Endeavour. Anton Maurer. Bad News Books

Posted in photography, politics, Uncategorized on November 5th, 2022
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Anton Maurer’s Endeavour is a series visualising the impacts of capitalism and colonisation on Aotearoa, New Zealand. Made from 2012–2017 the works challenge viewers to question their perception of this land and the narratives most commonly associated with it.

Edition of 100

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Detainee Handbook. Pablo Allison. Undocumented Press

Posted in illustration, politics on October 31st, 2022
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In July 2019 Pablo Allison was detained and imprisoned in an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention centre in the USA where he spent almost 1 month. During his time in prison, he was able to document the lives of migrants in detention through observational sketches made by him, alongside, texts and interviews from other fellow detainees.

The Detainee Handbook aims to offer a small view into the lives of people stuck and locked into the detention/prison system of the United States of America, an industry that has profited vastly from this human tragedy, off the backs of millions of people trying to find better life expectations in the USA.

Signed and stamped.

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Dan Perjovschi: The Book of Notebooks. Alina Șerban (Ed.). P+4 Publications

Posted in illustration, politics on September 24th, 2022
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Texts by Kristine Stiles, Alina Șerban, Jelena Vesić, What, How & from Whom / WHW

“I do one notebook for every show or project. It is like a pocket studio and research space. In the notebook drawings are pushed further to the limit and are not very PC. There are a lot of bad drawings, things that do not work out, lame jokes. Humor is hard to capture… Of the two hundred drawings in a notebook, thirty or fifty will make it onto the wall an maybe ten will make it into the general repertoire. The repertoire began in 2000 and since then drawings have been incorporated and discarded, rolling from one wall to the next.

I am the happiest when I draw in the notebook and I know the drawing is good. Translating it onto the wall is also good, but it is just a translation.

I draw, I happy.” (Dan Perjovschi)

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P+4 Publications is an independent publishing programme dedicated to the promotion of Romanian contemporary art, photography and architecture, exploring the book medium as a point of encounter between theoretical research, graphic design experiment and artists’ ideas and subjects present in their practice. Presently, the programme brings together the Artist Book Series and the Architecture Book Series, supported between 2013–2021 by the PEPLUSPATRU Association, and Parkour and Exhibition-Dossier series, developed by the Institute of the Present since 2017. Starting from 2021, P+4 Publications is coordinated by the Institute of the Present.

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13.09: Book presentation by Grace Ndiritu in conversation with Pablo Larios @ Motto Berlin

Posted in Motto Berlin event, Motto Berlin store, politics on September 13th, 2022
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Being Together: A Manual For Living

Artist and author Grace Ndiritu in conversation with art critic Pablo Larios

Tuesday 13 September 2022
6.30–8.30pm

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof)
10997 Berlin

6.30pm Gather
7.00pm Silent meditation
7.10pm Conversation and readings
7.40pm Silent meditation
7.50pm Conversation and readings 
8.15pm Q&A
8.30pm End  

*We ask every participant to commit to the entire duration of the event in order to not disrupt the meditation

Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan artist whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. Her writing has been published in her critical theory book Dissent Without Modification (Bergen Kunsthall, 2021); Documents of Contemporary Art: The Rural (Whitechapel, 2019) and Animal Shelter 4, Semiotext(e).

Pablo Larios is a writer based in Berlin. His work has appeared internationally in various publications, including Mousse, Frieze, 032c, Text zur Kunst, and Kaleidoscope. He is currently an editor-at-large at documenta fifteen.


Being Together: A Manual For Living

Edited by Grace Ndiritu, Pieter Vermeulen
Copy editor: Sue Spaid
Design: Vrints-Kolsteren

Contributors: Philippe Van Cauteren, Pieter Vermeulen, Grace Ndiritu, Rafaela Lopez, Roberto dell’Orco, Jana Haeckel, Katleen Vermeir & Ronny Heiremans, Nathalie Boobis, Shayla Perreault, Edward Ball, Guadalupe Martinez, Stacy Suy, Ezra Fieremans

Published by KRIEG

Being Together: A Manual For Living falls in the lineage of publications such as the Journal of the Society for Education Through Art, which throughout the 1960s provided British art schools a window into experimental education. By contrast, Grace Ndiritu’s experience in creating radical pedagogies arose from a connected, yet unorthodox system of ‘self education’. In 2012, she decided to spend time living in cities only when necessary. She thus lived in rural, alternative and often spiritual communities, while expanding her research into nomadic lifestyles and training in esoteric studies, which she began after graduating art school. This research led her to visit Thai and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, permaculture communities in New Zealand, forest tree dwellers in Argentina, neo-tribal festivals such as Burning Man in Nevada, a Scottish Hare Krishna ashram, and the Findhorn Spiritual Community in Scotland. Such lifestyles forever transformed her ideas of education and have proven critical for her art, whether conducting teaching experiments with students, peers and the general public; some of whose voices appear in this publication. Ndiritu posits, “What does (art) education mean today?” and specifically, “What does an embodied (art) education mean in a time of pandemics and social unrest?” Being Together: A Manual For Living attempts to answer these complex questions.

