Saturday, July 28. Skalitzer 68. YEAR 2012 + Karl Larsson

7pm – Presentation of the magazine with:
Ismaël Bennani
Sonia Dermience
David Evrard
Alberto García del Castillo
Orfée Grandhomme

8pm – Performance by Karl Larsson

This second YEAR is still an almanac, a choral book revealing behind the stage. Seasons are information. Hey, look at what has been done, should be, will be or never be. This issue is like talking with images. You can connect one page to another. Text can be spare, descriptive or exhaustingly disruptive. What have you done means what it will be. We asked people about what’s in their mind from the past or for the future and that creates an all present. Last time, we talked about no future, now we are no present. YEAR is still a chain reaction, organizing its content in the form of sequences. YEAR is still an experimental constellation.
The time of manifestos and propaganda is back! From the everyday or larger issues of sociability and historicity. It takes the shape of a collage of disparate sources in time and place. Advertisement, propaganda and manifestos are the ultimate forms for abstraction and engrained subjectivity like space from outer space. Porn and insults, unreal kind of novellas, advertisement as public space, again, opposed to archives, distinction opposed to evaluation, again, narrative to order, cool to distance, taste to energy, again, beauty to sense, sense to idea, idea to experience, experience to life and life to style and style to knowledge and knowledge to power and power to all perversive shit. Still.
As an author use your imagination to be radical, literal and obscene!
As a reader use your intellect and senses to be radical, metaphorical and obscene!

http://www.kmplt.be/project.php?id=61

Tomorrow, Saturday July 14th. Berlin

from 12 – 6pm

Motto Billig!

Back list, display copies, (…)

First come first served.

Berlin-Paris. Un échange de galeries.

CNEAI= Paris at Chert & Motto Berlin: Yona Friedman, “handbuch”
Opening Friday June 29, 2012
from 4pm to 9pm

Invited by Chert and Motto, as part of the Berlin-Paris exchange 2012, CNEAI= proposes an exhibition of Yona Friedman, entitled “handbuch”. Designed as a staging of the visionary projects of Yona Friedman, “handbuch” is a double presentation of works of the architect and artist. This exhibition takes the form of an encyclopedia project, a public use of a personal and autonomous thought.

full programme: http://www.berlin-paris.fr/fr.html#berlin

http://cneai.com/

B-B-B-Books & Watching Humans Watching @ Motto Berlin
Saturday 16/6 – 2012
From 7 PM

___________

B-B-B Books – Show and Tell

In talk and video, Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt from B-B-B-Books give a show and tell presentation
about each book released at their publishing house. B-B-B-Books was founded in Stockholm in August 2011, and takes an interest in the interaction between the different parts of book production. Every new project aims to encourage the convergence of photography, text and production. To this date, five books have been published: Gingerbread Monument, 581C vol 2-3, Blackdrop Island, Wikiland and Europe, Greece, Athens, Acropolis.

www.b-b-b-books.com
www.kk-tf.com

___________

Watching Humans Watching

Presentation of the book Watching Humans Watching by Inka Lindergård and Niclas Holmström, published by Kehrer Verlag 2011.

Watching Humans Watching deals with humans relationship with nature and the open landscape through the concept of humans as animals. Over time it also came to deal with the perception of nature as the ‘great unknown’, expectations of what it is, and how we are supposed to act within it.
With SAGA series we are more interested in the whole mystic aura surrounding concepts of nature. It is an experimental inquiry into our own notion of the sublime; The magic and psychological powers of nature phenomenas such as sunsets and horizons. It’s quasi-religious rituals and make-believe wilderness.

www.inkaandniclas.com

___________

‘If you leave’. Book presentation. Motto Berlin. 07.06.2012
start 6pm

if you leave is a collection of contemporary photography. Snapshots of a journey made by wanderers who study the mysterious yet uncannily peaceful feeling of desolation and loneliness.
More concerned with the impact of a single image, rather than a body of work by an individual photographer, it is the representation of a silent idiom of faces, landscapes, subjects and objects, all in their most personal and intimate états d`être.
As a collection if you leave features the work of over a 250 different photographers from all over the world.

Photographer Laurence Von Thomas has been curating this collection online since november 2009.

http://if-you-leave.tumblr.com/

Fillip 16: Berlin Launch
May 30, 2012, from 7 pm

Fillip and Motto Berlin are pleased to present a special launch event for the sixteenth issue of Fillip magazine with contributing artist Olaf Nicolai, writer Patricia Reed, and Fillip Associate Editor Antonia Hirsch.

Colour is a major factor in a magazine’s “shelf appeal” and Fillip magazine, though a publication more aligned with academic journals, has more than a few times been advised to “go colour” in order to facilitate a larger sales volume. Olaf Nicolai’s project for our new issue, 2500 × Fillip 16, subverts this market pressure by causing the magazine to be printed in colour—yet this application of colour is undelineated and flows across the spectrum of the rainbow as well as across the page regardless of the printed content. The printing technique used to achieve this effect is called split fountain printing; with a history that stretches back to the inception of the art of printmaking, it gained renewed currency in the 1960s and ’70s as a method to introduce colour in printed material without having to go through the expensive four-plate colour process. With its evocative, quasi-psychedelic effect, the technique was particularly popular in a countercultural context.

