Mondfotografie

Posted in Art, Artist Books / Monographs, photography, poetry on January 23rd, 2025
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Pictures of the moon, the ultimate topos in photography, have been given a new twist in Erik Steinbrecher’s MONDFOTOGRAFIE. The Swiss artist collects pictures of the moon and rephotographs them, placing a finger on the lens. In this way, images of the full moon are transformed into obscure crescents.

MONDFOTOGRAFIE is a dark and witty artist’s book that takes a subtle, yet illuminating approach not only to the discourse on the photographic image but also to the interpretation and reading of images in general.

Erik Steinbrecher (born 1963 in Basel, lives and works in Berlin) is known to a wide international audience particularly since his participation in documenta X (1997) as well as further major institutional presentations such as at Kunst-Werke in Berlin, MoMA PS1 in New York, the Kunsthalle Vienna, the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich or The Weserburg Museum of Modern Art in Bremen. His work as artist has developed in two main directions; the areas of sculpture and architecture as well as the realm of publication. Steinbrecher released numerous books and printed matters, which always expose a strong conceptual idea and function as independent artworks.

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LUO YANG catalogue

Posted in Artist Books / Monographs, Exhibition catalogue, photography on January 5th, 2025
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Luo Yang is considered the shooting star of the current Chinese photo scene. This catalogue combines examples from her main works since the beginning of her career, intertwining them as they were personal stories.

Since 2007 the extensive series “GIRLS” has been created, a very personal examination of the photographer with women of her generation. Whether against the backdrop of Chinese megacities or in intimate settings in the private environment, the young women present themselves confident and individual, but at the same time appearing vulnerable and fragile. Apart from traditional female role models and traditional clichés, they are looking for their way to a self-determined life in the modern, rapidly transforming China.

In the series “YOUTH”, Luo Yang has been working with young people of Generation Z since 2019, i.e. those born in the late 1990s and around 2000. Fluid gender assignments become just as apparent as the search for individual expression between creative staging and authentic body feeling. Luo Yang paints the sensitive picture of the urban Chinese youth in search of orientation and identity.

Migrant Bird Space is a Berlin & Beijing-based art foundation and gallery, providing a showcase for artists as well as art agency services in China & Europe. Working out of the gallery space at Koppenplatz in the heart of Berlin, the foundation offers a professional platform for cross-cultural communication between China and Europe with a focus on contemporary Chinese art. Promoting both established and emerging artists, Migrant Birds provides gallery spaces for exhibitions in Beijing and Berlin, an artist-in-residence program, regular talks and lectures, as well as support in liaising with Museums, universities, private institutions and more.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of Luo Yang’s exhibition organized by Migrant Bird Space Berlin and curated by Lu Mei.

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Pictures From a Briefcase

Posted in Architecture, Art, Artist Books / Monographs, Exhibition catalogue, Motto Books on January 4th, 2025
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The book is published on the occasion of the exhibition “Pictures From a Briefcase” by Alexander Rappaport at Maxim Boxer Gallery, Riga, Latvia from August 15 to September 9, 2024.

“Pictures From a Briefcase by Alexander Rappaport I find interesting first of all, because seeing only them one would not suspect the intensity, originality and scope of his thought on topics so far removed from everything that is depicted in them. The pictures, unlike his texts, are so unassuming and modest. It seems they are like an earthly anchor above which his ideas soar at unattainable heights.

All together they look like illustrations for a novella, which could either have actually been written, or exists only in the author’s imagination. There is nothing fantastic, exotic, or esoteric here. An ordinary domestic environment.

But an environment, unlike space, always belongs to someone. And yet in Pictures from a Briefcase there is no visible inhabitant, or hero of this book. You are right to suspect the author’s invisible presence. Sasha’s drawings are about himself.

But not his full spiritual life, it seems to me they are only about that side of him in which he is alone. Not in the public space of his blog the Tower and Labyrinth or his articles and texts.

Pictures from a Briefcase is about «The Man in a Case». But let’s not get carried away with this analogy. In Chekhov’s story the whole person is in the case, but in Sasha’s briefcase there is only one side of his life. The quiet and sad one.”

