotten self-help organization called Re-evaluation Counseling. Slogans call for self-empowerment and optimization, and one might also discern from the neat surroundings that a desire for structure, for inner and outer clarity, seems to be as desirable as it is acutely endangered.

Publishers: Kunstverein Braunschweig; Motto Books; Floating Opera Press

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Co-published by osloBIENNALEN, Agency for Cultural Affairs, City of Oslo and Motto Books.

The H-block, or Høyblokka as it is called in Norwegian, was the Government Quarter’s main building. The was building was completed in 1958. Architect Erling Viksjø was inspired by the French modernist Le Corbusier, and set out to create an elegant, monumental but sober functionalism.

On 22 July 2011 at 15:25:22 (CEST), a car bomb was detonated outside H-block. The car, a Volkswagen Crafter, was parked just outside the main entrance. The bomb killed eight people and injured a further two hundred. It also left a deep crater in the ground and caused major damage to the building, which nevertheless remained standing.

The terrorist then travelled to Utøya island outside Oslo, where the Labour Party Youth Wing, AUF – Arbeiderpartiets Ungdomsforening, held its annual summer camp. Disguised as a policeman, he killed sixty-nine innocent young people and injured another sixty-six before he was stopped by the police Delta Force Group seventy minutes later.

During two nights in October 2017, sound artist Alexander Rishaug was granted permission by Statsbygg (Norwegian Directorate of Public Construction and Property) to enter Høyblokka and record the sound of the vacant building. All the interior, furniture and equipment had been removed, leaving the building completely empty and abandoned, like a ghost in the middle of Oslo city centre.

Equipped with a directional microphone, two DPAs, and a set of contact mics, Rishaug began to explore and monitor the building’s acoustics, vibrations and resonance. Y (59°54’54,76”N 10°44’46,03”Ø) is a sonic portrait of the Government Quarter, an investigation of Høyblokka’s psychoacoustic state, at a point in time between past and future, before it is renovated, refurbished, and put to new uses as a political and administrative centre. In the title of this soundscape, the Y represents the Y-block and the coordinates (59°54’54,76”N 10°44’46,03”Ø) locate the H-block and the Government Quarter
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The album and art project is part of
 and co-produced by osloBIENNALEN, FIRST EDITION 2019 – 2024, curated by Eva González-Sancho Bodero and 
Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk. osloBIENNALEN is initiated and financed by the City of Oslo, Agency for Cultural Affairs, Norway.

The project could not have been realized without the funding and courage from URO / KORO and Bo Krister Wallström.

Recorded inside Høyblokka, Oslo:
29 October 2017, 05:38PM–11:45AM
30 October 2017, 03:30PM–06:47AM

Recording assistant: Ilay Bachke
Mixed and edited by Alexander Rishaug at SinZen Studio, Oslo, 2018 – 2019
Mastered by Helge Sten 
at Audio Virus Lab, Oslo
Mastercut by Helmut Erler at
 Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin
Design by Blank Blank / Petri Henriksson and Sandra Stokka
Photos by Arne B. Langleite and Alexander Rishaug, October 2017
Cover photo by Teigens Fotoatelier circa 1960, Dextra Photo/NorskTeknisk Museum.
Backside photo by Arne B. Langleite

Copy Editing by Martin Berner Mathiesen
Booklet printed by Livonia Print Ltd.
Vinyl pressing by Optimal Media
Vinyl manufacturing by handle with care

The dialogue with Statsbygg regarding the recording sessions in Høyblokka were coordinated by Charlotte Hagelund and Jan Christensen.

Thanks to 22. juli-senteret for their trust and support and for granting permission to record during closing hours.

Thanks to Ebba Moi for endless love and support, Per Henrik Svalastog for critical feedback, Statsbygg for granting permission, DSS – Departementenes sikkerhets- og serviceorganisasjon for guiding us safely around the building.

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This book is published as part of Marianne Heier’s project or osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024.

Marianne Heier performed her project And Their Spirits Live On, first at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan and then at Oslo’s former Museum of Contemporary Art.
How can a centuries-old plaster cast of a two thousand-year-old sculpture speak to us today?Plaster copies of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures have formed the basis for much of the history of art. Right up until modern times artists in the western tradition learned to draw and shape works from such models. When the National Gallery was built, the central building housed a collection of these classical plaster casts. Marianne Heier has chosen to make a performance among the plaster copies at the Academy of Art in Milan where she herself studied, and later in the empty bank premises which until recently housed the Museum of Contemporary Art – drawing attention to the potential power in these figures. They are archetypes that we still refer to, although we are often unaware of this. Heier’s performance takes the form of a museum guided tour in which she takes the role of guide, situating the plaster sculptures in wider histories. Using texts taken from classical mythology and political resistance movements, she shows the potentially radical possibilities of the sculptures. The mythology from which these classical figures are taken is full of critiques of power, gender issues and identity politics that perhaps suggest a need for civil courage in the political climate of our own times.

The performance was co-curated by osloBIENNALEN curators and Alessandra Pioselli and was produced in collaboration with students and employees at the Project School in Oslo.

