Vitrine installation at Motto Books courtyard & passage

4 photographs

Nu Qui Marche
Julien Carreyn

Opening reception: Sept. 8, 2020, from 7pm
Exhibition Sept 9-Oct 19, 2020.

Full vitrines and new publications display.

1.      Schlafwandler au Sacré Cœur
2.      Une librairie à Berlin
3.      Archi_éro_tektonisch
4.      Nu qui peint poreux
5.      Unexpected joy
6.      Pierrette, Pauline et Jacques
7.      Ist denn hier ein Schloß?
8.      Voyage tumultueux
9.      Shelves and frames
10.    Winzige Bilder
11.    Tu te mires
12.    Kisten voller Bilder
13.    Nu à deux, nu qui lit
14.    Das schwarze Auto
15.    Lutte de chiots
16.    Spielkarten
17.    The bathroom was a kitchen
18.    Krimi in der Provinz
19.    Sofortbilder
20.    Amateur
[…]

Notizen: R.Regnery

MOTTO BERLIN
Skalitzer Str. 68, im Hinterhof
10997 Berlin
U1 Schlesiches Tor
Open Monday – Saturday: 12h-20h

Bertrand Flanet: Pale Habits, 2017, installation view, Reality Companions, Motto Berlin

Gina Folly: Don’t worry about your Future, 2020, installation view, Reality Companions, Motto Berlin

Becket MWN: Seven-Oh-Six, 2015, installation view, Reality Companions, Motto Berlin

Inga Danysz & Becket MWN: +4915215142816, 2020, installation view, Reality Companions, Motto Berlin

Inga Danysz: The End is always at the Beginning, 2019, installation view, Reality Companions, Motto Berlin

Inga Danysz: Untitled, 2019, installation view, Reality Companions, Motto Berlin

Photos: Yudith Heinemann

Reality Companions
Feb 21 – April 30, 2020
Motto Books Berlin

with works by Inga Danysz, Bertrand Flanet, Gina Folly, Becket MWN

curated by Dennis Brzek

In 2002, German car manufacturer VW opened their so called “Gläserne Manufaktur” (meaning both glassy and transparent factory) as a simulacrum for granting an undisturbed view into its production processes. The glass factory’s promise of full transparency is enmeshed in an array of showcases devoid of human activity, in which tasks are performed for an audience solely by an interplay of automatic gestures. Leading the viewer’s eye from the assembly of individual parts towards the wholeness of the finished product, their performance is—next to government apologias of stability, craft, and expertise—a testament to its belief in a scratch-free experience by way of steering the mechanical arms in safe distance from the glass surface. The luminous airspace lying in between the machinic extremities and their transparent cube is a border of the mind being kept firmly monosemantic.

Fast forward a few years and we are at Elon Musk’s presentation for the Cybertruck, a bulky desert buggy clad in a retro-futuristic shell including dramatically blacked out windows made from the company’s certified armor glass. This product showcase is made out to become the prime denominator for innovation, all the while being drenched in an upside-down baroque aesthetic of all things black and shiny. About half way into the spectacle, lead designer-cum-stage assistant Franz von Holzhausen hurls a metal ball into the truck’s hushed glass outlooks for demonstration of their promised permanence in the face of force. The ball hits and makes the glass crack. A dull thud serenades this banal action, framed underneath bright spotlights and the audience’s chuckled gasps and awkward laughters. In the moment of collision, the ball created a suspended drawing mapping its own meteoritic field of impact located somewhere within the thick outer sheet of the transparent metal. The lines of destruction that were drawn by the unfortunate performer create a spiderweb that becomes a gothic prop in this story’s haunted narrative. The signature left by the metal ball is both concrete and abstract, sketching a caricature of the visual organization of our present where what cracks is never the glass but only its very before. Famously, the only things that ever hits the view of those hyper valued subjects hidden behind bulletproof glass are the raw eggs thrown by protestors trying to make a pointed take, mostly in vain.