Alexander Stepanov

Letter to Sasha Stepanov
(Alexander Rappaport, early July 1965)


Dear Sanya!
Well, I’ve finally picked up the pen.
I’ve finished my studies, and that chapter is behind me.
We are on the road again.
I want to write you a different kind of letter than what we usually exchange. I find myself in a state that invites a different kind of communication, rather than the usual “how are you?” and “what’s up?”.
What should I fill my life with now? More precisely, what should I discard to allow what remains to grow? Among all pursuits, I don’t know what I cherish most or what I am most inclined towards.
The science I thought I would devote my entire life to just a month ago—urban planning—is a science about everything. It’s a reliable (though shaky) endeavor, but the science is slow and unfamiliar. It reminds me of a long road that must be crawled upon. Yet, science is perhaps the only thing that remains. Mathematics, sociology, psychology, aesthetics—these, blending into architecture, form urbanism (will my frail body withstand this?).
There are two other ways of existing; I’m not talking about professions (no, I mean ways to exist, live, breathe, sleep, and love)—these are the arts. Either painting or poetry. These are two equal vows; I don’t know which one to take, but both are terrifying. I can hardly say I have ever truly engaged in painting. With poetry, only pale shadows of verses have crawled out from beneath my [unclear]. But it’s not even about the result. Here, try to understand me; this is very important: it’s not about what I choose to do (write poetry or scientific works)—it’s about who I will be in life: who?
After all, a person changes. A person is free to become whatever they want. There are many paths, many ways. One can become a glutton and a scoundrel, or one can be neither a glutton nor a scoundrel. One can become a POET or a philosopher, mathematician, or craftsman. I feel within me the capacity to become whoever I wish. I feel the freedom and right to make that choice. But Time comes to me and says: “Don’t joke with me. If you choose, choose quickly and don’t hesitate; otherwise, everything will shatter and fly to hell. As long as I am the future, you are free; when I am the past, you are my torn body, and you have no choice but to submit.”
Write me something, Sanya. And try to understand that this is not a joke.
Goodbye. I hope this time you will be my friend and support.
Sasha.

Alexander Gerbertovich Rappaport – a theorist and historian of architecture, philosopher, art historian, writer, blogger, and artist. He spent his childhood in Leningrad, lived in Moscow, London, and for the last twenty years – in a remote seaside village of Mazirbe in Latvia.
Alexander Rappaport is best known for his extensive work in the field of theory and history of architecture, having written several thousand texts. His works address fundamental issues in the history of architecture and professional thinking, touching on art history, philosophy, and cultural theory.
Alexander Rappaport comes from an artistic and cinematographic family. His father, the well-known film director Herbert Rappaport, an Austrian of Jewish descent, came to the Soviet Union in 1936 to work at the “Lenfilm” film studio. Here he met costume designer Lydia Shildknecht. She also came from a family of artists and architects: her father, artist Pyotr Shildknecht, emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1924 to work in European cinema. Among his films are “The Golden Age,” “An Andalusian Dog” (directed by L. Buñuel, screenplay by S. Dali), and many others. His father Nikolai Alexandrovich Shildknecht was an academic of architecture in imperial St. Petersburg.
Alexander Rappaport was born on October 23, 1941, under dramatic circumstances: his family was evacuated to Almaty (Kazakhstan) from besieged Leningrad. His mother went into labor on a train at the Vologda station, which became his accidental birthplace.
The family returned to Leningrad after the war in 1946. Rappaport’s beloved grandmother, singer Lydia Ivanovna Shildknecht (Matsievskaya), along with his uncle Viktor Shildknecht, moved to Riga after the war. Viktor was a film artist who was one of the founders of the Riga Film Studio. In childhood, Alexander spent every summer in Jurmala, which formed a strong connection for him with Latvia as the happiest place in his life.
In 1958, Rappaport entered the Leningrad Engineering and Construction Institute (LISI) in the architecture faculty. In 1964, he went to Georgia, where he studied drawing with a friend of his mother, Vasily Shukhaev, and lived in the house of Elena Akhvlediani. In Leningrad, he mingled with literary and artistic circles. His acquaintances with Anna Akhmatova, Viktor Sosnora, David Dar, Gleb Gorbovsky, and Joseph Brodsky influenced his entire life. Rappaport moved to Moscow in the early 1970s, where he continued to work as a theorist of architecture. Here he met the renowned philosopher Georgy Petrovich Shchedrovitsky and was a member of his Moscow methodological circle for almost ten years. This became a significant chapter in Rappaport’s life.
In 1991, at the invitation of the BBC as a radio correspondent, Rappaport moved to London with his wife, artist Natalia Arendt, and their four-year-old daughter Ariadne Arendt, to start a new life there.
In 2004, Rappaport took another decisive step, leaving London and settling in the Latvian village of Mazirbe on the desolate Livonian coast. Amidst a dense pine forest, he transformed a traditional farmstead into an interesting organic architectural project, where he lives alone, plays the piano, paints, and blogs – this has been his main activity for the last twenty years.

