MOTTO DISTRIBUTION

THE OMNIBUS EVEN, Swiss Institute, New York. Nov. 11th 2018

Posted in events on November 8th, 2018
Tags: Even Magazine, swiss institute

Even_Out-of-Practice-STACK

Please join us for an afternoon of programming to celebrate the launch of the anthology Out of Practice: Ten Issues of Even, 2015-2018, presented alongside a pop-up bookstore by Motto (from 12pm).

Program

4:00PM | History is Contemporary — A panel discussion on one of the major themes in Even: how history resonates within new institutions.

Featuring:
Frederick Deknatel, author of Even‘s story on rebuilding Syria
Kanishk Tharoor, author of Even‘s story on the Louvre Abu Dhabi
Moderated by Rachel Poser

5PM | Screening: Brune Renault (2009) by Neïl Beloufa, the French artist and filmmaker interviewed in Even No. 3.

5:30PM | Technology is Personality — A panel discussion on the most current of Even’s major themes: how technology is changing the performance of personality.

Featuring:
Robert Horning, author of Even‘s story on Instagram and the museum
Camille Henrot, artist interviewed in Even No. 8
Moderated by Jason Farago

Motto Books will present a temporary bookstore held in the Swiss Institute library. For this occasion, Motto will offer a selection of titles which resonate with the wide range of themes discussed in Even, from artists publications to art theory and critical discourse.

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net. Please note: events at Swiss Institute are limited capacity, and entry is on a first-come, first-served basis.

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Frederick Deknatel is senior editor of World Politics Review and a former Fulbright fellow in Syria.

Camille Henrot’s diverse artistic practice combines film, drawing, and sculpture. She lives and works in New York.

Rob Horning is an editor at Real Life. He lives in New York.

Kanishk Tharoor is the author of Swimmer Among the Stars, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and the presenter of the BBC series Museum of Lost Objects. He lives in New York.

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http://evenmagazine.com/
www.swissinstitute.com

Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina @ Motto Berlin. November 8, 2018

Posted in art, events on October 27th, 2018

Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina Book Launch. Nov 8, 2018.
7-10pm at Motto Berlin, with a short performance by the artists at 8pm sharp

Join us for the launch of Asymmetrical Response, the exhibition catalog of Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina’s show of the same name (Western Front, Vancouver. Sep 9 – Oct 22, 2016).

Designed by Manuel Buerger, the book includes essays, images, a script for a play written by Olia and a CD containing tracks from Cory’s AUDMCRS Underground Dance Music Collection of Recorded Sound as DJ’d by DJ regularfantasy aka DJ Silk.
Published by Western Front and Koenig Books ltd.

https://front.bc.ca/

Andrew James Paterson at Motto. 11.10.2018

Posted in events on October 8th, 2018

Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist Andrew James Paterson will be presenting a programme of writing and video at Motto on Thursday Oct.11 at 7pm. Paterson will read from his novel Not Joy Division (pub. Impulse B., Toronto) and his artist’s monograph Collection Correction (Kunstverein Toronto and Mousse Publishing), as well as screen a few of his language-based video works.

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Andrew James Paterson is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist working with video, film, performance, painting, music, critical and fictional writing. His videos have shown locally, nationally and internationally for three and a half decades. Much of his art in various media references tensions between bodies and technologies including language; as well as anarchic impulses played against formalist tendencies. His videos, films, and performances have been programmed in Seoul, Bangalore, Amsterdam, Salzburg, Buenos Aires, New York City, Montreal, and Toronto… among other international centres. Between 1977 and 1982, he was the prime vocalist and writer for the Toronto post-punk band The Government. In 2016 he launched an artist’s book Collection/Correction, published by Kunstverein Toronto and Mousse Publishing Milan. In 2018 he released a novelette titled Not Joy Division, published by Impulse B of Toronto.