Order the book here

7.09 from 6.30pm: Ho Rui An presenting Tables | Factories, in conversation with Nut Srisuwan @ Motto Berlin

Posted in Events, Motto Berlin event, politics on September 7th, 2022
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Please join us for the presentation of Tables | Factories with author and artist Ho Rui An in conversation with Nut Srisuwan

Wednesday 7 September
from 6.30pm

Motto Berlin
Salitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof)
10997 Berlin

//

Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working at the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. Working primarily across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, he probes into the ways by which images are produced, circulate and disappear within contexts of globalism and governance. He has presented projects at the Bangkok Art Biennale; Asian Art Biennial; Gwangju Biennale; Jakarta Biennale; Sharjah Biennial; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Kunsthalle Wien; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; and Para Site, Hong Kong. In 2019, he was awarded the International Film Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany. In 2018, he was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.

Nut Srisuwan is an independent researcher and curator based in Bangkok and Leipzig. His research examines the interrelations between subjects in transnational contexts, such as national identities, politics and migratory movements. As a co-founder of the artistic and curatorial collective “Charoen Contemporaries”, he also works together with other practitioners in finding new models for the art ecosystem in Thailand.

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Tables | Factories
Ho Rui An
Published by BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY

The process of preparing this book began with looking at photographs of large meeting tables around which Chinese and Singaporean public officials gathered during the many Chinese government study missions to Singapore throughout the 1990s. While such images might seem unremarkable today, the appearance of former revolutionaries of the Maoist era as sedentary technocrats marks the historic emergence of a distinct political imaginary in a time when “the economy” was displacing class struggle as the primary subject of governance in China.

It was at the table that these technocrats, having extricated themselves from the masses, devised the concept of the socialist market economy to frame the economic reforms that were launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. As they insisted on the compatibility of the market economy with the prevailing socialist social contract, the reformers articulated their turn towards the market as a decision informed not by the “invisible” manner through which the market allocates its resources, but by the assumed transparency of its information flows, which they believed would make visible what the party-state had been previously unable to see.

Yet, to the extent that this process of “seeking truth from facts”, as the reformers put it, is founded upon a set of separations—the party-state from the masses, information from ideology, the economic from the political—what ultimately underwrites the total visibility apparently provided by the table is the concealment of that which must not be allowed to appear as information in order for the logic of the market to obtain: the exploitation of labour.

It is on this basis that the factory can be construed as the table’s forgotten origin and impenetrable interior, and the gate that circumscribes the compound the limit of the market’s capacity for making things visible. Designed to spatially contain industrial labour and hide their exploitation from the public sphere, the factory gate is as close as the technocrat would get, as seen during the factory’s opening ceremony, to the world of labour under a capitalist mode of production. In thus proposing a convergence between tables and factories and examining their respective regimes of (in)visibility across the contexts of Singapore and Reform-era China, this collection of images and texts seeks to understand how the seemingly disparate worlds centred around these two objects in fact call forth each other to produce our deeply unsettled contemporary condition—one where the recognition that accrues to visibility has replaced freedom from exploitation as the most that the people can ever demand after the revolution’s untimely end.

Order the book here

Futuros Mejores. Bartlebooth (Eds.). Bartlebooth

Posted in politics, research, writing on September 1st, 2022
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Futuros mejores condensa conversaciones, voces y proyectos a través de los cuales discutir e imaginar futuros espaciales más justos. Futuros que, desde las ruinas del presente, las violencias y exclusiones, imaginan alternativas capaces de vislumbrar nuevas posibilidades. Arquitecturas amables con otras especies y territorios, prácticas espaciales para la hospitalidad, mediadoras de memorias orales y microbianas, nuevos imaginarios para el aprendizaje, nuevas (y no tan nuevas) arquitecturas para el cuidado más allá de la vivienda y tecnologías domésticas al servicio del bien común para una producción espacial todavía por venir.

Autores: Husos Arquitecturas (Diego Barajas y Camilo García), Mariana Pestana, Isabel Gutiérrez Sánchez, Candela Morado, Anna Puigjaner, Superflux, Alejandro Galliano, La Escuela Nunca y los Otros Futuros, Studio Ossidiana.

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Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh. Prarthna Singh.

Posted in politics on August 27th, 2022
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Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh is an ode to the infinite courage and resilience of the women of Shaheen Bagh, Delhi, who sat in protest for a 100 days and nights. A book of photographs, drawings, songs, letters and other material gathered as a record of the iconic protest, marks an extraordinary moment in the political and contemporary history of India.

In December 2019 a small group of Muslim women from the working-class neighbourhood of Shaheen Bagh, came out of their homes and sat down in protest, occupying a stretch of one of Delhi’s busiest highways. They were standing up against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which was designed to strip the Constitution of India of its right to religious equality. This peaceful sit-in began in December 2019 until the pandemic sent India into lockdown, and the state used this as an opportunity to destroy and dismantle all traces of the protest. This book serves as urgent and crucial evidence of a time that is systematically being erased from our collective memory.

