Roman Signer
A Step Towards the Sea

at Motto Zürich Müllerstrasse 57
on the 17th of September in the presence of

Roman Signer
Lorenzo Giusti
Li Zhenhua

The conversation starts at 5pm and will be held in German.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Roman Signer. Films and Installation, hosted at the MAN (Nuoro, Italy, April – July, 2016), A Step Towards the Sea is not only a catalogue, but a book to all effects and purposes, which tells the relationship between one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists and Italy. Signer’s relationship with the country is a special one, bearing in mind some of his most renown works, produced on the Stromboli volcano, or the numerous actions and sculptures that revolve around an Italian iconic subject such as the Ape Piaggio. The central section of the book is dedicated to Sardinia, with a conversation between Lorenzo Giusti and the artist and a photographic essay by Barbara Signer. A text by Barbara Casavecchia contextualizes Signer’s Italian dimension by introducing the viewing of Reisen Italien, the unreleased film included in the enclosed DVD: a personal collection of filmic notes produced by the artist in the course of his journeys with the family in the Nineties. The essay by Rachel Withers introduces the hefty iconographic setting of his entire Super-8 production, which consists of 205 clips made between 1975 and 1989 and presented in a large installation within the exhibition in Nuoro. The book is accompanied by a DVD which, in addition to the unreleased film, gathers all of the actions Signer carried out in Italy starting from the Nineties (Stromboli, Civitella d’Agliano, the Maremma, Venice) and a piece he produced specifically for the exhibition, after which the book is titled.

http://humboldtbooks.com/

‘Books and Elephant’. Simon Popper @ Motto Berlin.
Opening September 3rd, 7-9 pm

Exhibition September 4th until October 10th, 2016.

For his exhibition at Motto Berlin, Simon Popper’s work can be broadly understood by its degrees of visual and linguistic separation, that is, through its titles (its naming) and the relations between what the works appear to be, what they are and what they might become. This often rests upon a hinge of wordplay or punning and visual tropes to break down or collapse objects and ideas characterised by a sense of the comedic or the deadpan – but in all seriousness – in a logic of displacement or derangement.
The permeation of a kind of working dyslexia (real and imagined) or visual/linguistic displacement extends to Popper’s methodology in general and to each operation in particular. It’s his way of creating or making things in the world and for the world and his reason for doing it in the first place. This displacement or making other of art, books or just things is as much about the pleasure of creating opportunities as it is about unmaking them, a kind of non-productivity or ‘patience work’ in its ‘purposelessness’ in the folly of its ways. It could be understood as a ‘negative’ making or anti-artisanal production by producing something not just along the lines of value or even the commodity – at least notionally. It’s almost as if the artist was a cottage industry but without the industry, production without product in the simple act of doing.
The work of Simon Popper is an invitation to delinquency, an abandonment of one’s place anchoring a rational centred self into some altogether other self in another place, ordered and classified by systematic play and caprice if only for a moment. The ideal space these works might inhabit would be something like a contemporary ‘room of one’s own’, that now impossibly dissolving bourgeois space, away from the order of things, from the exhaustion of life and from a life surrounded by exhausted objects.

David Bussel

Exhibition proposed by Gregorio Magnani

New Dirty Enterprises:The First Annual Report
Record Release Party @ Motto Berlin. 29.07.2016
6-10pm

Jerszy Seymour with Travis Broussard, Olivier Lellouche, Victor Delestre, Kerwin Rolland,
Yanik Balzer, David Kaltenbach and Veronika Bjarsch
featuring Hot Tub Jazz Allstars DJ crew
of Egon Elliut and Steffen Sennert
and a Birthday Cake for Resi

2NCBOOKS and Motto Books at San Francisco Art Book Fair, July 22-24 2016

San Francisco Art Book Fair
1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco CA 94107

Saturday, July 23rd: 11am – 6pm Sunday, July 24th: 11am – 5pm

Preview on Friday, July 22nd: 6pm – 10pm

On Curating @ Motto Berlin. July 23rd from 7pm

OnCurating #31- Spheres of Estrangement: Art, Politics and Curating

With contributions from

Josephine Baker-Heaslip, Jonas Becker, Franco ‘Bifo’ Beradi, Benjamin T. Busch, Dan Bustillo, Lilian Cameron, Joey Cannizzaro, Carson Chan, Jeni Fulton, Ken Gonzales-Day, Matthew Hanson, Anke Hennig, Alistair Hudson, Alison Hugill, Suzana Milevska, Jared Pappas Kelley, Penny Rafferty, PUNK IS DADA, Claire Ruud, Jack Schneider, Adrian Shaw, Paul Stewart, Sam Thorne.
Editors: Jonas Becker, Benjamin T. Busch, Matthew Hanson, Penny Rafferty, Paul Stewart

Today’s estrangement is a fully incorporated component of the modern experience, a stimulant for ‘surplus alienation’. Therefore, this issue asks what artistic, architectural and curatorial approaches to estrangement offer current discourse in organisation, aesthetics and activism. The articles unpack estrangement for the political, social and cultural sprint of our time.

Publisher: Dorothee Richter
Co-Publisher: Michael Birchall, Ronald Kolb
Editors: Jonas Becker, Benjamin T. Busch, Matthew Hanson, Penny Rafferty, Paul Stewart
Proofreading: Stephanie Carwin
Graphic Design: Ronald Kolb, Biotop 3000

Buy the magazine

Wednesday July 13th, from 7pm @ Motto Berlin

Dreams First

During years Erik Steinbrecher sorted out daily dirt, leftovers and all kinds
of wrappings. The design of this artist book is based on photographes
of made layouts of waste, moody notes, scribbelings and liquid stains.

