Dear friends,

Motto is pleased to invite you tothe book presentation of Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh: One Hundred Days of Resistance with author Prarthna Singh.

Saturday 1 October 2022
6.30–8.30pm

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof)
10997 Berlin

Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh: One Hundred Days of Resistance

Author: Prarthna Singh
Design: Bombay Duck Design (Sameer and Zeenat Kulavoor)

Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh* is an ode to the infinite courage and resilience of the women of Shaheen Bagh, Delhi, who sat in protest for a 100 days and nights. A book of photographs, drawings, songs, letters and other material gathered as a record of the iconic protest, marks an extraordinary moment in the political and contemporary history of India.
In December 2019, a small group of Muslim women from the working-class neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh came out of their homes and sat down in protest, occupying a stretch of one of Delhi’s busiest highways. They were protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act, which was designed to strip the Constitution of India of its right to religious equality. This peaceful sit-in continued until the pandemic sent India into lockdown; the state used this as an opportunity to destroy and dismantle all traces of the protest. This book serves as urgent and crucial evidence of a time that is systematically being erased from our collective memory.

From the women of Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter, the Dandi March and Chipko Movement, to those at the front lines of India’s non-violent protests, this book is an act of remembrance that preserves the powerful legacy of women at the forefront of historic revolutions.

*Every Evening Belongs to Shaheen Bagh

Prarthna Singh is a photographer whose work explores questions of identity and gender, especially as they intersect with the fraught politics of nationalism in contemporary India. Her images reflect on the economic and political trajectory of the country, drawing connections between feminine precariousness and vulnerability on the one hand, and radical acts of strength and solidarity on the other. Her practice negotiates how the two sides are inextricably linked. After completing her BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, Prarthna lived and worked in New York City. Currently she is based in Bombay.

Sameer Kulavoor is a visual artist living and working in Mumbai, India. His work lies at the intersection of art, graphic design and contemporary illustration, and has taken the form of paintings, murals, books, zines, prints and objects. He is interested in why things look and work the way they do; constantly noting and understanding the impact that time, culture, politics and socio-economic conditions have on our visible and invisible surroundings. In this age of visual overload, his work involves filtering, dissecting, documenting and defamiliarising commonly seen subjects through the act of drawing, painting and design – often oscillating between instinctive and conceptual methods of making.

Zeenat Kulavoor is a typographer and graphic designer based in Bombay, India. She works with multiple Indian scripts and specialises in Urdu type, lettering and calligraphy. She believes that the Urdu script has endless creative possibilities and intends to change the perception towards the use of Urdu in India, which currently is widely perceived to be limited to religious usage. Using tongue-in-cheek humour and wit, combined with the use of scale, different mediums and varied print making methods, Zeenat is working towards reinventing possibilities of how the script can be a part of regular day to day life. Apart from her typography work, she is the creative director at Bombay Duck Designs, and runs a design store called Bombay Duck Shop that sells selected books, zines, prints and objects that blur the boundaries between illustration, art and design.

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Despite the state of the world, the sunrise, the smells, nature, and youth.
Everything was beautiful at the moment.

These photographs were taken for an advertisement for the artist’s brand ATELIER FLATMOON (https://www.atelierflatmoon.com/).

Photography by Hideaki Ota
@hid_ota

Edition of 30, numbered

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Silkscreened jacket & obi (textured tan or black) by Alan Sherry, inserts and a postcard. Lliner notes by Jon Dale, ltd to 285.

An’archives are thrilled to announce the release of Ricshari, the first LP from Japanese free improvising duo MAI MAO. Consisting of Shizuo Uchida of Hasegawa-Shizuo, Albedo Gravitas, archeus, Kito Muzukumi Rouber, TERROR SHIT, UH, etc. on bass, and Kyosuke Terada, of HUH (who have their own release due on An’archives soon), TERROR SHIT, Bay City Rolaz, Praymate, The Obey Unit, etc. on guitar, they’ve previously released two wild cassettes, Curvature Improvement Plan (Haang niap, 2020) and Folk Dope Rally (2021), both documenting one-take improvisations from live gigs. Ricshari was recorded by Nobuki Nishiyama in January 2021, and is proof, if any was needed, that this duo is one of the most fiercely unique, out-there units currently extant – in Japan, or anywhere, for that matter.

The music of MAI MAO seems to proceed by opposites and juxtaposition, shifting from frantic, hectic runs of splattering note spray to moments of granular stasis, where Uchida and Terada coax their instruments into and out of deep wells of silence, or rest, temporarily, in a lagoon of fermenting fuzz. Spiraling kinetics are largely the order of the day, though – the opener, “Chew a flying flash prayer”, skitters here and there, guitar and bass jumping over one another in games of leapfrog and Twister, finding new ways to perplex and puzzle the listener, and perhaps each other in the process, Uchida and Terada fully committed to the short-circuiting spirit of the moment.

The energy here is hyperactive, but it also speaks of a curious and committed attention to improvisatory responsiveness, one that’s just as likely to fork off into different directions in a split second – it’s real edge-of-the-seat stuff, as though the hands are moving too fast for the mind to follow. That’s all the better, then, to let the gush of genuinely free-thinking, devoted duo improvisation to fly at its most playful and intelligent. File next to the likes of Davey Williams & LaDonna Smith and their TransMuseq companions, or the wickedly perplexing bass-synth/trombone duets of Dave Dove Paul Duo, and you’ve some idea of what’s going on here, provisionally at least, ‘cos this one’s an enthralling, yet welcoming, head-scratcher of the highest calibre.