Cristian Forte & Hybriden-Verlag. Piktogramme Book Launch @ Motto 4.10.2018

Posted in art, Artist Book, books, editions, events, Motto Berlin store, Motto Books on October 1st, 2018
Tags: Cristian Forte, Hybriden-Verlag

piktogramme_motto

Cristian Forte & Hybriden-Verlag @ Motto Berlin
Piktogramme Book Launch
Thursday, October 4th. 6PM

Piktogramme is an artist book of original drawings and miniatures by Cristian Forte. These delicate diagrams are visual poems, singularly drawn onto each copy. Piktogramme was published in 2018 by Hybriden-Verlag in a limited edition of 10 copies.

Cristian Forte was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires. Between 1999 and 2006, Forte was a member of the interdisciplinary political group Etcétera, a collective influenced by Surrealism in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He lives in Berlin since 2009, where he runs Nicht-Verlag Milena.

Artistic gestures and practices of thought— writing, drawing, and publishing @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt — 23.08.2018

Posted in events, history, illustration, Journals on August 17th, 2018
Tags: Alexander Schellow, Babak Afrassiabi, Corinne Diserens, KAO Jun-Honn, Leah Whitman-Salkin, Nasrin Tabatabai, Nida Ghouse, Pages magazine, Paola Yacoub, Walid Sadek

With KAO Jun-Honn, Pages magazine—Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, Walid Sadek and Nida Ghouse, Alexander Schellow, Leah Whitman-Salkin, and Paola Yacoub

An open bookshop and a reading area will be organized by Motto Books consisting of curated
selection of books that are integral to the ideas discussed

Thursday, August 23, 2018 / 2pm – 9:15pm, full programme below

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10,
10557 Berlin

World cultural paradigm shifts not only effect social configurations but also the state of artistic production. One of the main concerns are the changing conditions of hospitality and openness to the vitality of artistic and intellectual life. What are the possibilities to foster an extended intelligibility of artistic engagement and what are the threats for artistic expression in different political contexts?

In experimenting with modes of engagement and cultural translation, multiplying perspectives, and reflecting on forms and acts, this encounter Artistic gestures and practices of thought—writing, drawing, and publishing will endeavor to activate the power of arts and of practices of thought. Doing so, it questions their modes of presentation and public reception in diversified contexts and networks of knowledge, where the conditions for the transmission have changed significantly.

Exploring the construction of symbolic and artistic spaces, necessarily heterogeneous, where experimentations and ideas are shared in direct relation to artists and writers’ practices, researches, and publishing projects, it will be conducive to formats that authorize great complexity, including editorial modalities or discursive configurations.

FULL PROGRAM. Free entrance, in English

14:00 Welcome note by Annette Bhagwati (HKW)

14:10 KAO Jun-Honn
(in Chinese with simultaneous English translation)

Through walking, filming, drawing and writing, the artistic research and practice of KAO Jun-Honn focuses on issues about economical and territorial transformations in Taiwanese contemporary society, and traces of colonial spatial politics and repression structures. The project A community still unwritten by history deals with inquiring and writing about the Daoboushe (Daobou tribe) indigenous community who once resided in the mountains on the outskirts of present-day Sanxia District in New Taipei City. The community endured the tragedy of the Japanese Governor-General of Taiwan’s “Five Year Plan for Barbarian Management,” where the Japanese government ordered police and military forces to obliterate the community in the Daoboushe Incident. The few surviving community members were relocated to the mountains of present-day Fuxing District in Taoyuan, with their ancestral land taken over by the Japanese Zaibatsu Mitsui Corporation. KAO with a team explored the area in an effort to excavate relics that remain from the Daoboushe Incident of 1906. The project is part of his recent book Notes on Traversing: Mountain Warfare, Empire and Images of Taiwan (after the book, Notes on Traversing Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range, written in 1914 by Japanese officials on the Japanese army’s conquering the indigenous tribes of Eastern Taiwan).

The book will be published in English by Motto Books. KAO Jun-Honn is an artist and researcher living in Taipei who received in 2017 from Tainan National University of the Arts a PhD in Art Creation and Theory.