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This glossary is meant to accompany the three-volume publication The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 1, 2 and 3. It reflects the concerns contained in those volumes. It marks the beginning of a long-term process of creating a dictionary of terms with which to understand and eventually destabilize the complex ways through which a future Neural Capitalism will work in creating contemporary forms of neural subsumption. Neural subsumption is a future condition brought about by an assemblage of networked neural technologies that will link our brainwaves to the Internet of Everything (IoE) and then encode them to use in advanced data analysis. No thought conscious or unconscious will be left unrecorded, encoded or surveyed. Furthermore this data will be used for a future form of data inscription upon the connectome: the data set describing the con- nection matrix of the nervous system and which represents the network of anatomical connections linking neural elements together. This in the end constitutes what I have called the Statisticon. Warren Neidich is an interdisciplinary artist and theorist working between Berlin and New York. He studied photography, art, neuro- science, medicine, ophthalmology, and architecture. Recently his practice has focused on performance, sculpture, video and film to investigate the contested milieus of the social brain. He is founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, New York and Berlin, 2015–2019. Its’ curriculum focuses upon the emerging conditions of cognitive capitalism in which the brain and the mind are the new factories of the 21st century. In 1995 he conceived of the website artbrain.org and the Journal of Neuroaesthetics. It officially appeared on the web in 1997 and concentrates on the capacity of artistic practice to deregulate and estrange the social-political-cultural milieu in the end activating the material brain’s neural plastic potential.

Published by Archive Books.
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Tales 37, Lago di Braies, Dolomiti, Italy, September 2011

Published by Motto Books and ENSP Arles
numbered edition of 500

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This is the first publication on the plays of New York–based experimental theater director and playwright Richard Maxwell (born 1967) and his company New York City Players. His plays have been commissioned by The Wexner Center, Columbus; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Performance Space 122, The Kitchen and Soho Rep in New York; and The Barbican Centre, London. The book captures the experience of actually watching the plays by way of screen-grabs and captions, and in doing so documents nearly 20 years of work.

Text by Jim Fletcher, Emily Hoffman, Richard Maxwell, Robert Snowden.
Published by Westreich Wagner and Greene Naftali.

€45.00

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Cristian Forte & Hybriden-Verlag @ Motto Berlin
Piktogramme Book Launch
Thursday, October 4th. 6PM

Piktogramme is an artist book of original drawings and miniatures by Cristian Forte. These delicate diagrams are visual poems, singularly drawn onto each copy. Piktogramme was published in 2018 by Hybriden-Verlag in a limited edition of 10 copies.

Cristian Forte was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires. Between 1999 and 2006, Forte was a member of the interdisciplinary political group Etcétera, a collective influenced by Surrealism in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He lives in Berlin since 2009, where he runs Nicht-Verlag Milena.

Terremoto 12

Independencias
Independences

Dorothée Dupuis (Ed.)
Terremoto, Motto Books

In the 17th issue of zweikommasieben something that has been apparent from the beginning of the magazine—whose credo is to study the present—only seems increasingly true: in the supposed present, temporalities overlap and intersect. They burst out, reaching at once backwards and forwards.

The magazine features interviews with John Maus about the six years between the release of his last two albums, with Anna Sagström and Daniel Iinatti of Country Music discussing accelerationist force of globalization or with Alessandro Cortini on the private retrospective of 1970s Italy in Avanti. In those conversations the nature of time shows itself as enigmatic, fragmented and displaced.

On top, this issue features interviews with Anna Homler, Errorsmith, Further Reductions, Gabber Eleganza, Jasss, Ossia, Peter Rehberg and Renick Bell; conversations with Russell Haswell and between Christoph Fringeli, Simon Crab and Nigel Ayers; a portrait on Mmodemm; an essay by DeForrest Brown Jr.; columns on gender in dancehall (“Basslines”), authenticity of field recordings (“Track Down Fiction”), pictures from Georg Gatsas (“We Are Time”) as well as poetry with “Sound Texts”; and contributions by Angoisse, Ipek Gorung & Ceramic TL and Jay Glass Dubs.

In zweikommasieben #17, the nature of time also shows itself in the design—a design initially looking for an aesthetic of speed but ultimately as much a reflection of pausing as of deceleration and acceleration. And in this attempt to give form to time, there’s also the primordial-musical moment.
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Skinned and Detouched, a pair of artists books, are a portal to a single performative stage in the industrial production of two large scale sculptures, one of which is on show at Large Glass. The books, including writing by Jennifer Boyd, photography by Thierry Bal and design by Europa, imaginatively document the multiple embodiments and disembodiments involved in one moment in the production of the two works.

Skinned and Detouched document one stage in the production of two sculptures:

210 s t r e t c h e d aluminium fingers for Mechanoreceptor, Icicles (red, red) (triple spring, striple strip) were dipped in liquid PVC at Plastic Coatings in Kingswinford, West Midlands, UK, on Friday 16 February 2018.

40 spider crab shells (Maja Brachydactyla) and 56 brown crab shells (Cancer Pagurus) for Crustacean Satellites were vacuum metallised at Dual Metallising in Tyseley, Birmingham, UK, on Monday 29 January 2018.

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Text by Jennifer Boyd

Photography by Thierry Bal

Design by Europa

Printed in Birmingham by Genie in an edition of 1000
Supported by Eastside Projects, Konrad Fischer Galerie and Large Glass
Published by Eastside Projects and Motto Books in 2018