Everything is About to Happen (Porto): artists’ books and editions @ Fundação de Serralves, Porto
Opening Friday 14 October
Exhibition from October 15 2016 to February 12 2017.

Works by Patrícia Almeida and David-Alexandre Guéniot, Karl Holmqvist, Janice Kerbel, Sara McKillop, Kristen Mueller, Luís Muñoz-Santini, Preston is My Paris, Simon Popper, Erik Steinbrecher, Fritz Welch, Nicole Wermers.

‘Everything is About to Happen (Porto): Artists’ Books and Editions’ is dedicated to the most recent developments in the field of artists’ books as a medium and context for contemporary art. The exhibition presents more than 200 works ? many of them published in small, hard to find editions ? to give an overview of the most recent developments in the field of artists’ books. Through them it looks at burlesque reversals, authorship fluidity, sub-activism, unproductive labour, nonsensical and non-linear languages as tools to reaffirm and question our collective desire for collectivity. It suggests that artists’ books should be seen both as individual artistic expressions and as participants in a forum whose culture and freedom are essential to our future.

For the duration of the exhibition, the Serralves bookstore will become an integral part of the show and present recent artists’ books that respond to the concerns it articulates. The bookstore selection is curated by Gregorio Magnani in collaboration with Motto, Berlin.

Artists’ books ? works of art that adopt the format and particular modes of distribution of the book ? first came to prominence in the mid-1960s. They offered artists a cheap and easily distributed art form that responded to the widespread desire to bring art out of the gallery context. After almost disappearing from view in the 1980s, artists’ books found new energy as a form of artistic expression in the mid-1990s. Then, the wide availability of increasingly affordable digital editing and printing technologies paired with the ease of communication afforded by the internet made it relatively easy to publish or self-publish a book or fanzine. Artists could adopt the book as their chosen medium and become publishers of themselves or choose to rely on a vast network of artist lead, small, adventurous, and often short lived, publishing houses. It was a media that allowed them to be in full control of their own work ? from the first glimpse of an idea, through its development in editing and publishing, to its final marketing. This was liberating: it allowed free experimentation that bypassed the need for institutional support and validation and relied instead on an alternative peer-to-peer network. It also responded perfectly to the 1990s dream of self-empowerment embodying its promise to make each of us a one-man-act on a constant path of self-reinvention. Today the hope of a non-exploitative relation between capital and independent cultural producers seems as unrealistic as the 1960s notion of liberation through commerce. In the creative arts, self-expression reads more and more as labour performed as entertainment for somebody else’s gain. But the productive power of the shared language that constituted the community around artists’ books remains. It relies on low costs, high affective investments, peer-to-peer exchanges and on the focus on the ability of the book to create social exchanges. Threatened by capital’s capacity to survive its crisis through the consumption and production of social spaces, it reaffirms its communal energy by acknowledging the dangers it faces.

‘Everything is About to Happen (Porto): Artists’ Books and Editions’ is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, and is curated by Gregorio Magnani.

How (…) things that don’t exist
How to (talk about) things that don’t exist focuses on the processes that led to the artworks and arguments in ‘How to (…) things that don’t exist — an exhibition developed out of the 31st São Pau¬lo Biennial’ presented at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto. The publication continues the ide¬as and discussions that generated the exhibition and proposes unexpected synapses between different subject areas: Education; Reverse Colonialism; and Right to the City — Criminalization of the Poor. It includes a wide variety of texts, chronicles, lyrics, historical documents, drawings, collages, paintings, film stills and photographs many of which specifically conceived for this book by artists, curators, art historians, writ-ers, researchers, pedagogues, sociologists, urban planners, journalists, social workers and activists.

Como (falar sobre) coisas que não existem
Como (falar sobre) coisas que não existem centra‑se nos processos que conduziram as obras e discussões presentes na exposição “Como (…) coisas que não existem — uma exposição desenvolvida a partir da 31a Bienal de São Paulo” apresentada no Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves no Porto. A publicação propõe sinapses inesperadas entre os diversos temas tratados: Educação; Colonialismo Invertido; e Direito a Cidade ― Criminalização da Pobreza e inclui uma variedade de textos, cronicas, letras de musicas, documentos históricos, desenhos, colagens, pinturas, fotogramas e fotografias — alguns concebidos especificamente para este livro — da autoria de artistas, curadores, historiadores de arte, escritores, investigadores, pedagogos, sociólogos, urbanistas, jornalistas, assistentes sociais e ativistas.

39.90 €

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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 has decorated Motto’s vitrines in an instant and enjoyable way.

From July 13th to August 25th at Motto Berlin

The non-Objective World

Presenting a body of work made by Art & Language between 1965 and 1967 together with paintings by Ilya Kabakov made forty years later but very much concerned with the same critical aesthetic ideas, the publication aims to investigate the artists’ understanding and response to The Non-Objective World – Malevich’s seminal writings on Suprematism, written in 1927 and published in English in 1959 for the first time.

Edited by Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts with texts by Art & Language, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Ilya Kabakov, Rod Mengham and Andrei Nakov.

