Kader Attia: Transformations. Ellen Blumenstein (Ed.). Spector Books.

The manifold entanglements of African and Western culture are a central motif in the oeuvre of the Algerian-French artist Kader Attia. The influence of traditional African architecture on European modernism forms the background for his voluminous spatial installations, videos and photographs, as much as the re-appropriation of North and South American black music within African Jazz and Pop of the 1960s up to the 1980s. His work manifests the productivity of dissonance: Where African masks, stuffed animals, scientific instruments, and historical artifacts seemingly have nothing in common, the artist unearths connections between Europe’s handling of its own colonial history, current migration politics, and the urbanistic realities of its metropolises of today. Based on Kader Attia’s solo show “Repair. 5 Acts” at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, this publication focuses on works from the years 2008–2013 and places them in a broader art historical concept.

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Die vielfältigen Verschränkungen afrikanischer und westlicher Kultur sind ein zentrales Motiv im Oeuvre des algerisch- französischen Künstlers Kader Attia: der Einfluss traditioneller afrikanischer Architektur auf die europäische Moderne bilden ebenso den Hintergrund für seine raumgreifenden Installationen, Videos und Fotografien, wie die Wiederaneignung nord-, bzw. südamerikanischer schwarzer Musik im afrikanischen Jazz und Pop der 1960er bis 80er Jahre. In seinem Werk zeigt sich die Produktivität der Dissonanz: wo afrikanische Masken, ausgestopfte Tiere, naturwissenschaftliche Instrumente, historische Artefakte scheinbar nichts miteinander zu tun haben, stellt der Künstler Verbindungen zwischen dem europäischen Umgang mit der eigenen Kolonialgeschichte, der aktuellen Migrationspolitik und städtebauliche Realitäten in den Metrololen von heute her. Ausgehend von Kader Attias Einzel- ausstellung „Reparatur. 5 Akte“ in den KW Institute for Contemporary Art fokussiert diese Publikation auf Werke aus den Jahren 2008 – 2013 und stellt sie in einen breiteren kunsthistorischen Kontext.

224 pp. German/English
Design / Gestaltung: Studio Quentin Walesch
Herausgeber: Ellen Blumenstein, KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Leipzig 2014
ISBN: 978-3-944669-23-6

€34.00

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1968: Radical Italian Furniture

Preface by Maria Cristina Didero. Drawings by Alessandro Mendini.

1968: Radical Italian Design, the newest project from Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari’s Toilet Paper in collaboration with the Deste Foundation in Athens, offers an unorthodox, kaleidoscopic walk through the Dakis Joannou collection of Italian Radical Design furniture. Led by avant-garde design firms such as Archizoom, Superstudio, Global Tools and 9999, Radical Design was firmly opposed to the ethics, and indeed the very notion of, “good design” or taste. Toilet Paper’s bold, mischievous interpretation of Joannou’s collection results in delightful, high-contrast photographs that merge the seductive lines of Radical Design furniture and objects with the curves of the modern-day nymphs cavorting among them. Published as a board book, and named after a year that was pivotal for architecture and design (and, of course, the world at large), 1968 is a collection of dreams and nightmares, an inspiring, eye-popping compendium of colorful, ironic objects and bodies. At once charmingly retro and alarmingly surreal, 1968 includes drawings by one of the Radical Design movement’s foremost architects, Alessandro Mendini.

Author: Maurizio Cattelan & Pieropaolo Ferrari
Publisher: Deste Foundation / Toilet Paper
Language: English
Pages: 120
Binding: Hardcover
€49.80

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After Butler’s Wharf, Critical Writing RCA.

After Butler’s Wharf presents a series of critical perspectives on the economic, artistic and political histories of this landmark London building, including: a catwalk commentary on 1975’s Alternative Miss World with photographs by Richard Young; a fictional conversation between Sir Terence Conran and Mr Butler, the founder of the Wharf; an interview with artist Kevin Atherton; archival investigations into the rich, unwritten history of 2B Butler’s Wharf, a film and live art collective which included John Kippin and David Critchley; a letter to the late Stephen Cripps, pyrotechnic sculptor and Butler’s Wharf resident; and an excerpt from an unpublished interview with Derek Jarman.