15:10 Break

15:30 Alexander Schellow

Alexander Schellow’s practice has its basis in reconstruction through drawings from memory. Engaging in different situations (the complex urban and social texture of Tirana, Albania, Marseille, France or Taipei, Taiwan, among others), he walks and experiences them, focalizing his gaze on details. The moment of drawing comes later; a few months after the direct experience, back in his studio, Schellow explores his memories, and starts to create complex, spotted drawing-structures – point for point, focusing on actual situations/ visual surfaces he experienced in the past. As in the artist’s words: The practice of reconstruction, sometimes complemented by a set of intentional manipulations (in the form of spatial interventions, for instance), can be used as a means of research, for example in urban environments. Using one’s own perception as a possible point of departure, one can examine and figuratively ‘document’ concrete spatial and temporal references of bodily and perceptive experiences within specific contexts.

Alexander Schellow is an artist living in Brussels and Köln. He is Professor of animation film at erg, Brussels.

16:20 Leah Whitman-Salkin
in dialogue with Alexis Zavialoff, founder of Motto Books

Leah Whitman-Salkin’s practice as an editor is focused on the collaborative aspects of editing, with her work exploring translation, the space of the visual and the written, and the process of making public through publishing. She is the founder, with Simon Battisti, of 28 November, an experiment in making community space, alternative distribution, and publishing practices through a bookshop and reading room in Tirana, Albania. In 2016 she was the curator, with Simon Battisti and Åbäke, of the Albanian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale—an editorial project on translation, music, and emotive spaces. She is deputy editor of Harvard Design Magazine, and former editor at Sternberg Press. Her talk will reflect on the economy and ecology of real and imaginary spaces, and the translation, both in thought and language, of desire, place, and making public.

17:10 Break

17:30 Paola Yacoub

Paola Yacoub is an artist based in Berlin and the founding director of ARP—Artistic Research Practices at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in Beirut. In promoting the relevancy of the arts, the program ARP proposes an active platform of inquiry of contemporary practices offering the necessary conditions for pushing forward artistic action and new pedagogical perspectives, exchanges among artists, writers, architects, critics and researchers from various fields (arts, sciences, philosophy, politics), as well as the diversity in the performance realm. It is engaged with ethical, social and political questions surrounding artistic and editorial practice.

Artistic works from the 2000s in Lebanon were generally part of the post-conceptual movement. One of the main inquiry conducted at ARP defined it as a field of application of a norm: the permission to remain indifferent to the agents’ intentions. We postulated its dissolution. Editorial practices have a strategic function from this point of view as they engage intentionalist or anti- intentionalist positions. Examples will be presented.

Paola Yacoub graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, and worked at the Institut Français d’archéologie du Proche-Orient in charge of the excavation in downtown Beirut from 1995 to 1999. She collaborated with Michel Lasserre on notations of aspect variations of territories in conflict and post-conflict situations. Her monographic exhibitions include among others Paola Yacoub, Drawing with the things themselves (Beirut Art Center, 2011), and Paola Yacoub, kiss the black stones (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2012).

18:20 Dinner pause

19:00 Walid Sadek, with Nida Ghouse

How does the troubled history of civil war continue to impact the conditions of living in postwar Lebanon? In The Ruin to Come, a collection of essays, written in Beirut between 2006 and 2016, Walid Sadek looks at the conditions of living under a temporality theorized as the “protracted now” of a civil war—one structurally capable of perpetuating the conditions of its own dominance—and argues, that although this temporality seems dominant, it nevertheless remains untranquil in the many unfinished strains of a troubled history that resist falling back into a settled and distant past. The book proposes and investigates diverse concepts of labor: the labor of ruin, the labor of the corpse, the labor of near blindness and the labor of missing.

The presentation of The Ruin to Come, Essays from a Protracted War (Motto Books & Taipei Biennial 2016) and reading by the author will be followed by a conversation with Nida Ghouse. Walid Sadek is an artist and writer living in Beirut. He is Professor and currently Chair of the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut. His early work investigates the familial legacies of the Lebanese civil war. He later began to posit, mostly in theoretical texts, ways of understanding the complexity of lingering civil strife in times of relative social and economic stability. His later written work proposes a theory for a post-war society disinclined to resume normative living. More recently, his artworks and written texts seek a poetics for a sociality governed by the logic of protracted war and search for eruptive temporalities to challenge that same protractedness.

