Nicole Wermers Women Between Buildings
Book Launch 26.04.2018
7-10 PM

Please join us on the 26th of April for the launch of Nicole Wermers’ new monograph, Women Between Buildings, published to coincide with her solo exhibition at Kunstverein in Hamburg.

The publication focuses on Wermers’ practice of the past 15 years, and includes essays by Sabeth Buchmann, David Bussel and Kerstin Stakemeier. Designed by Daly & Lyon, published by Compagnia, Motto Books and Kunstverein in Hamburg.

Eigenmischung, a new installation by Nicole Wermers for the Motto vitrines, will be presented on the same evening.

Revue Or @ Motto Berlin. 29.03.2018
from 7pm

Presentation and readings with poets
Anna Serra (France)
Cristian Forte (Argentina)
Kinga Toth (Hungary)

OR review, is a new relation between poetry and paper. An app makes it possible to hear the poem from the very mouth and instruments of its writer. During each listening, the page is enhanced by a visual poem escaping from the paper.

Download the App Here

http://orrevue.com/

Buy issue 1

Slavs and Tatars @ Motto Berlin. 05.04.2018

Book Launch / Presentation 7pm

Slavs and Tatars, Motto Books and Westfälischer Kunstverein are proud to present Kirchgängerbanger : a new, bi-lingual (Eng/DE) reader on Johan Georg Hamann, the 18th century polemicist, frenemy of Kant, and proto-Postmodernist who mixed faith and sexuality in ways that would make even Bataille blush: “My coarse imagination has never been able to conceive of the creative spirit without genitalia.” Includes the triple-platinum hits “New apology of the Letter H” and “New Apology of the Letter H by Itself.” Offset print, 92 pages, 20 x 14 cm. 12€

BUY

Discwoman merchandise pop-up @ Motto Berlin

Founded by Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson, Emma Burgess-Olson and Christine McCharen-Tran, Discwoman is a New York-based platform, collective, and booking agency—that showcases and represents cis women, trans women, and genderqueer artists in electronic music. Started as a two-day festival in September 2014 at Bossa Nova Civic Club, Discwoman has since produced and curated events in 15+ cities—working with over 250 DJs and producers to-date.

From the 21st-22nd of March, they will be selling a selection of merchandise at Motto, including their popular tees and sweatshirts.

PpR Journal @ Motto Berlin Wednesday November 29th, from 7pm

PpR Journal, Issue 3
The coco Issue

How do education and creativity exist together? In an age where students are faced with ‘learning outcomes’ and institutions are scrutinised on success rates and league tables, what does that mean for the student, and how does this impact on creative development, for both the individual and as an industry as a whole?
Looking at the wider context within the creative arts, including music and cinema, what does freedom to create on one’s own terms really mean, and is this possible within the frameworks of today’s commercial, art, and educational sectors? Is there an alternative model, and can it work?
This issue of PpR Journal originated from the idea of a ‘free school’. The Japanese fashion designer Yoshikazu Yamagata (writtenafterwards and Written By) founded coconogacco, an independent fashion school in Tokyo. A school where students do not follow learning outcomes and assessment criteria, and instead are free to explore their individual creative potential without such constraints. Exploring the notion of freedom singer/songwriter Tanita Tikaram discusses the creative process in an intimate conversation, Anton Gottlob photographs Kazuko Hohki of Frank Chickens, and Chikashi Suzuki joins a class of students at coconogacco.

Contributors:
Chikashi Suzuki, Anders Edstrom, Olu Odukoya, Hajime Sawatari, Anton Gottlob, Hajime Sawatari, Elizabeth Gregory, Miho Miyachi, Ayako Shuto, Laura Gardner, Maya Akashika, Sumire Hayakawa, Yoshiko Kurata, Marija Radakovic.

See you at Chicago Art Book Fair this weekend!

Opening November 7th, at Kunsthalle Wien. Starts at 7PM.
Exhibition 08.11.2017 – 28.01.2018

What is the role of art publishing today? How have artists adapted modes of publishing as a tool for their practice? How has the notion of artists’ publishing activity changed, given the ever-increasing amount of fairs and an ever-evolving number of book-related collections in contemporary art museums? Publishing has developed a favorite site and medium for aesthetic and artistic experimentation. It has also become an alternative space for promoting unrestricted individual or collective discourse. The multi-part exhibition project Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017 explores the potentials of publishing – in the form of books, magazines, journals, artistic interventions, websites – as a particular medium and context both to circulate information, knowledge – and to produce art.

Instead of looking at the already historicized and analyzed period of the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition will highlight how a recent generation of artists use publishing as a productive tool for their practice. The focus lies on the period from 1989 until 2017, taking 1989 as symbolic date to underline the shift from analogue to digital. On a political level, 1989 with the fall of the Berlin wall marks a significant date. On a social level, it is an important year as it indicates the invention of the World Wide Web.

THE BOOKSHOP AS MEDIUM

The bookshop curated by Gregorio Magnani and Motto Books presents a selection of artist’s books published between the late 1980’s and the present. Together these publications offer a privileged overview of the unexpected flourishing of the book as artistic and creative medium. At the same time the bookstore highlights the wide international network of artists and small independent publishers whose collaborations and shared interests are the motors for the artist’s book renaissance.

More information here

Browse the selection of 160 publications included in the show here

Awhām magazine launch @ Motto Berlin
Thursday 26th October 2017
6-10pm

Awhām magazine is pleased to invite you to the launch of its debut issue at Motto Berlin.

Awhām translated from arabic, means “Illusions”. Awhām is a collaboration among young and up-and-coming creative talents, across a range of mediums, drawn from the worlds of fashion, art, and politics, but not confined by their traditional boundaries.

Based in Berlin, Awhām is part photo journal and part graphic novel, with images and text presented to explore creatively different narratives associated with a particular theme or subject matter. Come around and celebrate with us!

+++Video work by Pandagunda+++

You Just Have to Experience It
Tuesday 4th July 2017
From 7pm
Motto Berlin

You Just Have to Experience It is a publication and event. It combines citations culled from the book Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968 to trace a history of the changing role of the spectator in art and exhibitions from Minimalism to Relational Art, and New Institutionalism to the present.

Produced on the occasion of the launch of Beyond Objecthood, this public talk in the shape of a performance reading presents a brief history of the exhibition as a critical form from the 1960s to the present, a form that inherently solicits spectators into temporal and spatial experiences and situations as indispensable components of the work.

The title refers to a statement by the American artist Tony Smith who recounts in a 1966 Artforum interview a ride on the newly minted New Jersey Turnpike, recalling a transformative nighttime experience of moving through space and time on the unmarked highway. This experience caused him to question the viability of art to represent something like that. You Just Have to Experience It uses this moment as a point of departure to explore how the criticality once posed by figures like Smith who solicited spectators into durational experiences in their work faces many challenges, not least of which is competing with the institutions that give it voice in an era when the differences between art and entertainment increasingly blur.

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James Voorhies is a curator and art historian of modern and contemporary art, as well as Dean of Fine Arts and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Bureau for Open Culture is a curatorial practice that inhabits and connects with institutions, designers and publishers to realise projects with artists and writers. The projects forge intersections among art, design, education, and consumer culture to rethink how institutions address and engage spectators.

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Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968