€40.00
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“I have been collecting Sol LeWitt books for some time now – initially these books were used as material for a series of animations – but slowly I started buying them just to complete a collection. The search for the white spine.

Sol’s books are predominately white and when going through the shelves of book dealers I always pull out the white books with hope… repetition and repeat is a constant – I often acquire the same book twice or even three times… they all look the same.

In 2005 I produced a book called Cover Version – it featured all the covers of my Sol LeWitt books – a kind of what’s in my library compendium.

For this new piece I have fabricated an abstract version of Cover Version.

The books were laid out as if on a small table top – each book carefully measured… height, width and thickness… Certain book sellers use a similar display technique.

This was then transformed into five medium density fibre board wall mounted relief panels. Expertly cut and routed (not by me) to follow the forms given by Mr LeWitt and his publications. The painted and sanded surface made by the fabricator has been left to give the appropriate patina to the entire piece.

Books are there to be handled and not just bought and sold.”

Jonathan Monk, 2015

With a text David Platzker
Edition of 400

€15.00

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There is a strikingly conspicuous high-rise building behind the Leipzig Central Station that contrasts with the city horizon. The 96 meters high tower, in a dignified shining pearl color, was first called Interhotel Merkur and is now The Westin Leipzig. With 27 floors it hosts more that 400 rooms with event and seminar spaces on separate floors, shops, restaurants. It’s a little city within the city.

In 2008, shortly after starting to study at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, I learnt that it is one of the few buildings that a Japanese construction company has build in German Democratic Republic in the late 1970s (there is two other constructions to be find in Dresden and Berlin). Something around and in this building triggered me to feel at home. When I saw it, I thought of the World Trade Center in Tokyo, from the top of which I enjoyed the Summer Festival of fireworks one day before my departure to Leipzig. So at that time I started to project my personal conflicts of a stranger in a new city on this huge building which became both a symbol of my hometown (even if, to be honest, there is nothing Japanese in its architecture) and of my frustrations.

With the celebrations of the 25 year of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of GDR, I wanted to know more about this building. Until then I had just looked at it from a distance and I finally decided to enter the Interhotel Merkur after 6 years of observation. I booked a room for one night there, took my camera and opened the door.

The Four-star hotel was deserted. Its Japanese restaurant which was once the best in Leipzig had no guests. And a cleaning man said to me: « I have been working here since the opening of the hotel, it was full of business people from all over the world in the 1980s ». He also explained me that the hotel was a hotbed of “illegal” prostitution (however this prostitution took roll as the espionage). I went to the reception and asked: « I heard that this hotel was build by a Japanese company. Is that right ? » A young man answered: « never heard about that » but the next morning I found a letter in my room with that simple sentence : This hotel was built by the Kajima Corporation.

In the summer 2014 I visited the library of Kajima Corporation in Tokyo. The librarian, Ms. Oda, prepared for me archive photos of construction, company’s monthly report, and even confidential documents. She also introduced me to Mr. Shimazu who was in charge of the architectural design team and lived in Leipzig from 1978 to 1981. I got the opportunity to hear their anecdotes, like the event that happened on January 12th, 1979 when the construction office was robed and all the money (GDR-Mark) from the safe was stolen. Additionally one roll of 35mm film that was in the camera of Mr. Sako, a colleague of Mr. Shimazu, had been gone as well. The camera was still in the office, but it had been opened and the negative had vanished. What was photographed in Mr. Sako’s camera must be normally the hotel’s construction process but that disparition had something from a spy movie. They went to the police but neither cash nor the film have ever been back.

I have been photographing modern architecture in Germany since 2008 and I am continuing to shoot similar buildings depending on my trips. In the process of creation, there is always a logical decision on positioning three bodies: the architectural body, the machinal body (camera) and my own body (photographer). But with Interhotel Merkur, I was strangely so excited that I could not measure the distances between the different « actors ». This architecture has, for me, the presence of a real and existing body that contains its story and its emotion. The building has its own life (which I am probably projecting on it) and, therefore, is reluctant to my photographs. But, for the History it represents, for its architecture (between classical Plattenbau and Japanese brutalism), for its role in my personal life, I decided to give it a try, again and again, until I obtain the right portrait of that motionless character of concrete.

When I left the archive of Kajima Corporation after my third visit, the librarian said to me: « Thank you, you shed light on our work, which has been forgotten ». This made me understand the real meaning of my obsession for the Interhotel Merkur: I sensed a Japanese spirit (or a soul?) in Leipzig. And I need to follow it before it flies too far away.

*This essay was originally written by the artist, and edited by Thibaut de Ruyter, for the publication「Stadt Bild / Image of City」(Cooperation by Berlinische Galerie, Deusche Bank Kunsthalle, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Nationalgalerie-Staatlische Museen zu Berlin)

Japan in der DDR – Tamami Iinuma – Exhibition Opening 28.05.16 @ Motto Berlin at 6pm.

Antonia Hirsch (ed.) in conversations with and reproduced texts by Theodor Adorno, Lorna Brown, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Elena Filipovic, François Laruelle, Olaf Nicolai, Lisa Robertson, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and Wolfgang Winkler.