Olaf Nicolai’s project for the Intangible Economies series extends the artist’s existing research interests, previously explored in such works as Warum frauen gerne stoffe kaufen, die sich gut anfuehlen (Why women like to buy fabric that feels good to the touch) (2011), and Considering a Multiplicity of Appearances in Light of a Particular Aspect of Relevance. Or: Can Art Be Concrete? (ongoing in varying formats since 2006). These works consider the role of colour as an agent to activate affect as a consumer incentive. Nicolai’s project for Fillip 16 also represents another instance of the artist’s ongoing infatuation with print media in general through which he consistently mobilizes production techniques in order to articulate conceptual concerns. The printing technique used in 2500 × Fillip 16 causes each single copy of Fillip magazine’s sixteenth issue to become a unique original as no printed copy is exactly like the other. Accordingly, the affective power of colour in relation to consumer behaviour is complicated by questions of value and circulation vis- à-vis the unique art object.

Copies of the new issue will be available at the launch, as will Olaf Nicolai’s new Irisdruck edition, Fillip Poster One and Two, produced in tandem with Fillip 16.

Participants

Olaf Nicolai is an artist who lives and works in Berlin. His work has been exhibited at documenta X, the Sydney Biennale, and the 51st Venice Biennale, as well as at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, among others.

Antonia Hirsch is Associate Editor at Fillip.

http://fillip.ca/

Sunday, May 20, 7 pm
Yorgos Sapountzis
Book launch

On the occasion of his two-part solo exhibition at Ursula Blickle Foundation (Videos and
Picnic, May 19 – July 8 ) and at Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster (The Gadfly Festival,
June 16 – September 2) a comprehensive book by Greek artist Yorgos Sapountzis will
be published by Sternberg Press. With texts by Rosalyn Deutsche, Chris Kraus, Veit
Loers and Katja Schroeder as well as an interview by Willem de Rooij with Yorgos
Sapountzis.

Music by no:sler

image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

http://www.sternberg-press.com/
http://bortolozzi.com/

YORGOS SAPOUNTZIS – TWO EXHIBITIONS

Videos und Picnic
May – 08. Juli 2012
Ursula Blicke Stiftung,
Mühlweg 18,
D-76703 Kraichtal
Opening Saturday, May 19, 7 pm

The Gadfly Festival
16. Juni – 02. September 2012
Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster
Venue soon to be announced
http://www.westfaelischer-kunstverein.de/
Opening Friday, June 15, 7 pm

jean-michel wicker

anti-arbeiten

At Motto Berlin
28.04.2012 – 19.05.2012
Opening reception, Friday 27 April, from 7pm

‘It is known that initially many wanted at the very least to build cities, an environment suitable to the unlimited deployment of new passions. But of course this was not easy and so we found ourselves forced to do much more.’
– Guy Debord ‘On Wild Architecture’

Vitrines, like strange capsules, lead from the street to the larger glass front of the bookstore where ‘concierge’, a fragile contraption of repurposed wire and cardboard, sheds its insufficient light. The first vitrine, still on Skalitzer Strasse, contains three differently large Es – 60, 75, and 90 cm high, to be precise-. They are cut out of a strange, white, sleek cardboard and float upwards like bubbles inside an aquarium. They seem to signify nothing; communicating not so much form or thought, as joy.

Inside the courtyard Ingrid Bergman – sans husband, but filmed by her real life one – lounges, thinking interesting thoughts. Elsewhere, varied sorts of seemingly always welcome debris, are thrown together in perfect disorder. A clutch of scrapbooks and fanzines complete the landscape.

Like visiting Asger Jorn’s walled garden at Albisola, the courtyard begins to feel like a microclimate; an experimental growing plot for new varieties of thought.
The Es make more sense now. The library – of words, of sounds, of images – and its reverse: the anti-library, of books unread and knowledge un-learned, are what is grown and preserved here. Who speaks? Who listens? Who does not speak? What will the books of the future be? How can we make them different? Anti-books, anti-knowledge, un-learning, extreme slowness and extreme speed, all seem relevant here.

Around 1805 Heinrich von Kleist wrote ‘instead of speaking with the pretentious purpose of enlightening others I want you to speak with the reasonable purpose of enlightening yourself’, advocating not words or concepts but a ‘certain state of mind’ as the most correct understanding of Property and State.

More recently, many have remarked on how to extract something from circulation – an object, idea, book – holding it still to examine it, is to do it a great injustice. Objects, ideas, books have a life, they will not stand still under someone else’s microscope. Sometime before this, Hannah Arendt drew attention to the ‘intervals’ within our daily continuity determined by ‘things that are no longer and things that are not yet’. This brief moment of potentiality for Arendt was thought itself.

The conscious fostering of this state of potentiality, the unwillingness to provide a microscope under which objects and thoughts may be kept still, the aspiration towards a language free from knowing, may be what Jean-Michel is after.

Finally we must note that the artist favours improvisation. Last minute changes are likely to happen.

Gregorio Magnani

—

On this occasion, acidator, acidator 2, acidator 3, acidator 4 and acidator 5, an edition of unique books and posters made in collaboration with Maximage Société Suisse, will be presented.

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer str. 68
10997 Berlin
Mon.-Sat. 12-20h
Ph: +49 (0)30 75442119
Fax: +49 (0)30 75442120

www.mottodistribution.com

The White Review #4 @ Motto Berlin. 20.04.2012
Start 7pm

After a short presentation of The White Review by the editors, Swimming Home author and The White Review No.4 contributor Deborah Levy read from her latest novel. Artists Shorvon & Hunter will then be speaking to Ingar Dragset of conceptual duo Elmgreen & Dragset — the artists behind the current Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square and the Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism.

http://www.thewhitereview.org/
BUY