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Texts by Kristine Stiles, Alina Șerban, Jelena Vesić, What, How & from Whom / WHW

“I do one notebook for every show or project. It is like a pocket studio and research space. In the notebook drawings are pushed further to the limit and are not very PC. There are a lot of bad drawings, things that do not work out, lame jokes. Humor is hard to capture… Of the two hundred drawings in a notebook, thirty or fifty will make it onto the wall an maybe ten will make it into the general repertoire. The repertoire began in 2000 and since then drawings have been incorporated and discarded, rolling from one wall to the next.

I am the happiest when I draw in the notebook and I know the drawing is good. Translating it onto the wall is also good, but it is just a translation.

I draw, I happy.” (Dan Perjovschi)

*
P+4 Publications is an independent publishing programme dedicated to the promotion of Romanian contemporary art, photography and architecture, exploring the book medium as a point of encounter between theoretical research, graphic design experiment and artists’ ideas and subjects present in their practice. Presently, the programme brings together the Artist Book Series and the Architecture Book Series, supported between 2013–2021 by the PEPLUSPATRU Association, and Parkour and Exhibition-Dossier series, developed by the Institute of the Present since 2017. Starting from 2021, P+4 Publications is coordinated by the Institute of the Present.

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Printed in the edition of 200, Atom is an exploration of desire, beauty, loneliness, and introspection. It is also a reflection of our shifting understanding of the body and spaces we’ve inhabited in the last two turbulent years, and a project firmly rooted in the transformative power of the female gaze.

Atom captures a range of leather pieces by Fleet Ilya as tools of self-discovery, intimate connection, and collaborative creativity. The book, edited by Fleet Ilya co-founder Resha Sharma, comprises portraits of five heroines within their private spaces, still lives, immersive nature shots by Bazhenova-Yamasaki, and poetic text by Beata Duvaker.

The book is a result of almost a decade-long collaboration between Bazhenova-Yamasaki and Fleet Ilya. It combines the plurality of female perspectives and voices from the collaborators and the heroines depicted in its pages – a testament to that underrepresented point of view when it comes to photography, sexuality, and leatherwork.

Atom is a book of erotic photography that reinvents erotic photography, strips it to viscerally honest corporeality, deep-rooted intimacy, and irresistible beauty of the small details, be it a flower or a leather strap. It offers a sensory journey through photography and writing – alongside the pleasure of an exquisite object to hold or have at home.

Edition of 200, numbered.

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The book has been produced on the occasion of the exhibition The Beirut Experience at Beirut Art Center in Beirut (12.10 – 19.11.2011) and at Villa Bernasconi in Lancy, Geneva (20.04 – 10.06.2012).

Artists: Lara Almarcegui, Marc Bauer, Tony Chakar, Marcelline Delbecq, Latifa Echakhch, Eric Hattan, Mark Lewis, Adrien Missika, Estefania Peñafiel Loaiza, Dan Perjovschi.

The edition includes Vacant buildings in the Hotel district, Beirut by Lara Almarcegui.

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‘Panorama’ is a collection of photographs of different landscapes in Tokyo captured between 2019-2020 using a slit camera that Haruyuki Shirai made himself.

‘Panorama’ is a combination of ‘pan’, meaning ‘all’, and ‘horama’, from the Greek word for ‘view’, hence the meaning ‘full view’. Haruyuki Shirai chose this word as the title of his book – a collection of photographs which capture ‘views of everything’.

The dimension of time is introduced, and the flow of time is projected horizontally, becoming a landscape-like scene. Upon a timeline, these photographs are the ‘views of everything’.

Text: Kinichi Obinata
Art Direction: Taro Kambe
Design: Noa Watanabe
Translation: Catherine Lealand

Edition of 500, numbered

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INFO is pleased to announce Remain Calm, an LP and booklet cataloguing Nile Koetting’s performative installation and its immersive soundtrack produced in collaboration with Nozomu Matsumoto and Miriam Stoney. In Remain Calm, Koetting draws inspiration from the earthquake and tsunami drills he experienced as a young student growing up in Japan. Through blending sci-fi narratives with ready-made technologies, Koetting creates scenographic performance environments where an omniscient technocratic authority softly mediates between performer, audience, and natural disaster. Matsumoto’s sound design and Stoney’s texts read by computer speech synthesizers are a fundamental facet of the work, and in this LP version, they culminate into a compelling and singular listening experience.

Edition of 400 copies, includes a full sized booklet of text and images, with words by Miriam Stoney.

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Tresor: True Stories is the first printed excavation of Tresor’s legendary history.

Digging deeply into its rich archives, the venerable institution has unearthed countless treasures from its over three-decade old history. Over 400 never before seen photographs, flyers, faxes and other illustrate a story that intersects with the most important social and musical trend in the modern history of Berlin.

The story is told with the voices of those that were there – over 40 protagonists share their first-hand reminiscences of the ‘big bang’ that launched techno into the world. Through the story of Tresor, the book charts the heady days of 80s West Berlin through to the explosion of new energy that midwifed in the new social reality of reunified Germany. This is a unique and essential printed monument to the institution that changed electronic music forever, and the city that allowed it to exist.

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Order here