Expanding from the exhibition Negative Space, this lateral publication of seven conversations and reprinted texts is a project in its own right to consider the space between and around subjects and objects.

Antonia Hirsch’s practice testifies to a long-standing engagement with the quantitative, spatial and syntactic systems that structure an understanding of our universe. The opposite of chaos, cosmos can be defined as a complex and organized system: the ordered universe. Hirsch’s work often relates these ordering structures to embodied and visual experience, considering how the equivocal and often ideological nature of these representational systems is expressed through a level of abstraction.

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Catalogue raisonné and artist book: TXT IMG brings together forty-one projects by Katharina Gaenssler, from her first photo installation in 2003 up to her latest project Bauhaus Staircase on display on the stairs of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Like her photo installations, where hundreds of single images come together to create a large-scale work, this monograph is shaped by the contrast between the fragment and the whole. It includes all the thirty-four texts that have been written to date about Gaenssler’s work and every one of the 407,954 photographs she has taken to provide the material basis for her projects. The myriad tiny individual images combine on the pages of the book to form abstract colour sequences – taken as a whole they can be interpreted anew, becoming a photographic manifestation somewhere between a colour code and a dynamic spatial expanse.

This book is published to coincide with the exhibition Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

€68.00
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Motto is pleased to present a pop-up bookstore at Wendy’s Subway, a non-profit library and workspace located in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The store will be open Feb 19-28, 12-7 p.m., with a talk by Where’s Lucy Hunter & R. Lyon / Artwork by Kayla Guthrie at 7 p.m. on Sunday 21.02.16. This pop-up is the first in a series of curated libraries, shops, and collections displayed in the storefront of Wendy’s Subway’s new Bushwick location.

Where is a think tank and publishing platform headquartered in a shipping container in Brooklyn, NY. It is co-produced by historian Lucy Hunter and artist R.Lyon, who use the think tank as an opportunity to research information theory through experiments with the exhibition format. They publish their findings in book-length on-demand publications. For their talk at Wendy’s Subway, Hunter and Lyon will discuss, among other things: libraries, completeness, empire, and the past. Refreshments will be on hand to lighten the load. The talk will begin promptly at 8pm.

Kayla Guthrie will display a page from her most recent artist book, Sunsets Working (in collaboration with Nathan Antolik, calligraphy, and published by Bodega, New York) in the window. Kayla Guthrie is an artist working in writing, sound, and visual mediums. Her EP Blue was released in 2015 by Mixed Media Recordings. She has performed at Greene Naftali, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Massimo de Carlo (London), and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the curator of Intra Phenom, a New York-based performance series presenting the work of female artists in live and durational genres.

Wendy’s Subway
*New Location*
379 Bushwick Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11206

http://www.wendyssubway.com/

A panorama of the city, a public platform, a dysfunctional lookout, blocking the actual view but confronting the viewer with textual observations of the city and the condition of the view in Istanbul, „Panorama (The Right of View)“ was a traveling attraction and an architectonic sculpture. After standing in Kadiköy, on the Asian shore from october-december 2010, looking across the Bosporus onto the city, it was moved to Eminönü for the spring of 2011, into the middle of the city, on the shore of the Golden Horn, next to the Galata bridge, the Spice Bazaar and the New Mosque.
The publication documents the project and presents the full length of the panorama’s text panel in a 3,5 meter printed leporello.

About author: Andreas Fogarasi (born 1977 in Vienna), studied architecture and fine arts in Vienna and Paris, lives in Vienna. His work has been exhibited widely, including Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; GfZK Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich; Grazer Kunstverein; Mücsarnok Budapest; Kunstverein Düsseldorf; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; MSU, Zagreb; Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna; Lombard-Freid Projects, New York; Ludwig Forum, Aachen; Palais de Toyko, Paris and at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia 2007, where he was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation. In his works, Fogarasi uses forms of display that are reminiscent of minimalism and conceptual art to explore questions of space and representation. Located between documentary and sculptural practice he critically ana- lyses the aestheticization and economization of urban space and the role of architecture and culture in con- temporary society. Incorporating video, sculpture and installation in wide-sweeping discursive webs, Fogarasi deals with fault lines in historiography, imagineering and cultural identities. Solo exhibitions (selection): GfzK. Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig; Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2014); Galerie Cortex Athletico, Paris (2013); Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto; Trafó, Budapest (2012); Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; CAAC, Sevilla (2011); Ludwig Forum, Aachen; Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna (2010); MAK, Vienna; Ernst Museum, Budapest; Lombard Freid- Projects, New York (2008). Group exhibitions (selection): Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; New Museum, New York (2014), Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; CAC, Vilni- us (2011); MSU, Zagreb; Mücsarnok, Budapest (2010); 52th Biennale di Venezia; Kunstverein für die Rhein- lande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; European Kunsthalle, Cologne (2007); MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2006); Palais de Toyko, Paris (2003); Manifesta 4, Frankfurt / Main (2002).

€12.00

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