Cloth bound hardback, 136 pages.

17.50€
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The Ritual of the Snake. Gianni Politi. cura.books.

What images can speak today of the Absolute in a universal way? Aby Warburg’s legendary journey among the native tribes of North America – an experience reported in the famous 1923 conference on the “Serpent Ritual,” which in 1939 appeared in the Warburg Institute’s «Journal», and later became the scholar’s spiritual testament – represents the emotional and cultural reference behind a collection of 80 images, selected by eight artists and eight curators, dedicated to the identification and construction of a personal and collective imaginary. The power of images, of which Warburg investigated the origins in magic rituals and in spiritual and pagan celebrations, is given back here through the explorations of the authors involved, who, thanks to a variety of experiences and of historical, personal and cultural references, go through the kaleidoscopic landscape of contemporary iconography.

Softcover
Concept: Gianni Politi
Design: Andrea Baccin

Price: €18.00

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DADALENIN. Rainer Ganahl & Johan F. Hartle. Edition Taube.

DADALENIN reconstructs and speculates about how Dada and Lenin had more in common than is usually assumed. The book points to some of the tragicomic aspects of their parallel and overlapping artistic and political histories in order to question the unfulfilled legacy of the avant-garde.

In Rainer Ganahl’s voluminous series of works DADA and Lenin are abundant sources of historical imagination. To dive into the historical situation Ganahl uses a variety of artistic media and techniques––ranging from animation movies to theatre performances, from ink drawings to bronze sculptures, departing from a number of historical details and catch phrases, from the no-man’s land between porn, terror and the history of the avant-gardes.

Co-editor Johan F. Hartle’s text situates DADALENIN in the development of Rainer Ganahl’s work and reconstructs it in the context of current debates on the artistic and political avant-garde. DADALENIN thus appears as a reflection of numerous key motifs of contemporary cultural theory, indirectly haunting us in all kinds of monstrous alliances.

Edited by Rainer Ganahl and Johan F. Hartle
With contributions by Boris Groys and Jenny Borland

Black and white offset print.
Language: English
Hardcover, 608 pages.

Price: €25.00

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Dear Herb. ECAL.

In October 2012, a group of 10 students from the Master Art Direction course at ECAL travelled to New York for a one week workshop at the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography. This publication is the result of interviews and photographic interpretations of the heritage of Herb Lubalin, with a specific focus on and around Eros Magazine.

Price: €12.00

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The State Vol IV: Dubai. Rahel Aima, Ahmad Makia (Eds.). The State.

In Kerala, a term exists for people like my parents, bandied by neighbours and relatives – Gulf return. Always used in the singular, it is a term associated with privilege, a term for the once-insider who will die an outsider. It accentuates the success story, pretending to know and define those who, out of desperation, adventure or marriage, left their homes to seek work, and now return to expected social glory and envy.—Deepak Unnikrishnan, “Gulf Return,” Himal (December 2010)

A few months ago, we found ourselves sitting in a blush-walled room in the grey area between Mattancherry and Fort Kochi, Kerala. We were in a Gulf Return house on a Gulf Return street, in a town built with Gulf Return money. Just a short ferry ride away was a Dubai Ports World terminal; right on our doorstep, at the nearby Kunnumpuram Junction, was a UAE Xchange outpost, and an ice cream parlour selling Sharjah Shakes. We had left Dubai, with the intention of producing this issue looking at it from across the Arabian Sea, but everywhere we looked, Dubai was all around us.

Can you ever leave Dubai?

