Borderline (Signed Copy)

Posted in Artist Book, photography on March 12th, 2024
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Borderline, Charles Paulicevich.
(Signed Copy)
Ceci est un essai, a collection run by François Bouchara.
Graphism Colin Junius.
Engraving and manufacture Gérard Issert.

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Playful subversion. Beni Bischof

Posted in Artist Book, photography on March 9th, 2024
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Playful Subversion from Swiss artist Beni Bischof is a wild journey through 945 black-and-white images taken from every available web portal in a crash of cultures, identity, humor and political comment a riotous paranoia about the world we live in and the billion of images that assault our senses every single day. It reads like an oversized flipbook except you will need one hell of a pocket to tuck this fat little monster into your coat pocket. Produced for his first Austrian solo exhibition at Fotohof Salzburg, it does exactly as the title suggests. A highly entertaining vade mecum, it blends together the great icons of the culture industry in a high-contrast panorama of our postmodern media culture. The contrast of black-and-white reproductions not only deconstructs and profanes the odd hero or two but also generates a subversive maelstrom, the pull of which is difficult to escape.

Author: Beni Bischof

Publisher: Fotohof edition and Laser Magazin

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veiled_eyes. Maryna Russo.

Posted in Artist Book, photography, writing on March 8th, 2024
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Veiled Eyes was founded in 2015, originally as an art project against Instagram and its hashtag culture. Having to adapt to the fast-growing social media and marketing platform, Veiled Eyes was born. The concept was to hide (or veil) the subject’s eyes and show no locations. At the time the project began, users were unable to have more than one account per registered email. Over time, after updates and several iPhones later, I was blocked and locked out of the Veiled Eyes account. After many attempts to regain access, I simply gave up. In collaboration with dtan Studio, I transformed the original concept into the analog form you currently hold in your hand.

Maryna Russo

edition of 58

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Joëlle Tuerlinckx : A Stretch Museum Scale 1:1 – Invitation

Posted in Artist Book on February 25th, 2024
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Joëlle Tuerlinckx: A Stretch Museum Scale 1:1 – Invitation / Uitnodiging / Invitation to a stretched walk 1:1 in a compact museum. Une promenade à échelle 1:1 dans une arhitecture de Aldo Rossi

Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2001)

Author: Joëlle Tuerlinckx

Publisher: Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht

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Auditing Intimacy

Posted in Artist Book, politics, research on February 24th, 2024
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Auditing Intimacy catalogues the last five years of O.J.A.I.’s postcard correspondence. In addition to over 80 images, the publication contains a specially commissioned essay by curator Alicja Melzacka dealing with self-institutionalization – the performing of the self as an institution – as an approach to artistic research and performance. There is a lexicon disambiguating the invented bureaucratic jargon O.J.A.I. produces and circulates around their practice.

Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence is the collaborative practice of artists Chris Dreier (DE) and Gary Farrelly (IRE/BE) since 2015. The work is fueled by a recurring obsession with architecture, infrastructure, finance, conspiracy theory, institutional power and magic. O.J.A.I. pursues a strategy of self-institutionalization where tools and codified rules of engagement are appropriated from economic and political infrastructures. The work meets the public as performance, sound art, installation, cartography, publications, and a radio show (transmitted on Dublin Digital Radio and Cashmere Radio, Berlin). O.J.A.I. has performed and exhibited work at AAIR Antwerpen, Damien and the Love Guru, ISELP (Brussels), Laura Mars Gallery (Berlin), Grölle Pass Projects, Gold and Beton, University of Texas, Marres Center for Contemporary Culture (Maastricht) and Horst Festival (Villevord).

Author: Gary Farrelly, Chris Dreier

Publisher: Zero Desk

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Sound Installation

Posted in art, Artist Book on February 22nd, 2024
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Max Neuhaus began his career as a musician, a percus-sionist. He continues to use sound as his medium. Why. then, do we find his works in the world of art, in places dedicated to seeing, not to listening? Why, in other words, does so much of his work appear on sites, indoors and out, where we would expect to find painting and sculpture? I think answers to these general questions about Neuhaus entire oeuvre must precede the attempt to say anything in particular about specific pieces. We must account for what appears to be an immense, overarching anomaly before taking up the puzzles presented in turn by each of Neuhaus various works.

Autor: Max Neuhaus

Publisher: Kunsthalle Basel

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Klara – Klara Liden

Posted in architecture, art, Artist Book, performance on January 24th, 2024
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Klara Liden

Statement

Part of me is this poor architect dealing with the prob lem of existing structures in the city, part of me is this amateur dancer or performer who wants to return ideas of rhythm to the activity of building, or of re-appropriating the built environment. Building is also un-building, re cycling or improvising new uses for what’s already been set up in places like New York, Berlin or Stockholm, whether in a museum or in my own apartment, and th ques tion of re-appropriating privatized, urban space always somehow begins with the body, its ways of moving and the temporalities it engages when it goes to work or opens up spaces of non-work in work. There is an idea of play that prefers not to decide what is and what isn’t work, what is and what isn’t useful in the activity of building. Use, most of the time, means diverting materials or spaces from their prescribed functions, inventing ways of making these things improper again. Aside from my interventions in galleries and museums, I have done things like set up a year-long, free postal service in Stockholm, built an underground house on city property in Berlin, removed ad Vertisements from downtown areas, made music with my house keys and moonwalked around Lower Manhattan.

