Kulturamas Högre fotografiska utbildning (Higher photographic education) @ Motto, Berlin
from 6pm
The presentation consists of a display of photo books produced by the students, in presence of professor Misha Pedan.
Published on the occasion of Dominik Sittig’s solo exhibition “Die anwesenden Eltern” at the kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, March 6 to May 25, 2015. Conceived as a hybrid between a catalogue and an artist’s book, it documents recent works by Sittig. Texts include an entomological sketch on art’s frock coat by Heinrich Dietz, “I INSPIRE A LOT OF PEOPLE. Poison Is Everywhere” by Barbara Buchmaier and Christine Woditschka as well as “Beyond ‘Art and Politics’. The Art of Fantasy” by Helmut Draxler.
Editor: Heinrich Dietz, kestnergesellschaft
Concept: Dominik Sittig
Authors: Barbara Buchmaier and Christine Woditschka, Heinrich Dietz, Helmut Draxler
Publisher: Motto Books
Date of publishing: March 4, 2015
Language: German/English
Pages: 180
€24.00
There are certain images that provoke us. Take, for example, the photograph of Jane Birkin, in which she stands leaning casually against a door with a cigarette in one hand and the other in her trousers – a detail that you don’t see at first glance. A groundbreaking image that was seen in the 1970s as an act of female self-emancipation. Grit Hachmeister copied the pose in 2007 and its effect is just as startling as the original. The artist has a series of such pictures in her oeuvre: people dressed in nothing but a pair of shoes engaged in various sexual practices. There’s plenty of fumbling around and coupling here – being human is a messy business. Hachmeister now presents her first monograph, a collection of drawings, self-portraits, visual narratives, and staged photographs that were produced over the last ten years and provide a showcase for the artist’s humorous, gender-critical work.
Grit Hachmeister (*1979 in Leipzig, Germany), lives and works in Berlin.
German/English, 33 b&w Illustrations and 135 colour illustrations
€32.00
Often there are only seconds between the ignition of a blasting charge and the collapse of a building, but the planning for such a demolition can take weeks. Blasting is a profession that relies on experience, and that is conveyed through the medium of the image. The blaster, before he destroys the building, makes a complex technical drawing of the progression. The detonation itself is then recorded by several cameras from different view points. Afterwards the drawings are superposed over the photographs in order to control the blast. A permanent calibration, an optimization between the idea and the reality by the means of drawing and photography. In her artistic work, Alina Schmuch also mostly uses the medium of photography. For the project Script of Demolition she worked with the extensive image archive of the blaster family Fink. The publication includes different imaging media — from 8mm film to digital photography. The book presents movement sequences of collapsing chimneys, TV towers and buildings that have been recorded following explicitly nonaesthetic criteria.
German and English, including numerous drawings
Gestaltung: Jan Kiesswetter
Heike Schuppelius, Armin Linke (Hrsg.)
Leipzig 2014
36.00 €
Sova #6 “Desire” takes a glimpse at the apparently essential query of the hedonistic generation – our bawdy cravings, our passionate endeavour and the destructiveness of our devouring needs. Various visual and textual reflections by 16 different photographers, writers and other artists including Anastasia Muna, Anna Crews, Archie Fitzgerald, Eylül Aslan, Florian Reimann, Helen Korpak, J Mauricio Orozco, Jasmin Kokkola, Lena Gallovicova, Marina Richter, Massimiliano Perasso, Nicolas Polli, Nicole Weniger, Ren Hang, Rebecca Brodskis and Slavoj Žižek create an encounter of disparate aspects of desire and investigate the nature of our ambiguous aspirations.
The Sova #6 Artist Poster by Atelier Disko with a quote from Slavoj Žižek. Comes with every freshly printed copy.
€14.00
Rick Buckley @ Motto Berlin. 25.04.2015
from 7pm
Four Corners Books Familiars series
The Nose by Nikolai Gogol art by Rick Buckley
Q&A: Rick Buckley, The Nose
In 1997 you anonymously fixed to-scale sculptural nose forms to buildings around central London. What was the idea behind this?
