Under one umbrella, Silberkuppe (Dominic Eichler and Michel Ziegler).
Published by Sternberg Press.
English. 144 pages.

Texts by Silberkuppe, Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, Kaucyila Brooke, Vivian Rehberg, Jennifer Higgie, MAP magazine, Martin Ebner, basso, a.o.

Contributions by Anonymous, Endre Aalrust, Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, basso, Dirk Bell, Gerry Bibby, Juliette Blightman, Kaucyila Brooke, Sabeth Buchmann, Anders Clausen, Maria Cruz, Alice Creischer, Enrico David, Etienne Descloux PE-P, Martin Ebner, Isa Genzken, Julian Göthe, Adrian Hermanides and Andrew Verster, Jennifer Higgie, Janette Laverrière, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Ryan McLaughlin, Motherland, Ariane Müller, Christian Philipp Müller, Sarah McCrory, Sean McNanney, Shahryar Nashat, Henrik Olesen, Kirsten Pieroth, Josephine Pryde, Rebecca Quaytman, Mathilde Rosier, André Rottmann, Andreas Siekmann, Nicolas Siepen, Starship, Oliver Tepel, Till by Turning, Danh Vo and Dr. Joseph Carrier, Stephen Willats, Susanne M. Winterling

This book is the first overall presentation of Silberkuppe. Since it’s founding in May 2008, Silberkuppe has become one of Berlin’s most outstanding independent spaces for contemporary art. Dominic Eichler and Michel Ziegler run the space from a twenty-five square metre room in a former concierge‘s office. Over the last two years they have initiated around twenty projects including exhibitions, lectures, presentations, film screenings, concerts and performances, which together have involved more than fifty cultural producers with diverse interests and backgrounds, including contemporary artists, architects, actors, dancers, designers, musicians and writers. This catalogue comes as a result of the exhibition “Under One Umbrella” (2010) in Bergen Kunsthall, a project that was the culmination of a series of institutional group exhibitions in which Silberkuppe extended their practice out from their own micro-space. It takes the form of a “photographic report” documenting all of Silberkuppe’s main exhibitions and events, as well as presenting several essays related to the projects.

D 23€
BUY

Inside the White Cube – Yann Sérandour. Overprinted Edition. By Yann Sérandour & Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié.
Published by JRP.
English. 84 pages.

This publication functions as a palimpsest: constructed on the reprint of the first French translation of Brian O’Doherty’s influential book “Inside the White Cube” (published by JRP|Ringier in the series Lectures Maison Rouge), it superimposes reproductions and commentaries of Yann Sérandour’s work.

Yann Sérandour’s interstitial and mimetic proposals stem from pre-existing works or publications, whose meaning and problematics are thus reactivated. Inscribing himself in a conceptual heritage, the artist is prolonging historical gestures or manifestations by infiltrating and parasiting them. This practice of “détournement” is a way of reviving the (sometimes latent) stakes and significations of appropriated elements, as well as a way to interrogate their historical, political, and aesthetic dimensions.

D 25€
Buy: orders@mottodistribution.com

BLESS. Retroperspective Home #30 – #41.

Edited by Désirée Heiss, Ines Kaag, Manuel Raeder, Katrin Bucher Trantow, Peter Pakesch
Texts by Andrea Lissoni, Peter Pakesch & Katrin Bucher Trantow, Adriano Sack
Published by Sternberg Press on the occasion of the exhibition “BLESS N° 41 Retroperspective Home,” Kunsthaus Graz – Universalmuseum Joanneum, May 22 – August 29, 2010.
English/German. 416 pages.

Heralded as one of fashion’s most innovative designers, the Paris- and Berlin-based duo BLESS (Désirée Heiss and Ines Kaag) refuse to capitalize on any one milieu, and instead explore the differences between and the mixing of the systems of art, fashion, and design. This book brings together visual and written documentation of BLESS’s last twelve collections (N° 30–N° 41), continually prompting and challenging the question of where a product begins and ends. Their latest project, N° 41 Retroperspective Home, culminates in an exhibition / intervention of the same title at the Kunsthaus Graz from May–August 2010. “The hybrid nature of [BLESS’s] output cries out to be tackled by an institution like ours,” state the curators of the exhibition, “but at the same time makes it very difficult to do so … This is precisely where the challenge of our exhibition lies, seeing art as design and fashion as architecture.”

D 39€
Buy

Keren Cytter, Magnus af Petersens.
Published by Sternberg Press.
English/Swedish. 160 pages.

This catalogue provides the reader with the opportunity to read six of Keren Cytter’s scripts for films that are being shown in the exhibition at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, May 8 – August 15, 2010.

Keren Cytter has rapidly established herself internationally as one of the most interesting and unique artists on the contemporary art scene. At the mere age of 33 (born 1977 in Tel Aviv, currently living and working in Berlin), in the last eight years she has produced more than 50 video works, written three novels and an opera libretto, started the dance and theatre company D.I.E. Now, won awards and is the darling of the art press. Last summer, she exhibited at the New Museum’s group show “Younger Than Jesus” and participated in the Venice Biennale. Cytter says: “I studied art because I wanted to go to New York and wash dishes.”

Keren Cytter’s topics often include love stories, violence, sex and murder. She applies a non-linear narrative, the stories often shot with a hand-held camera. The actors—amateurs and friends of the artist, but more recently professional actors—switch roles with each other, or read their stage directions out loud. Scenes are repeated, but with a different course of events, with voiceovers or alternative dialogues. The films are usually set in simply-furnished apartments, especially the kitchen regions, suggesting a connection to kitchen sink realism. The literary tone of the dialogue, however, is far from realistic, writes Magnus af Petersens in the catalogue, adding: “Instead the films are deliberate hybrids between seemingly incompatible genres, between home videos and auteur films in the spirit of the French nouvelle vague, between Dogme and docu-soap or sitcom. But her films are above all existential dramas about the human condition, about love and hate in our thoroughly medialised age.”

D 18€
Buy: orders@mottodistribution.com

Cyprien Gaillard. Geographical Analogies, Edited by Florence Derieux, Susanne Gaensheimer, Adam Szymczyk, Rein Wolfs.
Published by JRP. Limited edition.
English. 224 pages.

This artist’s book is based on Cyprien Gaillard’s “Geographical Analogies,” a collection of 900 Polaroids, carefully and rigorously arranged in a total of 100 showcases, telling many stories about landscapes, monuments, modernist buildings, and architectonic utopias, and just as many stories about decay, destruction, and devastation.

As Rein Wolfs puts it in the introduction of this publication “Gaillard’s epic work, outmodedly analog … reflects a computation of time that seems to have disappeared …. In the disintegrating medium of Polaroid photography the aspect of disappearance inherent to time is documented and allegedly temporarily halted—until in foreseeable time these originals too will have disappeared beyond recall … Decay, disappearance, remembrance and decline are omnipresent motifs in this work … Numerous devastated concrete landscapes, unfinished holiday developments, monuments, ruins, modernist high-rise estates, cemeteries, landscapes and—as a counterpoint—golf courses stand for an equal number of failed ambitions, or decaying cultural testimonies to their time … But the ‘Geographical Analogies’ can be conserved for perpetuity in the format of this book which, like an atlas arranging things at a different level, represents a further stage of scientific classification: a global atlas full of ruins of the Gaillard trademark. A world atlas against disappearance.”

D 60€

Buy

The Photograph Commands Indifference, Nicholas Muellner

Nicholas Muellner’s new book is a personal, historical, and philosophical inquiry into the relationship between photographs and monuments. Built around alternating densities of text and image, each of the thirteen chapters approaches the subject from a different starting point, ranging from reconsiderations of art-historical works, to 1960s era snapshots of monuments in the former Soviet Union. At root, The Photograph Commands Indifference considers the proposition that both photographs and monuments attempt to stop, or restore, the terrible racing away of meaning from subject and presence. As such, Muellner questions the impulse to create material facts from the fundamentally abstract processes of desire and loss that characterize memory.

Publishd by A-Jump Books, Edition of 500.

D 16€
Buy : orders@mottodistribution.com

Wear, The Journal of Homeshop #2, by Elaine W. Ho

Located in the centre of Beijing on one of its old hutong alleyways, HomeShop is a store space turned sleeping-working-living space which uses its window front as the beginning point from which to examine our ways of relaying between public and private, the commercial and pure exchange as such. That given, temporality is a crucial aspect to the work of HomeShop, whereby these relations (e.g., maker/audience, neighbour/friend, seller/buyer) involve processes, wearing in and, perhaps, a mere letting in. We are an open platform as such, seeking to explore the possibilities given the context outside of the creative clusters of Beijing’s art industry and 798, and within a neighbourhood of steadfast Beijingers who persist amidst the literal rising of change all around them.

D 20€
Buy : orders@mottodistribution.com

Drift, Jochen Lempert

Artist book published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, on occasion of the exhibition of Jochen Lempert in the Museum Ludwig, Köln, from april to june 2010.

(Out Of Print)
Buy : orders@mottodistribution.com

Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane.

This is a book about the creative life of Britain and the first attempt since the Festival of Britain to document the popular and folk art of the present day. Organised by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, presents a personal selection of objects and actions, containing elements of ambition, humour, pathos and resistance, which present us with invaluable evidence of creative life in Britain today.

D 23€
Buy: orders@mottodistribution.com

Dans la forêt,
Deux ébauches d’étude sur l’oeuvre de Rodney Graham,
Suivi de Lenz par Rodney Graham.

Published by Yves Gevaert Editeur.