Author: Alexander Rappaport

Publisher: Maxim Boxer Gallery; Motto Books

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TRULY BLESSED

Posted in Artist Books / Monographs, Documentary, Monograph, photography on November 13th, 2024
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Truly Blessed tells a powerful visual story about a community’s response to discrimination, both racial and religious. Chris Suspect came upon this unusual community by chance. He met Bilal Ali after a taxi hit Ali on the streets of Georgetown in Washington, DC. Suspect photographed the accident and sent him the photos for his lawyer to use. A few months later, Bilal invited Suspect to photograph a private party at a non-descript restaurant in Dupont Circle. At the time, Suspect had no idea he would be introduced that night to an empowered community of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender African Americans.

“In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where l am. You know the way to the place where I am going.” John 14:1-4

“Sometimes it is only through photographs that we can see the sacred in the secular, or the secular in the sacred. This collection, Truly Blessed, uses photography to forge a conversation between the sacred black church and secular sexual/erotic spaces, capturing sites where the body, mind, and spirit converge. Suspect’s attention to the subtlety of the performances of everyday people-engaging in rituals of their own choosing-illustrates the diverse and dynamic realities of being black and queer in America.
I was fortunate to be a founding minister at The Community Church of Washington, DC (UCC), the church that is so well-defined in this text.
I had left the DC metropolitan area by the time of this chronicling of sacred-secular aspects of black queer life. However, while in the ministry at the “Community Church,” I always felt conflicted to literally dance in the sanctuary, after a night of dancing and sweating in the streets. My queer peers and I were taught early the separation of the church and the street, the necessary division of the secular and the sacred. In many ways, being in a church where all were welcomed-where queer met straight, trans met bi, and men met women, we were already in a cultural world far different than what we had historically been given within larger and more mainstream black churches. Dare I say, while we may have sometimes felt a degree of shame or conflict—in mixing our sacred and seculars—we all felt the harmony between the spiritual and sexual, as both energies were charged by bodily need, passion, and improvisation. Every now and then the riffs at the DJ booth inside the Bachelor’s Mill would parallel the scratch of the drums behind the pulpit. Indeed, as Suspect shares images of folks engaged in a spiritual worship experience sometimes in the midst of giving devotion to a higher power, sitting in a pew, caring for children, hugging tightly, or speaking from the pulpit-we are offered a look into a word that may be familiar to some and foreign to others.
Likewise, as we move into the clubs and homes, we are presented with bodies who speak sexuality and desire in many ways some standing and watching, some moving, some in drag, some in masturbatory bliss, some posed in a moment of intimate dance, and some ready for the camera while others are unaware of its presence. The way that these scenes of sacred-spiritual and secular-sexual expression still exude the plurality and porousness of community, allows this work to color Black queerness in all its shades.” – Jeffrey Q. McCune, Forward

Author: Chris Suspect

Publisher: King Koala Press

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Сhris Suspect / Truly Blessed Presentation

Posted in Art, Artist Books / Monographs, Events, Exhibition catalogue, Motto Berlin, photography on November 12th, 2024
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Join us with King Koala Press in Berlin on Tuesday, Nov 12, from 7-9 PM for a presentation of ‘Truly Blessed’, a compelling visual narrative exploring community responses to racial and religious discrimination.

Published by King Koala Press, this book features a foreword by Jeffrey Q. McCune, PhD, and includes an extensive interview with Chris Suspect by Ibarionex Perello, host of The Candid Frame. With a testimonial from Guggenheim Fellow Maggie Steber, ‘Truly Blessed’ uses photography to bridge the sacred Black church and secular erotic spaces, highlighting the convergence of body, mind, and spirit. This work acknowledges the complexities of the “sacred” while celebrating the unapologetic existence of the sexual-secular-sacred trinity in the Black queer community.

Meet and greet, book signing and photo exhibition.