Nida Ghouse is a writer and curator. Her ongoing writing project «Lotus Notes» has appeared variously in Mada Masr (Cairo 2014), After Year Zero (University of Chicago Press 2015), ARTMargins (MIT Press 2016), and Critical Writing Ensembles (Mousse Publishing 2016). She recently co-curated Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017), and is currently working towards The Matrix of All Possible Narratives (with Anselm Franke and Erhard Schüttpelz, slated 2020), both at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. She was previously director of Mumbai Art Room, where she installed Walid Sadek’s Thoughts on Speaking Dead.

20:00 Pages, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi in Conversation with Corinne Diserens, via Skype

Pages is a bilingual Farsi/English magazine developed and edited by artists Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi alongside their collaborative projects. Produced both in Iran and the Netherlands, it was initiated in 2004 and until now nine issues have been published. Pages has recently expanded to an online platform which aims at creating a space beyond the predefined economies of accumulation and distribution in archiving and publishing. In their presentation, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi will talk about the trajectory of ideas that led to initiating Pages’ new platform (www.pagesmagazine.net) and delve into the relation to archiving and writing pursued in this platform while presenting sections of contributions by invited authors.

Pages: Issue 1, Public & Private, February 2004 / Issue 2, Play & Location, May 2004 / Issue 3, Desire & Change, September 2004 / Issue 4, Voice, June 2005 / Issue 5, On the Verge of Vertigo, August 2006 / Issue 6, Eventual Spaces, September 2007 / Issue 7, In Translation, March 2009 / Issue 8, When Historical, May 2011 / Issue 9, Seep, October 2013.

Artistic gestures and practices of thought—writing, drawing, and publishing is organized in collaboration with curator Corinne Diserens and Motto Books.

With the support of

Motto, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, National Culture and Arts Foundation & Taipeh Vertretung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Cheng Xinyi / BHKM @ Motto Berlin. 03.08.2018

Posted in events on July 29th, 2018
Tags: BHKM, Cheng Xinyi

Cheng Xinyi / BHKM @ Motto Berlin. 03.08.2018

(talk 8pm sharp)

Blink at the silky space

Read within another time

On the occasion of the launch of The Blower (BHKM, 2018), artist Cheng Xinyi talks with publisher BHKM about the relationship between Cheng’s photography practice from 2012 to 2018 and her paintings.

The Blower is the second publication by BHKM.

BHKM is a conceptual publishing house founded by Ho King Man.

Cheng Xinyi (b. 1989, Wuhan, China) lives and works between Shanghai and Paris. She studied painting at Maryland Institute College of Art (USA) and attended Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (NL). Her solo exhibitions include: Harnessing the power of wind, Antenna Space, Shanghai, 2018; Hands of a barber, they give in, Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris, 2017, Swimming Hole, Practice, New York, 2015. Recent group exhibitions include: Painting Now and Forever, Part III, Greene Naftali Gallery, Mathew Marks Gallery, New York, 2018; Scraggly Beard Grandpa, Capsule, Shanghai, 2017; Economy Plus, Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris, 2017.

Sandra Peters BOOK LAUNCH The Book as an Exhibition Space @ Motto Berlin. 27.07.2018

Posted in events on July 18th, 2018
Tags: monograph, sandra peters, verlag für moderne kunst vienna

PER/TRANS Performing the Cube, Transforming the Cube Works by Sandra Peters. 1998–2017

EDITORS Sandra Peters, Abu Dhabi / Berlin

ESSAYS Michael Ned Holte, Fiona McGovern, Sandra Peters, Gregor Stemmrich

DESIGN Cyan, Berlin

DETAILS English, Hardcover, 30,7 x 24,6 cm, 208 pages, numerous color illustrations

