Happy Potatoes and Sad Silkscreens at Motto Books

As the Happy Potato Press, Martijn in’t Veld has been publishing books, prints and other printed matter since 2019. Please join us for a wintery-xmas-drink and the presentation of various potatoes on December 11th, 18:00h. Among the things on display will be a severed arm, the weather report from the day Richard Brautigan died, a young girl stealing fishes and the ever expanding city of New York.

www.happypotatopress.com

Criminal Garden

Hiroshi Takizawa at Motto Berlin

Criminal Garden

Project01: “Assumption”
Criminal profiling is used as an investigation technique to hypothesize on a suspect figure. An assumed portrait is inferred and emerges from what is left of a particular setting or crime scene. I am intrigued by the development of such assumed figures, as well as the fact that these profiles are fictional and nonexistent unless replaced by an asserted criminal.

“Assumption” consists of scanned images of objects found in ordinary surroundings. Instead of shooting or scanning a flat surface, I chose to scan objects with uneven surfaces as a method to emphasize the distortion of the outcome. As a result, the images are highly detailed, yet far from the objects’ original shapes and forms. The method also allows me to illustrate that the process of reproduction can result in a fictitious representation of an object. To me, there is a similarity in the process of profiling and scanning in the sense that both processes creates a fictional and imaginary image. In this work, I aim create an image of a fictitious profile, although there may not be any criminal context to it. What interests me is that the scanned objects gain a fictional character that reveals the possibility of an additional dimension to its existence, and furthermore, a suggestion that the fictional existence is in fact closer to reality.

Find more of Hiroshi Takizawa’s works here

Putting together. About Libraries, Books, Images, Words.

Damiàn Navarro, Olaf Nicolai, Stéphanie Serra

Saturday November 23, from 7pm at Motto Berlin.

Join us for a discussion around the practice of assembling, which will lead to the question of researched and found material and its montage possibilities. We will look at Damián Navarro’s rotorelief stickers and collecting process, and Olaf Nicolai’s editing practice in the 3 volumes of Conversation Pieces that link the library of the Roman gallerist Maria Colao to the art historian Mario Praz through his house (Walther König) and Stéphanie Serra’s written project on libraries, Through the Words of Others (fink).

Screening: Conversation Piece, Luchino Visconti, 1974 (subtitles in English)
Damián Navarro is an artist who works in Lausanne (Switzerland). He plays with collected object-documents to dig into realities, and repeatedly attempts to reshape the topics he addresses.

Olaf Nicolai is a German conceptual artist who works in Berlin. His work includes a major interest in books, literature and editing as well as its possible special forms.

Stéphanie Serra is a Swiss writer and researcher working on French films made by writers between 1950 and 1975 (Isou, Debord, Beckett, Perec, Duras).

In addition to the talk, an intervention in the Motto bookstore showcases will turn around the on-going looping.store website project developed by Pablo Perez and Damián Navarro and aims to share part of his stickers collection.

Recent publications as well as the fink twice series from edition fink will be on display
http://www.editionfink.ch/

Criminal Garden

Hiroshi Takizawa at Motto Berlin, November 16th 2019, from 7pm

Project01: “Assumption”
Criminal profiling is used as an investigation technique to hypothesise on a suspect figure. An assumed portrait is inferred and emerges from what is left of a particular setting or crime scene. I am intrigued by the development of such assumed figures, as well as the fact that these profiles are fictional and nonexistent unless replaced by an asserted criminal.

“Assumption” consists of scanned images of objects found in ordinary surroundings. Instead of shooting or scanning a flat surface, I chose to scan objects with uneven surfaces as a method to emphasize the distortion of the outcome. As a result, the images are highly detailed, yet far from the objects’ original shapes and forms. The method also allows me to illustrate that the process of reproduction can result in a fictitious representation of an object. To me, there is a similarity in the process of profiling and scanning in the sense that both processes creates a fictional and imaginary image. In this work, I aim create an image of a fictitious profile, although there may not be any criminal context to it. What interests me is that the scanned objects gain a fictional character that reveals the possibility of an additional dimension to its existence, and furthermore, a suggestion that the fictional existence is in fact closer to reality.

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Criminal Garden
Hiroshi Takizawa

First Edition
Format:Rolling paper / pvc rod / pvc cover
Type of printing : Offset
Size: 3364mm × 265mm
Number of Pages 2
Edition 80

Images Hiroshi Takizawa
Published Hiroshi Takizawa
Translation Martha Aida
Design Yuto Takamuro

Printed in Germany
Images copyright@2019 Hiroshi Takizawa

Saturday, September 28^th

5-7 PM. Talk at 5.30.

Motto Berlin Skalitzer Str. 68, 10997 Berlin, Germany

Kristian Handberg’s Conquering the present in the Long Sixties is an art historical essay. The book presents a new understanding of the art work in the 1960s and how a predominant interest in the present even brought a Soviet Cosmonaut to the Venice Biennale in 1968.

Talk with Terry Smith, author of Art to Come. Histories of Contemporary Art (2019).

Kristian Handberg., (b. 1980) Art historian, Ph.D., postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. Handberg has researched in the importance of exhibitions and their international circulation in the postwar era at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

Terry Smith, Professor in Art History, University of Pittsburgh. A leading historian and theoretician on the history of contemporary art, Smith has just published the book Art to Come. Histories of Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2019), which will be available at the launch. Smith will be in conversation with the author on the notion of contemporary art and the exhibition as a way of staging the present.