Artist book on the occasion of the exhibition Non-solo show, Non-group show, interview with Ei Arakawa, Nikolas Gambaroff, Nick Mauss, Nora Schultz and Klara Liden (Engl.), 236 pp. with 200 b/w images, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2010.
The book is a joint project by the artists Ei Arakawa, Nikolas Gambaroff, Nick Mauss and Nora Schultz, realized on the occasion of their exhibition Non-solo, Non-group show in Zurich in 2009. It s the first monograph on Klara Liden and documents her works from the recent years – performances, videos and installations, that often incorporate found materials to explore the conditions of physical as well as of psychic spaces. It choses a form between artist book and catalogue, that draws on the DIY-aesthetic of Liden’s works and gives an overview of her artistic practice.

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Houston. Thomas Block Humery. Alberto Books

Posted in Artist Book, photography, travel on December 2nd, 2023
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« Houston » n’est pas un livre comme les autres. Par le biais particulier de l’autobiographie, il nous invite à parcourir, ou à imaginer, la moins connue des grandes mégalopoles américaines. À côté de Los Angeles, New York, Miami ou Chicago, cette ville du Texas n’a rien de la ville de carte postale. Elle en est peut-être même l’antithèse avec ses quartiers très étendus, ses autoroutes qui la divisent, pour ne pas dire la tranchent et son « downtown » accablé par la chaleur en été. Pourtant c’est là que Thomas Block Humery nous invite à concevoir la ville au-delà des considérations urbanistiques, socio-économiques ou culturelles, en mettant l’accent sur la dimension intime comme dynamique de connaissance. Il voit la ville avant tout comme un lieu de projection de soi validé par l’amour, l’ambition, la réalisation de soi, le confort esthétique et d’autres grandes espérances difficilement quantifiables.

La ville est ici liée au sentiment et à l’émotion. Selon cette proposition, l’auteur dépasse les descriptions de géographie humaine, faites de courbes démographiques, de statistiques économiques ou de taux d’activité, pour ne conserver que la perspective individuelle faite de ressenti, d’adaptation, de partage, de liens possibles, de visions changeantes, traversée par la contingence, la délicatesse voire la fragilité de l’expérience. L’espace urbain se déploie selon les modalités de la rencontre qui joue un rôle catalyseur et accélérateur. Houston devient le théâtre d’une interaction où la connaissance de l’espace va de pair avec l’intensification de la relation.

L’auteur revient dix ans après cet épisode vécu et fait le point sur cette connaissance spécifique où des habitudes s’étaient enracinées et où des liens s’étaient noués. Houston est alors un décor de théâtre où des scènes réelles se sont jouées, un décor qui a lui-même changé, transformé par les forces inhérentes et spécifiques des villes américaines pour lesquelles une décennie est déjà une fraction importante du temps. La ville et son visiteur se retrouvent comme deux amants qui n’arrivent plus vraiment à communiquer. On dit que les criminels reviennent toujours sur les lieux de leur crime. Qu’en est-il de la personne qui revient sur les lieux d’une histoire passée ?

Le projet pose ici la question : peut-on montrer ça en images ? La réponse est ambiguë, avec des oui et des non, car les images, malgré leurs limites, peuvent traduire la présence et l’absence, le rêve et la réalité, le passé et parfois la précarité du présent. Thomas Block Humery s’amuse à rendre la ville de Houston labyrinthique, parcellaire, géométriquement abstraite et peut-être même chimérique, comme lorsque l’on veut recoller un bout de vie à un autre.

Le livre est plein de poésie et de profondeur où il est question d’un photographe qui ne voit plus que des métaphores plutôt que le réel. Le projet devient une autofiction et la réponse qu’il propose prend la forme d’une œuvre d’art. Il est question de relations à distance, de publicités détournées d’un âge d’or, de façades de buildings qui font écran, de temps qui passe, du souvenir de “Paris, Texas”, de la flore locale, d’appareils photo et de négatifs vierges. La ville devient une utopie, avec des souvenirs qui reviennent et des futurs qui se dessinent.

Le projet prend une place particulière aujourd’hui à l’heure où beaucoup d’entre nous sont tentés d’aller vivre « ailleurs », où une nouvelle forme de nomadisme s’implante dans des modes de vie changeants. L’expérience montre ici un phénomène de fragmentation, où la vie n’est plus une simple ligne droite mais une succession de moments où l’enracinement semble se faire à différents coins du globe, dans une sorte d’atomisation des destins pris dans une multitude de potentialités. Thomas Block Humery ne tranche pas sur la morale de l’histoire. Il accepte les espoirs comme les échecs et les prend comme les ferments d’une vie qu’il préfère romanesque que totalement maîtrisée.