I was inspired by reading about the antics of the International Situationists operating in Paris during the late 1960s, carrying out sporadic artistic pranks as political gestures. The intervention involving the cast nose forms applied to specific interior / exterior locations within and around Central London, was a political gesture responding to a long running political debate over the obtrusive and ever growing numbers of CCTV surveillance cameras being installed within public spaces in and around the capital. This excess of surveillance was criticized as an infringement upon the rights to privacy of the individual citizen.
It was an afterthought whilst carrying out the intervention, that by integrating an applied form to a specific location, would over a period of time, become part of the structure it had been applied to. With the emergence of social network forums on the net, the small number of remaining nose forms have since become part of urban myth making. One such myth entitled The London Nose’, is centered around a Nose form located at Admiralty Arch. Various versions exist, but the first to appear was on a London Cab Driver’s blog, where he made numerous speculations for the nose’s existence. One explains that because of its position, it enables mounted horse guards to stroke it for good luck whilst on military duty whilst passing through the arch. It is now believed to feature in the London Cab Drivers examination (The Knowledge), thus prompting fledgling cab drivers to touch the nose for good luck before taking the exam and enabling them to receive their hard earned London Hackney Carriage License.
How does this street intervention fit in with the rest of your practice?
I’ve always been interested in the concept of myth making, which I often use as a conceptual pretext for my artistic practice.
How do you feel the project has changed now that it also exists in the form of photographs accompanying text?
It’s many years since I carried out the intervention and therefore I have a distance to it. It’s now out there on its own, belonging to the public, and therefore the book publication is extension of that public sphere.
How do you think the experience of reading this edition might compare with reading a version without images?
Well the human imagination is far more inventive than what already exists out there, but juxtaposing a 19th Century novella with a contemporary setting, may make the absurdity and pomposity of power more vivid.
Were there any challenges in working in response to a story by such an influential author?
No, because both works were responding to absurdities of authority and criticising the powers that be. And there are certainly no challenges in regards to the obstacles relating to copyright law, as it’s outside the 70 years remit. Actually, current Russian copyright law stipulates that all copyrights to works published prior to October Revolution (7th November 1917) are believed to have expired.
Mousse #48 includes:
The Artist as Curator
Issue #7 an insert in Mousse Magazine #48
(Available in the international edition and for subscription only)
Quatre grenouilles apparaissent en négatif et déambulent parmi les pages du livre. 4 Frogs est un jeu formel, qui contraste avec le reste du travail de Jochen Lempert. Biologiste de formation, il entreprend dans son oeuvre photographique une patiente observation de la nature, tout en témoignant et mettant en perspective nos représentations du monde organique. Par une approche évoquant Jean Painlevée, il propose ici un regard à la fois nouveau et archaïque sur l’animal, dont les mouvements semblent émaner de la page. Fixés dans un déplacement chaotique, les reflets des batraciens s’organisent pourtant sous notre regard en des sortes de constellations, en une organisation presque sensible et qui indique à notre vue la frontière de notre compréhension du vivant. DV
Ce livre a été réalisé en accompagnement de l’exposition ONYCHOPHORA, qui s’est tenue à art3
(Valence, Fr) en novembre 2010.
“When it comes to pop music, conceptual art, audacious positioning, and fierce artistic independence, there is simply no way around Bill Drummond. The KLF, The Timelords, The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (J.A.M.S.), The K Foundation, The 2K, K2 Plant Hire Ltd. – these were all projects that aimed to attack established pop practices by means of easily-acquired sampling technology. Bill ceased being interested in the pop business a long time ago. Nonetheless, music is still at the centre of his current endeavours. The present book is a summary of his recorded lecture at Spoiler, MuseumsQuartier Vienna 2002, which for the past thirteen years has been available only as a single-copy library DVD. Despite the fact that Bill is loath to look back at the past and always directs his focus to the here and now, or rather because of this, I deemed it necessary to highlight his vast artistic range, development, and process of the last thirty years by means of this contemporary document and to present it to a younger generation. For the concept of time plays a special role in Drummond’s work. Whether as The Timelords, or in songs like ‘What Time is Love?’ or ‘3 A.M. Eternal,’ or via metaphorical numbers like 23, 33 ⅓, or 45, or his current World Tour 2014-2025 Bill has always thought, planned, acted, and reacted in structural time periods”. Robert Jelinek
€9.90