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ED4M Presentation

Posted in Art, Artist Books / Monographs, Editions, Events, Film, Film Association K1NO1 Paris, K1no1, K1no1 MONOCINEMA, music, newsprint, poetry, Zines on November 6th, 2024
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ED4M
Zine presentation and Screening ‘Making of ED4M’

November 8th, 2024
Screening starts 7 pm

+conversation with the artist with K1NO1
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Motto – 38 rue du Vertbois – 75003 Paris
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The main character is the electric train type ED4M, one of the most common in Russia since the mid-90s. This small detective story unfolds on newsprint, featuring carriage vestibules, doors, handles, and wanted persons. It immerses the audience in the realm between the living and the dead, accompanied by the sound of wheels clattering, exploring space, ritual, collective recognition, and personal experience. The Tbilisi weekly sports newspaper served as the prototype for this book.

ED4M (Electric train Demikhovsky, type 4) is a series of Russian DC electric trains produced from 1996 to 2016 at the Demikhovsky Machine-Building Plant. The first batch with increased comfort was manufactured for the Moscow Railway between 1999 and 2000. During this period, ED4 and ED4M models became the most significant electric trains for local purposes.

Zine features photographs by Ivan Anisimov taken between 2019 and 2022 before he left Russia. Further shooting was continued by his son Danila, who took four rolls of 35mm film in winter 2023. Zine design by Aeona Melnikova.

Screening is a documentation of the printing process of a zine in a print facility, Tbilisi.

Ivan Anisimov was born in Pereslavl-Zalessky, Russia, in 1988. For more than 10 years, he has been engaged in documentary film and photography, collecting archives from lost photographs and videos. He has carried out several photographic projects and is now based in Paris, France.

The event is organized within the framework of the cinema club and Film Association K1NO1 Paris.

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ED4M

Posted in Art, Artist Books / Monographs, Editions, history, Monograph, music, newsprint, Zines on November 6th, 2024
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ED4 (Electric train Demikhovsky, type 4) is a series of Russian DC electric trains produced from 1996 to 2016 at the Demikhovsky Machine-Building Plant for the railways of Russia and the states of the republics of the former USSR.
In the period from 1999 to 2000, the first batch of electric trains with an increased level of comfort were manufactured. This batch was by order of the Moscow Railway, and was necessary for the implementation of local flights. In 2000, the first set of AC electrical equipment for ED9M electric trains was supplied by Electrosila OJSC. It was from these deliveries that the active introduction of the equipment of this company into production began. During this period, trains of the ED4 and ED4M models were the most significant and widespread electric trains used for local purposes.

The book features photographs by Ivan Anisimov taken between 2019 and 2022 before he left Russia. Further shooting was continued by his son Danila in accordance with the list provided by his father. In total Danila took four rolls of 35mm film in winter 2023.

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Andy Warhol. abstrakt. Kunsthalle Basel . 1993

Posted in Art, Artist Books / Monographs, Monograph on July 27th, 2024
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Between 1977 and 1986, Andy Warhol created six series of paintings of various sizes, which even today are little known. Rather than featuring mass-produced photographic reproductions of well-known personalities, products, and events, these six series reveal a bent for painting in abstract patterns. Thirty-six examples of Warhol’s abstract paintings, together with a selection of stills from his early films, are presented for the first time.

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statementhouseRCA + statementhousetanlin

Posted in Architecture, Artist Books / Monographs, Exhibition catalogue, Motto Books, poetry on April 30th, 2024
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@shouseRCA and @shousetanlin are two publications from their respective Twitter accounts. Each account was one of the two voices of the statementhouse (temporary title) built at the Royal College of Art in London in 2015.

The house “spoke” in two ways. One was that of the arrangements of texts and ordinary situations that punctuated its daily life through the action of the two curators Sophie Oxenbridge and Katie Reynolds (@shouseRCA). The other voice was that of poet Tan Lin, echoing it remotely from New York (@shousetanlin).

The two voices answered and prompted each other.

TBOOK is a fictitious publishing house that proposes to transform the Twitter scroll into a book form.

Author: Jean-Pascal Flavien, Tan Lin

Publisher: TBook; Motto Books

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Found Serendipity

Posted in Artist Books / Monographs, photography on April 13th, 2024
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While walking, one captures the fleeting and ordinary objects encountered in the form of images. These captured images are then reassembled to ponder the impermanence of these objects, encouraging a renewed perspective on the everyday items that surround us. Since 2015, she has been photographing objects on the street, collecting and studying images on site STREETOBJET. Found Serendipity juxtaposes images of common objects found by chance on the streets with exhibition-style captions, inviting the viewer to linger between the lines, appreciate, and imagine the essence of these object images. Each book cover is uniquely stamped, creating a serendipitous arrangement.

Author: Hong, Ji-Sun

Publisher: Plate

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