La description de « Houston » ne saurait être complète sans la mention texte de l’auteur qui fait partie du projet, un texte en forme de confession qui contextualise le corpus d’images et qui fait entrer, pas à pas, le lecteur dans une sphère secrète où chacun peut un peu se retrouver.

———–

“Houston” is not like any other book. Through the unique approach of autobiography, it invites us to explore, or imagine, the lesser-known of the major American metropolises. Compared to Los Angeles, New York, Miami, or Chicago, this Texan city has nothing of the postcard-perfect image. It may even be the opposite with its sprawling neighborhoods, highways that divide, or dare I say, cleave it, and its downtown area sweltering in the summer heat. Nevertheless, it is here that Thomas Block Humery invites us to conceive the city beyond urban, socio-economic, or cultural considerations, emphasizing the intimate dimension as a dynamic of knowledge. He perceives the city primarily as a place of self-projection validated by love, ambition, self-fulfillment, aesthetic comfort, and other hard-to-quantify aspirations.

In this perspective, the city is closely tied to feelings and emotions. With this proposition, the author transcends human geography’s descriptions consisting of demographic curves, economic statistics, or labor participation rates, retaining only the individual perspective shaped by emotions, adaptation, sharing, potential connections, and ever-changing visions influenced by contingency, delicacy, and the fragility of experience. The urban space unfolds through the dynamics of encounters, acting as a catalyst and an accelerator. Houston becomes the stage for an interaction where understanding of space goes hand in hand with the deepening of relationships.

The author revisits this specific knowledge a decade after the experience, reflecting on entrenched habits and forged bonds. Houston serves as a backdrop where real scenes played out, a backdrop that has changed, transformed by the inherent and specific forces of American cities for which a decade is a significant fraction of time. The city and its visitor reunite like two lovers who struggle to communicate. They say that criminals often return to the scene of their crime. What about someone who revisits the scenes of a past story?

The project raises the question: can this be conveyed through images? The answer is ambiguous, with both yes and no, because images, despite their limitations, can convey presence and absence, dreams and reality, the past, and sometimes the precariousness of the present. Thomas Block Humery playfully turns the city of Houston into a labyrinth, fragmented, geometrically abstract, and perhaps even chimerical, as if trying to piece together one fragment of life with another.

The book is replete with poetry and depth, featuring a photographer who sees metaphors more than reality. The project evolves into autofiction, and the response it offers takes the form of an artwork, touching on long-distance relationships, advertisements diverted from a golden age, building facades that act as screens, the passage of time, memories of “Paris, Texas,” local flora, cameras, and blank negatives. The city becomes a utopia with returning memories and emerging futures.

The project holds a particular place today, as many of us are tempted to live “elsewhere,” where a new form of nomadism is emerging in changing lifestyles. The experience here reveals a phenomenon of fragmentation, where life is no longer a simple straight line but a succession of moments, where rooting oneself seems to occur in various corners of the globe, in a kind of atomization of destinies caught in a multitude of potentialities. Thomas Block Humery does not pass judgment on the moral of the story. He embraces hopes and failures, regarding them as the ferment of a life that he prefers to be more romantic than entirely controlled.

The description of “Houston” would not be complete without mentioning the author’s text, which is part of the project, a confessional text that contextualizes the image corpus and gradually immerses the reader into a secret sphere where everyone can find a piece of themselves.

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Finlandia. Gerardo Montiel Klint. librosmorg

Posted in Artist Book, photography on December 1st, 2023
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“The explorer of himself navigates in a sea that does not exist. He steers the small rowboat towards the rocky coastline, guided by the roar of the breaking waves.” 

Photographs by Gerardo Montiel Klint
Texts by Mauricio Ortiz and Rebeca González

100 copies

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 I did not plan to stop there but. Iga Mroziak.

Posted in Artist Book, photography on November 29th, 2023
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I did not plan to stop there but is a collection of photographs that offers a closer look at scenes from everyday life.
Both unknown people and random objects become the target of careful observation. Put in the spotlight (although still in their original context), they become a detail under a magnifying glass − and turn into (Insta)stories about themselves. They don’t pretend to be anything other than what they
really are. An interesting slice of reality. A modern melancholy.
By using an iPhone camera to get closer to my surroundings, I am able to capture details that are easily overlooked without interfering with them. I work organically: sometimes I instinctively take photos with my phone, even if I have already taken them with the camera. And then I immediately make them public, as proof of the existence of ordinary beauty, as something that gives me a feeling of comfort and
elation. It is a process that has accompanied me since my beginnings with photography.
These photos represent life’s great journey as well as small daily trips, with all the unscheduled stops I make along the way. They reflect the experience of finding the extraordinary while exploring the real.

Edited and designed by Iga Mroziak
Photographs, poem, drawings by Iga Mroziak
Softcover
Self-publishing
First edition (2023)
Language: English, Polish
Pages: 176
Proofreading: Piotr Mroziak

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