In the last year, we’ve produced THE STATE from Madagascar, Portugal, the US, India, and the UAE. Thus far, we’ve been thinking of this publication as placeless, rooted only in the nebulous printernet. Turns out we’ve been trying to figure out Dubai—this strange, wonderful, occasionally traumatic place we grew up in—all along. (Jury’s still out on whether that trauma was due to Dubai, or just the turbulence of adolescence.) The thing is, we are the children of Gulf Returnees ourselves. We didn’t leave our home countries to come here; Dubai’s the only home we’ve ever known. Yet most narratives of Dubai focus on its extremes—solar-sintered skyscrapers made from sun, sand and glass or the unknown labourers that built them; unbridled admiration for its visionary transformation or vitriolic, xenophobic schadenfreude; searing desert heat or lush, landscaped golf courses. As residents-but-not-citizens, we’re paradoxically privileged, yet invisible; our stories remain as yet untold.

Our first questions linger. How do you speak a place, or from a place? Can cultural production have terroir? What does it mean to be a publication from Dubai that has thus far evaded ever actually addressing its positionality head on? Consider this a first attempt.

Contents:

The State Shall Remain Nameless
Manan Ahmed Asif
An Arabikatha
Deepak Unnikrishnan

Teaching Moments in Dubai
Ayesha Mulla

Remembering My Narrow Veins
Maryam Wissam Al Dabbagh

Sharjah Smells Like Biscuits
Sophie Chamas

5,000 Kilometres of Evocations: Bombay – Dubai – Mumbai
Nilofar Ansher

Aesthetics of Disempowerment
Sheyma Buali
Memory Images from Dubai
Ben Thorp Brown

Speculations and Questions on Dubaization
Fadi Shayya

Indelible Marks: Africa’s Traces On Dubai
Jareh Das

A Drone’s Eye View of the Speculative Future
Manuel Schwab

The Brown Apple
Jaswinder Bolina

Language: English
Pages: 140

Price: €12.00

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The State Vol III: The Social Olfactory. Rahel Aima, Ahmad Makia (Eds.). The State.

THE STATE is a publishing practice based out of Dubai, U.A.E. It investigates South-South reorientations, alternative futurisms, transgressive cultural criticism, the transition from analogue to digital, and the sensuous architecture of this “printernet.”

FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE:

Khairani Barokka—Can the Subaltern Smell: The Olfactory Other
Transnational olfactory stereotypes in Indonesia, India, South Africa, and the USA

Ali Boggs—The Corpse
A dead girl in Madagascar, an old pastis-soaked Belgian, and the loose skin of overripe peaches

Suzanne Fischer—Smell H-I-S-T-O-R-Y: A Guided Tour of the Smell Exhibition
In the coming age of olfactory archaeology, a speculative tour of the museum of tomorrow

Adam Flynn—Under the Iron Snout: a First Take on Olfactory Imperialism
Drug-sniffing dogs, fermented fish and mosquito repellent in Vietnam, the Stasi’s smell archives, People Sniffing, and strategies to survive smellveillance

Mary-Jo Gillian—Heap
A residency in a rural Irish landfill, the filamentine heat of rotting matter, the intimacy of olfactory community

Pavel Godfrey—Sensation, Memory, and Place in Delray, Detroit
Post-industrial detritus in Little Budapest, a carbonaceous cocktail of respiratory illnesses and mnemocide, exploding the neoliberal myth of recycling

Barbara Herman—An Ode To Bodies: Peau d’Espagne
The gendering of leather perfumes, and the hidden, abject animal body at its origin

Anne Elizabeth Moore—Fake Snake Oil
Smell, trickery, and xenophobia in Marfa, Texas

Kristine Ong Muslim—The Proustian Phenomenon
A missing dog, the assertive scratchiness of lemongrass, the stench of river water, the frowning fustiness of mothballs

Charles Reid—Nietzsche and the Electric Nose
The laziness of Nature, synaesthesia, and building an electric nose

Erika Renedo Illarregi—Smell Portraits
How might a smell be archived like a polaroid or instagram?