PUBLISHER Verlag für moderne Kunst, Vienna

The Book as an Exhibition Space

Sandra Peters presents her recently released book PER/TRANS. Performing the Cube, Transforming the Cube: Works by Sandra Peters 1998–2007. This extensive monograph presents more than 20 complex work ensembles. For some pieces, which have not to date been presented to a larger public, this publication represents a premiere. This publication is the product of a so to speak artistic-curatorial process that has lasted a number of years. Its inception goes back to the year 2016, when the artist rented a 700 m² hall in Berlin, which she converted into a temporary display space. Working together with a technical team she had assembled personally, Peters then began to configure her installations in the space. In close collaboration with the photographer Jens Ziehe, the resulting arrangement was documented in high visual quality. This new publication, with its retrospective orientation, contains many of these work series, photographed in situ, along with additional materials, also previously unpublished. Sandra Peters will speak about the contents of her oeuvre, along with the genesis and production of the monograph.This book presentation becomes an occasion to discuss questions concerning the relationship between exhibition and book formats, and to speak in new way about private and public, about publicity and modes of presentation in relation to specific and general viewpoints.

Artist talk & Book launch

The book will be presented on Friday 27.07.2018, with a talk at 8PM:

Sandra Peters in conversation with Fiona McGovern and Eva Meyer-Hermann (In English)

Alpina Huus x Motto. 10.08-07.09.2018

Posted in events on July 16th, 2018
Tags: Alpina Huus

Alpina Huus x Motto

10 August—7 September 2018

Adam Fearon, 10 August
Claude Eigan, 17 August
Tarik Hayward, 24 August
Nastasia Meyrat, 31 August

Exploring performance and domestic space
In August 2018, four artists are challenged to think the
outdoor exhibition space and the historical window
displays located in the courtyard of a bookstore in Berlin.
Over the course of a project exploring the performative
potential of their visual and sculptural practices, you are
invited to a weekly gathering, during which one of the
artists will unveil their contribution.

Motto
Skalitzer Str. 68
10997 Berlin

This project is curated by Elise Lammer and kindly supported by Pro
Helvetia the Swiss Arts Council, Motto and Domus Alpina.

HOW DO WE MAKE A WE booklaunch + Karl Holmqvist. 09.06.2018

Posted in events on June 1st, 2018

HOW DO WE MAKE A WE
BOOK LAUNCH AND A PERFORMANCE BY KARL HOLMQVIST
09.06.2018

Please join us on Saturday June 9th from 7 till 9 PM at Motto Berlin for the book launch of How do We make a We, a publication that grew out of the Ratti Foundation’s XXIII CSAV artists’ research laboratory Language and Sound as Sculpture held in Como, Italy, in the summer of 2017.

Designed by Claudia de la Torre and Gregorio Magnani in collaboration with the participants , the publication reflects on the experiences shared at the laboratory and on its overall theme. Through individual and collaborative contributions it investigates how sound, performance and language may become tools in the creation of a ‘we’ that is both capable of agency and in a continuous process of dismantling itself and of an ‘I’ that is always at war with itself.

The XXIII CSAV was : Lorenzo Benedetti, Hannah Black, Isaac Contreras, Michael Dean, Claudia de la Torre, Kiah Endelman Music, Hugo Esquinca, Romain Grateau, Russel Haswell, Karl Holmqvist, Doris Hardeman, Marine Julie’, Annett Kottek, Youngjae Lih, Gregorio Magnani, Jan Moszumanski Kotwica, Annie Ratti, Natalia Rebelo, Sara Rodrigues, Alex Turgeon,Titus Wonsey and Giulia Zabarella

Performance by Karl Holmqvist 8 PM sharp.

Snacks and drinks .

How do We make a We is published by Compagnia with the kind support of Fondazione Antonio Ratti

Motto Skalitzer Str. 68, im Hinterhof
10997 Berlin
U1 Schlesisches Tor

Nicole Wermers @ Motto Berlin. 26.04.2018

Posted in events on April 14th, 2018
Tags: Daly & Lyon, Gregorio Magnani, Nicole Wermers

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.