SUPERBEE SPIX COLA 139 KOOL GUY CRAZY CROSS 136 DUKE SPRIT SUPERKOOL KOOLKILLER ACE VIPERE SPIDER EDDIE KOLA are only some of the protagonists mentioned in Jean Baudrillard’s vision of New York of the 1970s in his essay “Kool killer ou l’insurrection par les signes” published in 1976. Here, the neurotically semiotic French philosopher describes the city as a vessel for signs and graffiti, abundant signifiers and empty words. The plane of production of these symbols is not just walls of buildings and underground stations but also the more irreducible surface of windows. Today, these scratchings seem to hover in between layers of glass, making them appear suspended in time and place like intractable and incomprehensible signs of another age. Workers who will travel to Grünheide in Brandenburg via S-Bahn for their shifts at Tesla’s Gigafactory 4 will see those engravings and believe them to be hieroglyphs of a time in which semantics were something created instead of endured.

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

Claude Eigan. Alpina Huus x Motto
17 August, 6-10pm
In collaboration with Alizee Lenox and Jake Kent
A special cocktail will be served

 
Claude Eigan (b. 1983, France) uses sculpture as a primary medium, often extending to installation, sound and print. Recent exhibitions include: Haptic House (Horse & Pony Fine Arts, Berlin, 2018),Everytime you switch me off, I die. A little. (gallery Foothold, Polignano a Mare, 2018), Sun Sipping Some Syrup (gallery Frontviews, Berlin, 2018), Times New Romantic (M.I/mi1glissé, Berlin, 2017), State of the art (gallery Lily Robert, Paris, 2017), Meatspace (The impossible project, Berlin, 2016), Comfort Zone (Kunstfabrik HB55, Berlin, 2016).

* * *
Alpina Huus x Motto
10 August—7 September 2018

Adam Fearon, 10 August, 6-10pm
Claude Eigan, 17 August, 6-10pm
Tarik Hayward, 24 August, 6-10pm
Nastasia Meyrat, 31 August, 6-10pm

* * *

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

Die vorliegende Publikation erscheint im Rahmen der Ausstellung “Alexander Kluge. Gärten der Kooperation” im Württembergischen Kunstverein Stuttgart: einer umfassenden Einzelausstellung des Schriftstellers, Filmemachers und Theoretikers Alexander Kluge, die auf der gleichnamigen Schau im Kunstzentrum La Virreina in Barcelona basiert. In enger Zusammenarbeit mit La Virreina sowie Alexander Kluge selbst hat der Kunstverein eine Neufassung und Erweiterung von sieben Eizelaspekten dieses Projektes entwickelt.

Entsprechend der Ausstellung setzt sich auch das Buch aus sieben “Inseln” zusammen, die jeweils mit einem Bild und Text aus Alexander Kluges Büchern eingeführt werden. Darüber hinaus versammelt es eine Auswahl ergänzender Texte von Alexander Kluge, die auch ind er Ausstellung zu finden waren.

—-

The publication accompanies the exhibition “Alexander Kluge: Gardens of Cooperation” in the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart: a comprehensive solo exhibition by the writer, filmmaker, and theorist Alexander Kluge, based on the show of the same name at the La Virreina Art Center in Barcelona. In close collaboration with La Virreina and with Alexander Kluge himself, the Kunstverein has developed a new version and expansion of seven individual aspects of this project.
The book, like the exhibition, is composed of seven “islands”, each introduced by a picture and text from Alexander Kluge’s books. In addition, it brings together a selection of complementary texts by Alexander Kluge, also found in the exhibition.

German / English

19 x 12.5 cm

ISBN: 9782940524723

199 pages

Co-published by Motto Books & Würtembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

Buy it

Published by Bergen Kunsthall in 2017 on the occasion of the exhibitions:

The Noing Uv It
Bergen Kunsthall
9 January – 15 February 2015

The Showing Uv It
Simon Ling
Bergen Kunsthall
27 February – 5 April 2015

Curated by
Martin Clark and Steven Claydon

Texts by
Martin Clark, Steven Claydon, Timothy Morton, Martin Herbert, Russell Hoban, Martin Westwood

Buy it

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