From the women of Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter, The Dandi March and Chipko Movement, and those at the front lines of India’s non-violent protests, this book is an act of remembrance that preserves the powerful legacy of women at the forefront of historic revolutions.

Soft bound in undyed, hand-spun Kora cotton by Womenweave, Maheshwar

Edition of 800

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The Collective Eye in conversation with ruangrupa. The Collective Eye (Eds.). Distanz

Posted in politics, writing on August 26th, 2022
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“Our curatorial approach strives for a different kind of collaborative model of resource use — in economic terms but also with regard to ideas, knowledge, programs and innovations.” – ruangrupa

The documenta fifteen will be curated by a collective for the first time in its history. Another first: the artistic directors come from Asia. ruangrupa is an association of nine friends who unconditionally combine art with their everyday lives as a practice of living and surviving together under the socioeconomic conditions of their native Indonesia. Fourteen other collectives, so-called lumbung members, have been invited to join ruangrupa in transforming Kassel into a new, sustainable ekosistem. Lumbung, the Indonesian term for a communal rice barn, is the starting point for all their activities and also this documenta.

In this volume of the book series Thoughts on Collective Practice ruangrupa talks about their beginnings, the harsh struggle for survival under the Suharto regime in Indonesia, the post-dictatorship euphoria, student protests, punk, and video culture. About their first art projects, maintaining solidary social relationships, the Indonesian tradition of sharing, and their unusual approach to resources.

The autobiographical conversations are supplemented by five exemplary glimpses into ruangrupa’s projects since 2003 and unpublished archival material.

The Collective Eye (TCE), founded 2012 in Montevideo, organizes exhibitions and symposia on collective practice in art. The collective has pursued a partnership with DISTANZ since 2021, publishing the book series Thoughts on Collective Practice as an extended collective between the publishing team and TCE. Their work aims to strengthen polynational dialogues between different collectives as well as between collectives and theorists. The volume of conversations with ruangrupa is the fourth installation in the series.

The Collective Eye: Dominique Lucien Garaudel, Heinz-Norbert Jocks, Emma Nilsson and Matthias Kliefoth (Eds.)

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Tables | Factories. Ho Rui An. BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY

Posted in politics on August 21st, 2022
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The process of preparing this book began with looking at photographs of large meeting tables around which Chinese and Singaporean public officials gathered during the many Chinese government study missions to Singapore throughout the 1990s. While such images might seem unremarkable today, the appearance of former revolutionaries of the Maoist era as sedentary technocrats marks the historic emergence of a distinct political imaginary in a time when “the economy” was displacing class struggle as the primary subject of governance in China.

It was at the table that these technocrats, having extricated themselves from the masses, devised the concept of the socialist market economy to frame the economic reforms that were launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. As they insisted on the compatibility of the market economy with the prevailing socialist social contract, the reformers articulated their turn towards the market as a decision informed not by the “invisible” manner through which the market allocates its resources, but by the assumed transparency of its information flows, which they believed would make visible what the party-state had been previously unable to see.

Yet, to the extent that this process of “seeking truth from facts”, as the reformers put it, is founded upon a set of separations—the party-state from the masses, information from ideology, the economic from the political—what ultimately underwrites the total visibility apparently provided by the table is the concealment of that which must not be allowed to appear as information in order for the logic of the market to obtain: the exploitation of labour.

It is on this basis that the factory can be construed as the table’s forgotten origin and impenetrable interior, and the gate that circumscribes the compound the limit of the market’s capacity for making things visible. Designed to spatially contain industrial labour and hide their exploitation from the public sphere, the factory gate is as close as the technocrat would get, as seen during the factory’s opening ceremony, to the world of labour under a capitalist mode of production. In thus proposing a convergence between tables and factories and examining their respective regimes of (in)visibility across the contexts of Singapore and Reform-era China, this collection of images and texts seeks to understand how the seemingly disparate worlds centred around these two objects in fact call forth each other to produce our deeply unsettled contemporary condition—one where the recognition that accrues to visibility has replaced freedom from exploitation as the most that the people can ever demand after the revolution’s untimely end.

Order here

I, Ecology, on the ecology of everything. Cristian Toro, Jens Benöhr, Klara Lena Virik.

Posted in politics, Zines on August 12th, 2022
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This collection of incomplete essays is what we call the ecology of everything. We think of complexity like an astrayed arrow hitting no target. Line and dots. A dashing constellation of things. Everything is not directly related to everything, but everything is related to something.

These ideas are a vestige of a fragmented ecosystem. A marginal third nature that manages to live in the interstices of capitalism. They are a recollection of brief awe, not able to finish their growth and already being torn into pieces by social media, memes, podcasts, YouTube videos, video games, and a constant urge for disaster. A little codex sent from planet Earth in times of destruction. And so, we find them. Sporulating at the End of the World is Holobiont; me, you, and everything in between.

Numbered edition of 50.

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