10 Years of Provence
at Motto / The Downer

Opening Friday 23 August, 6-9pm

with:
Gerry Bibby, Megan Francis Sullivan, Martin Ebner, Edgars Gluhovs, Daniel Herleth and Bärbel Trautwein of Oracle, Karl Holmqvist, Lisa Holzer, Ilya Lipkin, Inka Meißner, Ariane Müller, Kaspar Müller, Henrik Olesen, Philip Pilekjær, Marina Pinsky, Josephine Pryde, Starship Magazine and Seyoung Yoon

Laida Lertxudi book launch and 16mm film screening at Motto Berlin. july 20th, 2019.
from 7pm

fluent & Mousse Publishing are excited to invite you to the launch of Landscape Plus, the first monographic book on the work of Laida Lertxundi at Motto, Berlin.

This editorial project began two years ago, first emerging as a research project around Laida Lertxundi’s 2017 solo exhibition at fluent. Framed within fluent’s former programme Aesthetics of Contamination, this book explores the wider practice of the artist, grounded in but not limited to the work presented in the show. A series of essays by Erika Balsom, Anna Mannubens, Laida Lertxundi & Alejandro Alonso Díaz expand beyond the time-space of the filmic work.

Alongside this, the book features a number of premiered visuals, plus sets of images illustrating her exhibitions, projects, and works. For the first time since Lertxundi began making films, a publication maps her overall practice and allows for enhanced readings that navigate around film-theory, feminism and subjectivity. As a whole, the book intends to present an essential constellation of Lertxundi’s universe.

English / Spanish / Basque
128 pages.
Softcover.
Design: Mousse Studio.
Edited by: Alejandro Alonso Díaz.
Publisher: fluent & Mousse Publishing.

On the occasion of its launch, we invite you to join us at Motto, where we’ll present and discuss the publication and you could enjoy a special launching price!

—

Laida Lertxudi

Blending conceptual rigor with sensuous pleasure, the films of Los Angeles-based artist Laida Lertxundi are seductive and self-reflexive explorations of place. Her works are produced through a process she refers to as “landscape plus,” which marries observational photography with music, actions, and chance events. Lertxundi draws parallels between land and the body as sites of pleasure and experience.

http://laidalertxundi.com/

+ Book Presentation. ‘Tales 37‘ Daniel Gustav Cramer. Motto Books, ENSP Arles (all day).

Cosmos art books
1, rue de la Paix
13200 Arles

Bardhi Haliti; May 25 is now October 1 — Book launch

Thursday May 30th
From 7 PM
Motto Berlin

May 25 is now October 1 is an extensive research across Kosovar newspapers published between 1974 and 2018. The book documents sports activities that took place in seven identical sports halls in seven cities of Kosovo. The images have been cropped, zoomed in on, and paired together by similarity. The choreography is not meant to render them jewels or treasures, but rather to help find their meaning beyond their meaning within the now unfashionable sports halls. Through repetition, the images and texts reveal the multifunctional nature of community space in which larger sociopolitical and cultural cycles are reflected.

May 25 is now October 1
Graphic Design by Bardhi Haliti
662 pp; 38 color / 406 bw photographs;
Softcover; 165×233 mm; 500 copies;
Texts by Bardhi Haliti, Owen Hatherley, Hans-Christian Dany;
Published by cpress, Zurich;
Distribution by Idea Books, Amsterdam; 978-3-9524710-5-0

Botanical drift – Book launch/Exhibition – Motto Berlin

Saturday 18th of May from 6pm – 10pm
Exhibition runs until June 1st

Vegetal intelligence and artists working with plants has become a subject of many volumes recently. Botanical Drift has grown over the past 5 years from Kew Gardens Economic Botany collection in London, spreading out beyond. It now materialises as an exhibition at Motto and launch of the recent anthology. The exhibition features work from artists and contributors David Edward Allen, Connie Butler, Melanie Jackson, Hu Yun, and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll. The artist Emma Waltraud Howes’ choreography is presented in a papercut work and performance. A history of the tree is philosophised by theorist Matteo Pasquinelli and the translation of The Murder of a Buttercup is introduced by author Wietske Maas.

Melanie Jackson’s edition of T-Shirts based on her chapter on the Coco de Mer are available for sale.
The books are half price on this evening only – 16 Euros
The launch is accompanied by food and a bar.
18 Uhr – 22 Uhr

MOTTO BERLIN
Skalitzer Str. 68, im Hinterhof
10997 Berlin
U1 Schlesiches Tor

Botanical Drift: Protagonists of the Invasive Herbarium
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll (Ed.)

Contributions by David Edward Allen & Maria Buzhor, Rebecca Anderson, Bergit Arends & Sunoj D, Connie Butler & Hazel Dowling, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Caroline Cornish & Mark Nesbitt, Alfred Döblin, Natasha Eaton, Germaine Greer, Kim Berit Heppelmann, Emma Waltraud Howes, Melanie Jackson, Alana Jelinek, Philip Kerrigan, Kay Evelina Lewis-Jones, Claire Loussouarn, Wietske Maas, Natasha Myers, Matteo Pasquinelli, Raqs Media Collective, herman de vries.

Botanical Drift explores the hermeneutics, historicization, semiotics, and symbiosis of plant diversification, species cultivation, and destruction—past and present, extant and extinct—around the globe. Plant histories are explored as commodities and colonial as well as decolonial devices by significant and diverse feminist, art-historical, and anthropological voices—from Germaine Greer to herman de vries—bringing new perspectives through photo-essays, fiction, performance, and interventions in ecological, film, and translation archives. Reflecting on experimental ecology—the undiscovered, underestimated, and undesired non-European flora and fauna—it challenges perception and inspires potentialities to bring new understandings of the undergrowth of the Kew Gardens botany collection.

Design by A Practice for Everyday Life
16.7 x 23 cm, 240 pages, color and b/w ill., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-353-0

(Image Caption: David Edward Allen, p. betulifolia – winter 2015/16)