For this new episode the artist will decorate Motto’s vitrines in an instant and enjoyable way.

Recent Titles:
YOU AND ME AND EVERYBODY
SUNKA BUCH

Dreams First
Erik Steinbrecher
Motto Books
12€
Free beer and cigarettes for any purchase.

Sunday July 10th, from 5pm @ Motto Berlin

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Dan Rees’ new monograph, Road Back to Relevance. The event will include a conversation between the artist and Documenta 14 curator Dieter Roelstraete.

Published by Mousse on the occasion of his exhibition at Nomas Foundation in Rome, Road Back to Relevance gives insight into the last decade of Rees’ practice. It brings together groups of works that have never before been viewed simultaneously, and reveals the complex nature of the artist’s research. The title refers to a slide presentation made in collaboration with an advertising strategist and designer that, by charting the course of a specific solidarity campaign between Wales and Nicaragua started in the 1980s, questions how pre-“clicktivist” modes of social engagement, activism, and international solidarity can remain relevant today. As Dieter Roelstraete writes in his essay contribution, “The work of Dan Rees touches upon a wide range of topics, subjects, and issues, but one dominant, recurring preoccupation doubtlessly concerns the politics of taste. ‘Taste’ – its cultural corollaries, its political over and undertones, and most importantly its social sources – is one of Rees’s preferred problems. And where it is addressed most directly and unapologetically – that is to say, in the so-called Artex paintings – is exactly where his work becomes most willingly, egregiously ‘problematic.'”

with special thanks to Tanya Leighton Gallery and Mousse Publishing

TAXIDERMY FOR LANGUAGE-ANIMALS: A book on stuffed words by Tine Melzer

Book Launch on Friday June 24 at 7.30 pm at Motto Zurich, Müllerstrasse 57, 8004 Zürich.
Live music performance, reading and talks with special guests from Amsterdam, London, Bern and Zürich.

A parrot can be trained to repeat the sounds we make when we speak. But what does a parrot say? ‘Taxidermy for Language-Animals’ examines language fragments from different practices – philosophy, literature, visual art – by exploiting some of our linguistic habits and tools. This book includes examples of ordinary language trapped in images. Games we play with language and games language plays with us are introduced. Like language itself, language-games are based on perception, habit and memory and are played in collaboration with others.

464 p, ills colour & bw, 17 x 26 cm, pb, English
Rollo Press, Graphic Design Urs Lehni

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Image by Markus Schinwald, Kurt (2008)

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Book Launch: Jean-Max Colard – Die Ausstellung meiner Träume (The
exhibition of my dreams)

Jean-Max Colard is an art critic, exhibition curator and literary scholar.
On July 5th Wolff Verlag will present the german translation of his book
L’exposition de mes rêves, MAMCO, 2013, a collection of dreams linked to
contemporary art exhibitions, either probable, imaginary or real. A set of
texts which propose through dreams another form of art exploration and
writing.

Book presentation in the presence of the author Jean-Max Colard and the
translator Christian Hartwig Steinau.

Reading of selected dreams by the actress Stefanie Tiedtke.

JEAN-MAX COLARD: art critic for Les Inrockuptibles, France Musique, France
Culture, curator of numerous exhibitions, including the Exhibition for the
100th anniversary of the writer Marguerite Duras “Duras Song” (October 15,
2014 – Jan 12, 2015) at the Centre Pompidou and the parallel to the
European Football Championships in France presented exhibition “La Grande
Galerie du Foot “(5. Jun. – July 10, 2016.) in La Villette, Paris.
JeanMaxColard.com

Free admission, In German

Jean-Max Colard: Die Ausstellung meiner Träume. Edited and translated from
French by Steinau, 118 pages, paperback, Wolff
Verlag Berlin, ISBN 978-3-941461-34-5, 14,90 Euro

The First Summer Fest of Western Liberation June 3 – 5, 2016

Artist Keren Cytter is returning to her former gallery location Elisabeth Kaufmann (now Réunion) and initiates together with Natalie Keppler and Andreas Wagner a summer festival for all forms of art.
The First Summer Fest of Western Liberation is formed for the non-globetrotting crowd and the young people of Zurich. The festival wants to expand the idea of contemporary art, art-space, art-event and time in general with music performances by the all-girl jazzy, post-pop-punk band Ravioli Me Away, the theatrical music performer Mathias Ringgenberg aka PRICE and Hove aka Marc Hofweber, among others.

The First Summer Fest of Western Liberation is a non-institutional art event that aims to present time-based art in a weekend of hard and light-hearted entertainment: From a curated library by Christoph Schifferli & MOTTO, to a Brunch based performance by Dafna Maimon and Hanne Lippard, among others.

The First Summer Fest of Western Liberation separates art from capital and delivers it to the general public in one weekend of relief with screenings by the talented Berlin based Kerstin Cmelka and the New York It girl Maggie Lee.

The face of the festival and host is Robert Steinberger. Location: RÉUNION, Müllerstrasse 57, Zurich
Date: June 3-5, 2016
 Daily: 2PM – 1AM

Participants: Christoph Schifferli & MOTTO, Andrew Kerton, Antonio Grulli, Keren Cytter, Ravioli Me Away, Thomas Moor, Maggie Lee, Cosima Grand, Marc Hofweber aka HOVE, Mathias Ringgenberg aka PRICE, Dafna Maimon & Hanne Lippard, Kerstin Cmelka, Sophie Jung and Pascal Sidler.

RÉUNION: combines, condenses and converts curatorial field research and experimental art production.

FULL PROGRAM