Stan Douglas’s The Secret Agent explores the turbulent Seventies and the history of Portugal, which was shaking off a dictatorship and losing its colonies in those years.

The book contains three works by the Canadian artist. The video installation The Secret Agent (première in WIELS in October 2015) tells a story originally written by Joseph Conrad in 1907. Douglas has retained the characters and the plot, but transferred them to the turmoil of Lisbon soon after the Carnation Revolution in 1974. The book contains the original script and an extensive collection of stills and production images.

The second work in the book is Disco Angola, a series of eight staged historical photographs – four in New York, four in Angola – that show the parallels between two more or less simultaneous moments: the hedonistic glam culture of New York nightlife in the Seventies and the civil war in Angola.

The third work, Luanda–Kinshasa, is a 6-hour jazz film set in 1974. It contains eleven songs recorded in the legendary 30th Street Studio, where Miles Davis, Glenn Gould and others have worked.

Stan Douglas is an artist. His films, videos and photographs have been shown internationally since 1970 at events such as Documenta ix, x and xi (1992, 1997, 2002) and three Venice biennials (1990, 2001, 2005). He has had solo exhibitions in leading museums in Europe and North America. Douglas lives and works in Vancouver.

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition INTERREGNUM at Wiels, 9 October 2015 – 10 January 2016.

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This book is published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition produced by the Wiels and curated by Dirk Snauwaert and Charlotte Friling. It held at the Manège de Sury, Mons (European Capital of Culture), from June to October 2015.

This project takes as its starting point the history of Mons and the Borinage, comparing it with the history of the modern age on an international scale, and relating it to the present time through the voices of some twenty artists questioning our times and our environment.

What we generally call “modernity,” that history of multiple conquests targeting control over reality through technology and science, also refers to the exploration through art of the hidden dimensions of our behaviour, our ideas and our subjectivity.

Atopolis proposes to rediscover models of social and cultural utopia developed by personalities from our region, but the exhibition also unveils captivating works created by artists who are watchful and critical of the era of globalisation in which we are living, that of uniform channels of information and free trade, leading both to an unprecedented connectivity and to a loss of frames of reference.

Atopolis, a title which echoes the ideas of Edouard Glissant, a writer who has philosophised about identities and migratory movements, seems an excellent metaphor of our digital era, given the importance it grants to the development of models of cohabiting and coexistence which seem to hark back to the social utopias that have emerged from our region.

This publication is composed of two interdepedent parts: one with the texts of four different authors on all the works at show; the second one with visual and textual elements from the Mundaneum Archives, excerpts of texts of Edouard Glissant, Raoul Vaneigem, Paul Lafargue, a.o., and unpublished material of Allan Sekula on the Borinage.

With Saâdane Afif, Nevin Aladağ, Francis Alÿs, Danai Anesiadou, El Anatsui, Yto Barrada, Huma Bhabha, Vincen Beeckman, Vlassis Caniaris, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Meschac Gaba, Jef Geys, Thomas Hirschhorn, David Medalla, Adrian Melis, Benoit Platéus, Walter Swennen, Diego Tonus, Jack Whitten…

Edited Sébastien Biset and Raphaël Pirenne (sic)

Textes by Jan Baetens, Sébastien Biset, Yves Citton, Charlotte Friling, Raphaël Pirenne, Dirk Snauwaert, Yoann Van Parys, Elvan Zabunyan.

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Catalogue, Zora Mann interview with Julie Church.

This catalogue follows a project proposal presented in Paris, Fiac- Lafayette, in 2015.

The presentation comprises a curtain made out of recycled flip flops that are found littered on beaches and in waterways of Kenya. Flip flops are one of the largest marine pollutants on the Indian Ocean beaches, nowadays there are several artisans in Kenya working on a recycling project of these materials, which started in late nineties initiated by marine conservationist Julie Church.

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Zora Mann (Amershan, 1979), lives and works in Berlin. She studied art at Villa Arson in Nice. She grew up between Africa, USA and Germany.

Julie Church (Kenya) a marine conservationist, founder and director of Ocean Sole – the Flipflop Recycling Company, lives and works in Kenya. She studied environmental sciences at the University of Cape Town, and adopted these skills to the marine environment namely in Kenya, Tanzania and Indonesia. She is passionate about the Ocean and creating opportunities for a better world through art and trade.

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For over twenty years, Michel Blazy (b. 1966 Monaco) has developed an atypical work in the French art scene, which portrays the transformations of matter, which plays with time and life cycles.

This monograph traces the entire career, from his first pieces in 1990 until 2014. An abundant iconography presented chronologically for understanding the evolution of the work. It reveals the metamorphosis and the process of the works themselves.

Questioning our relationship to time and death, he produces works that contain the possibilities of their own demise, thus desecrating the immutability of form.

Text: Valérie Da Costa, Xavier Franceschi, Olivier Michelon, Ralph Rugoff

Co-published with Frac Ile de France
Design: Baldinger • Vu-Huu

Paperback with screen printed dusk jacket, Japanese binding

€45.00

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Exhibition held from 8 April to 26 June, 2005, at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto.

€52.00

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Catalogue of the exhibition held at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museet for Samtidkunst – The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek; Albertina, Vienna; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas.

€50.00

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Published on the occasion of Nairy Baghramian’s (1971, Isfahan, Iran) new outdoor sculptural work for the Sonae|Serralves Commission, this fully illustrated book draws upon the artist’s interest in the ways sculpture functions in the public domain. Featuring a text by curator Suzanne Cotter, Director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, this publication also includes a selected visual history of works installed in the unique context of the Museum and Park.

€14.50

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Under the Clouds: from Paranoia to the Digital Sublime

Since the second half of the twentieth century, we have lived under the shadow of two clouds: the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb, and now the ‹cloud› of information networks. How did the symbol of post-war paranoia become the utopian metaphor for today’s interconnected world? Under the Clouds confronts the interrelated effects and affects of these two clouds on life and work, leisure and love, and on images, bodies and minds, through contributions from an intergenerational group of artists.

Texts by
Enrico Baj & Sergio Dangelo, Thomas Hirschhorn, Sean Landers, Metahaven, Seth Price, João Ribas, Frances Stark, Hito Steyerl, Stan VanDerBeek

€34

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Infinite Possibility 1974 – 2014
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Published on the occasion of the first museum survey of mirror works and drawings by Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (Qazvin, 1924), this book offers a critical and art historical view on a singular body of work produced over a career of more than 40 years.

Essays by curator Suzanne Cotter, cultural historian Shiva Balaghi, and art historian and critic Media Farzin examine Monir’s oeuvre and its development from the 1970s to the present in relation to the decorative and architectural traditions of Islamic art and the cosmopolitan contemporary art world of which she has always been a part. A detailed timeline situates the artist’s personal and artistic trajectory within the broader context of contemporaneous historical, social and cultural events worldwide.

€39

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In “Reading the Economist” Zachary Formwalt gathers various archival documents from the late nineteenth century, when the credit institutions in Britain first entered panicked. Texts and removed the notebooks of Karl Marx images of The Economist and the American Daily Graphic reassociate and rewrite historical connections and episodes of this period with a view to a reconsideration of the current economic crisis. Artist book published by the Serralves Foundation and Hull for the exhibition “To the Arts, Citizens!”.

€15.00

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