Adam Rothstein—The Olfactographic Capacities of the Human Brain
Smelling the traces of architecture and mapping odourous urban geographies

Francisco Salas Pérez—Impeccable Tenderness
Papayas in Xalapa, the displaced remembrances of diaspora, and escaping the Proustian straitjacket

Manuel Schwab—Petroleum, Frankincense, and Myrrh
A souk in Nyala, Sudan, a lake of petroleum, and the carnivorousness of the development-industrial complex

Mark West—The Smell of OCD
The insidiousness of burning toast, and the creeping doubt of OCD

Language: English
Cover available in one of four colors.
Printed in Dubai.

Price: €22.00

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Our Group Wourk, Ziga Testen, Peter Rauch, Cornelia Durka.

‘Work’, how does one spell it even? There is only one way to describe what we did during that time, which is ‘to make things ours’, to be upfront about the collectivity, about the conditions of our output. 

It was our group, and hence what we announced to be presented in the exhibition at SKC in 1979 on that poster became part of our wourk. If you wish to argue that there is no meaning to be ascribed to that lapsus, so be it. But I was there, I saw our group wourk.

“Our Group Wourk” is an attempt to NOT write a biography of Yugoslavian graphic designer Dragan Stojanovski. Stojanovski was the in-house graphic designer at SKC Belgrade (student cultural centre), a state-funded cultural institution established after the 1968 student uprisings to contain, pacify and institutionalize student culture as an “organized alternative”. At the same time, it was a place of avant-garde experimentation and new forms of political activism and self-organization. Dunja Blazevic, a director of the visual arts department at the SKC in the 1970s refers to Stojanovski as Yugoslavia’s first conceptual designer.

This publication was prompted by conversations and encounters with Sasa Stojanovski, Biljana Tomic, Sklavko Timotijevic, Ljubinka Gavran, Milica Tomic, Slobodan Jovanovic and Dunja Blazevic with Ziga Testen, Peter Rauch and Cornelia Durka in Belgrade in April 2013.

Published by Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design.

If it wasn’t for the support of CuratorLab – Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, this publication would not have been possible.

Softcover, 80 pages.

Price: D €8

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Notes From a Revolution: Com/Co, The Diggers & The Haight. David Hollander & Kristine McKenna. Foggy Notion Books & Fulton Ryder, Inc.

The social upheaval of the sixties gave rise to many fascinating coalitions and communes, but the Diggers, a little-known and short-lived group, stand apart from them all. Formed in Haight-Ashbury in 1966 by members of R. G. Davis’s subversive theater company, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Diggers took their name from the English Diggers, a seventeenth century agrarian collective devoted to creating a utopian society free of ownership and commerce.

The San Francisco Diggers – under the leadership of Peter Berg, Emmett Grogan, Peter Coyote, and Billy Murcott – were true anarchists, with roots in the Theater of the Absurd, Existentialism, and strategies of direct action. They coined slogans designed to prod people into participating and staged art happenings, public interventions, and street theater infused with wicked humor. The Diggers also provided free food, clothing, medical care and lodging to anyone in need as part of their effort to create a unified and mutually supportive community.

A critically important part of their methodology were the hundreds of broadsides that they regularly produced and distributed throughout the Haight, printed by the Communication Company, a maverick, short-lived publishing outfit founded by Chester Anderson and Claude Hayward. A selection of these graphically inventive, lacerating and sometimes funny broadsides are gathered together for the first time in Notes From a Revolution, which offers a fascinating and oddly moving record of the counterculture in its early bloom.

Edited by David Hollander
& Kristine McKenna
Introduction by Peter Coyote
Essay by Naomi Wolf
Conversation with Claude Hayward
by Kristine McKenna
Flexi-bound / 8 1/2 x 11″
/ 176 pages / 150 color images
ISBN 978-0-9835870-3-3

Published by Foggy Notion Books
in partnership with Fulton Ryder, Inc.

Price: €42.50

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