The Library of Mr. & Mrs. Neutra uses the built environment of Richard and Dione Neutra’s VDL House (1932/1965) as a space for site-specific research into the content and material structure of the modernist architect’s library. Working to document the volumes collected in the Los Angeles residence and studio’s extensive library, this book indexes the specific, lived history of a personal book collection marked by its owner’s professional, personal, and familial relationships.
Published on the occasion of Built In organized in the fall of 2021, co-curated by Erik Benjamins and Marta, Los Angeles.
This book is an extension and continuation of an artwork titled Proposal for a House Museum of an Unknown Crying Man by artist Mahmoud Khaled, in which he imagines a house museum for an anonymous person who has entered Egypt’s queer history as an „unknown crying man“ and iconic image.
Mahmoud Khaled was able to continue and complete his work on the performative publication A Book on a Proposed House Museum for an Unknown Crying Man during his residency as a Fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2020 and 2021.
With texts by Sara El Adl, Bassam El Baroni, Edwin Nasr, Hannah Elsisi, Lina Attalah, Ismail Fayed, Hicham Awad.
How do we see the cityscape and its periphery? Can we read these as a composition of volumes pasted over with brand labels and messages? The appearance of our cities is a mirror image of the state of our culture. People read and interpret the city based on a form of text written by the private sector and the state. What does our urban public space tell us? The present artist book responds to visual strategies deployed in public space with the intention to consolidate and entrench a repressive system of control, turning citizens into consumers.
Markéta Kinterová (*1981) focuses on conceptual photography, oftentimes overlapping into public space. She studied photography at the Faculty of Art and Design at the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic. The author’s book is published as the artistic part of the doctoral thesis Oppositional Reading of Public Space, which she defended last year at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. She has been the head of the Documentary Photography Studio at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) since 2016. She has taken part in several independent and group exhibitions. She is the editor-in-chief of the Fotograf magazine and the executive director of the Fotograf Festival in Prague.
with contributions by Susanne Mierzwiak, Moritz Scheper and a conversation between Lucie Sotty and Robert Brambora.
Graphic design: Paul Bowler
–
Robert Brambora (born in 1984, Germany) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He completed his studies in the class of Rebecca Warren at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2015.
The work of the artist takes as its subject the current neoliberal system and its impact on the individual, as measured under Marxist analysis. It particularly approaches issues such as working conditions, school dropouts, stress-related illnesses, anxiety and loneliness, the housing crisis, and overpopulation as so many causes leading to alienation in our contemporary societies. Also at the heart of his questioning is the analysis of a sense of loss of points of reference, of a form of time distortion generated by these stress conditions. The artist seeks to extract the waking hallucination – the onirism – from these crisis situations. Robert Brambora practice primarily develops itself in two ways: he creates on the one hand paintings and ceramics, in the realm of traditional techniques and media, and on the other hand large format panels upon which texts are laser-engraved. The most recent text works address issues such as the real estate market crisis and financial speculation. These texts are based on political journals, excerpts of conversations and comments from internet forums, as well as personal notes. The artist draws equally from scientific articles from medical journals, evoking afflictions related to anxiety, as well as theoretical essays on the economic competition faced by individuals. These extracts are then reworked, superimposed on each other to create a three-dimensional pictorial space, which sometimes evokes the outlines of architecture.
Robert Brambora (born in 1984, