The Exhibitionist #4 – La Critique, Journal on Exhibition Making

The Exhibitionist, a journal made by curators, for curators, focusing solely on the practice of exhibition making.The objective is to create a wider platform for the discussion of curatorial concerns – encourage a diversification of curatorial models, and actively contribute to the formation of a theory of curating.

Editor: Jens Hoffmann

Editorial board: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Okwui Enwezor, Kate Fowle, Mary Jane Jacob, Constance Lewallen, Maria Lind, Chus Martínez, Jessica Morgan, Julian Myers, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Paul O’Neill, Adriano Pedrosa, Dieter Roelstraete, Dorothea von Hantelmann

Design: Jon Sueda and Jennifer Hennesy / Stripe, San Francisco

D 10€

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No Order – Art in A Post-Fordist Society

No Order is a research, production and publication machine based in Milan, employing different tools to impact the social, semiotic and economical assemblages within the contemporary cultural industry.

Editor in chief: Marco Scotini

Editorial Board: Asef Bayat, Harun Farocki, Peter Friedl, Maurizio Lazzarato, Sylvère Lotringer, Christian Marazzi, Achille Mbembe, Angela Melitopolus, Nelly Richard, Florian Schneider, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Françoise Vergès

Publisher: Archive Books, Berlin

D 20€

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Museum of the Near Future (MNF) is an apparatus for looking sideways at institutions, cities, time and space. In an attempt to challenge perceptions of what is possible, and desirable, between now and next, MNF produces places for imagination and discussion in site-specific, functional installations. They are set up in interaction with museum and other institutional contexts and contents, asking questions for and with their hosts.

The first MNF project manifests in a thematic book society and -shop, taking over the old space of Museum of Finnish Architecture in Kaivopuisto, Helsinki, as part of the museum’s attempts to revitalise it. It explores micro-political participation in a city undergoing grand urban projects, such as its rapid expansion to central harbour and industrial areas or the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 nomination. Using literature and related activities – like reading circles and performative publishing – as tools, MNF I experiments with the convergence of personal and public space, asking how value-based concerns of individuals could be turned into productive ways of living in Helsinki.

Museum of the Near Future is created by OK Do, the creative practice of designers, writers and curators Anni Puolakka and Jenna Sutela, and carried out in collaboration with organisations and individuals of different stripes. The project team for MNF I includes designer and curator Anna Mikkola, bookshop representative Matilda Tjäder (Motto), curator Cheyanne Turions and designer Tommi Vasko.

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Museum of the Near Future bookshop

9–18 September, 2011

Address:

Museum of Finnish Architecture’s villa in Kaivopuisto

Puistokatu 4, Helsinki

Open:

Tue, Thu, Fri 10–16

Wed 10–20

Sat, Sun 11–16

(Mon closed)

Programme:

Fri 9.9. Museum of the Near Future bookshop opens at 10 am

Sun 11.9. Museum of the Near Future morning party, including the Helsinki launch of OK Do’s OK Talk Helsinki/London book 9 am–noon (RSVP at hello@ok-do.eu)

Sun 11.9. Walk talk in Hernesaari, a Helsinki harbour area in development. Participants will be picked up by a water bus to Hernesaari at the Sea Harbour of Kaivopuisto (address: Merisatamanranta 10) at 1.30 pm and brought back by 4 pm (tickets 5 e, bookings at hello@ok-do.eu)

Tue 13.9. Reading circle I 6 pm–9 pm (free entrance, RSVP at helhello@ok-do.eu)

Fri 16.9. OK Do curates a film screening at Museum of Finnish Architecture’s backyard, Kasarmikatu 24, Helsinki 7 pm–9 pm (free entrance, to be announced at www.mfa.fi)

Sat 17.9. Reading circle II 12 am–3 pm (free entrance, RSVP at hello@ok-do.eu)

Sun 18.9. The bookshop closes at 4 pm

Coffee will be served by Café Aaltopelti!

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More information:

hello@ok-do.eu / +358 50 527 3123

www.ok-do.eu

www.mottodistribution.com

www.mfa.fi

www.helsinkidesignweek.com

The Readymades. John Holten. Broken Dimanche Press

John Holten’s debut novel The Readymades uses and abuses a number of literary genres: found texts from the history of modern art, witness testimonies, press releases and the narrative style of art-historical accounts. The novel emerges from one of Félix Fénéon’s infamous three-sentence ‘novels’ – appropriated mini-stories from French newspapers – and from the starting point of Fénéon’s narrative readymade, Holten has extrapolated a whole missing art movement and their contemporary European picaresque saga.

The action begins during October 2008 in Paris, with John, a young Irish publisher, meeting the jaded Serbian artist Djordje Bojić. Bojić tells John about the manuscript he is writing: the history of the LGB Group – an Eastern European neo-avant-garde collective that arose in the turbulent environment of mid-1990s Belgrade, when Bojić and his friends, recently returned from the war in Bosnia, started to produce art in order to escape the hysterical nationalism all around them.

Bojić’s manuscript makes up the final part of the novel. Starting out as an academic attempt to document the LGB Group, the sober attitude of the art-historical account soon collapses, and the narrative gradually turns into a disclosing life-story of violence and existential decay. As the manuscript moves closer to the horrific truths of Bojić’s own war experiences, the testimony gradually fails, becomes full of mute lacunas in order to finally reach the ineffable climax of the testimony: the aphasia of trauma, the dumbness of loss, and the ultimate silence of Bojić’s own death.

By juxtaposing the experience of war, the urge for artistic creation and the act of narrating the past, The Readymades launches a double strategy in which the artistic gesture becomes an attempt to overcome war, while simultaneously forced to partake in it. Because art (at least since the original Dada gesture) has sought its own raison d’être in an ongoing dialectic of defiance, transgression and negation of the status quo, it must inevitably find its own dynamic intrinsically linked to acts of violence. With a unique book design, this mise-en-abyme presents a book-within-a-book that takes the reader on a journey to the darker corners of contemporary European history. In collaboration with the Serbian artist and filmmaker Darko Dragičević, Holten has produced a catalogue of LGB artworks and memorabilia, presented both in the book and in exhibition-spaces throughout Europe this coming autumn. In other words: The Readymades is not just a novel, but also an on-going ‘fictitious event’, pushing against any sedate conception of what the literary novel can achieve today, at once not afraid of today’s ‘reality hunger’, nor the legacy of postmodernism.

340 pp., 32 b&w ill.
18.5 x 13 cm
ISBN: 978-3-00-032627-1

D 18€

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The Final Word. – RCA CA&D, edited by David Gibson, Livia Lima, Susanne Stahl, Jigna Chauhan, Vanessa Boni

This publication is a compilation of three books featuring work by Communication Art and Design students at the Royal College of Art. Guest artists, designers, illustrators, alumni and RCA tutors have all responded to three starter topics:

Book 1 – Fact and Fiction in a Digital Context. A text by Holly Francis that discusses the loss of authorship in the online environment, asking, who is the author? And what defines reality?

Book 2 – The Value of Things. An image of a postcard generated by Lola Halifa-Legrand exploring material artefacts in a digital environment, sent to RCA students by email.

Book 3 – New Models for Publishing. An online platform created by Pedro Cid Proença, where users can comment on the text as a whole, a section of it, or on a comment made by another user.

Contributors include Abäke, Europa, Julia, Stewart Smith, Adrian Shaughnessy and Sara de Bondt

D 13€

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Part one, Second edition. By Robin Waart

Part one is a collection of pages from English books and (mostly) novels, featuring pages with only the words Part one/Part I/Part etc. The book, designed by Jonas Wandeler, contains 101 pages and was printed in an edition of 101, and nominated one of the Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2010. The second “market” edition was printed in 202 copies and nominated one of The Best Dutch Book Designs 2011.

D 49€

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Flash Tattoo Collection No 1 – FUZI UV TPK

All drawings by FUZI UV TPK
Concept and design by David Keshavjee, Marietta Eugster, and Rémi Brandon
Offset version printed in an edition of 500
Back cover: Dépot du Val d’Argenteuil, photograph by RAP, 1996

D 20€

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Michal Pěchouček: Lessons in Art
Catalogue launch with a screening and talk at Motto Berlin, September 1st, 2011
Start 7pm

Czech artist Michal Pěchouček will present his latest catalogue, published on the occasion of a solo exhibition on two floors of The Stone Bell Gallery in Prague earlier this year, with two groups of works one could easily mistake as from two different authors. First being a romantic figural painter who changed paint for embroidery and fabrics. Second being a minimalist photographer, exploring the forms of his medium through routines, cycles, and it’s liminal narrations.

Pěchouček’s solo exhibition Virgin’s Lives will open at Jiri Svestka Gallery the following day on September 2nd in Berlin.

http://www.jirisvestka.com/

IT’S NOT A GARDEN TABLE – Kunst und Design und im erweiterten Feld
Sammelband, herausgegeben von Jörg Huber, Burkhard Meltzer, Heike Munder, Tido von Oppeln

Künstler, Designer und Theoretiker diskutieren die Konsequenzen eines selbstreferenziellen Designkonzepts, der Ästhetik der Lebenswelt im Kunstkontext und andere damit verknüpfte Themen mit einem besonderen Fokus auf die Objektkategorie des Möbels. Die Publikation schlägt drei Zugänge für eine erweiterte Auffassung von Design heute und ihre Beziehung zum Kunstkontext vor:

– „Unterscheiden“: mit Texten von Sven Lütticken, Klaus Spechtenhauser, Tido von Oppeln, Mateo Kries, Burkhard Meltzer

– „Teilnehmen“: mit Texten von Alexander García Düttmann, Monika Kritzmöller, Jennifer Allen, Judith Welter und einem Gespräch zwischen Martin Boyce, Frédéric Dedelley und Max Borka

– „Herstellen“: Interviews mit Jerszy Seymor, Julia Lohmann, Jurgen Bey, Martino Gamper, Front Design, Martin Boyce, David Renggli, Matthew Smith, Andrea Zittel, Florian Slotawa und Mamiko Otsubo

Herausgegeben anlässlich einer Forschungszusammenarbeit zwischen dem Institut für Theorie (ith) der ZHdK und dem migros museum für gegenwartskunst Zürich.

Gestaltung: flag/www.flag.cc
Erscheint bei JRP|Ringier, www.jrp-ringier.com, Verfügbar ab September 2011
Ausgaben: Deutsch ISBN 978-3-03764-237-5 / Englisch ISBN 978-3-03764-211-5
Softcover, 165×220 mm, 270 Seiten, über 200 Abbildungen, davon 32 in Farbe, CHF 48

Heimat und Wahnsinn. Viertel-Verlag

«Heimat und Wahnsinn» ist die erste Ausgabe der riesengrossen Heftserie mit dem Namen «A&0», die in regelmässigen Abständen auf Plakatformat (A0) Texte, Gespräche, Versuche, Gedanken, Lieder, Bilder und Zitate veröffentlicht. Die erste Ausgabe des grössten Hefts von Europa wird nun fabelhaft und furios vernissiert. Wir laden euch darum ein, nach Oberegg, auf «Epfeltorte», auf wilde Geschichten.

Auflage: 600 Exemplare

D 8€

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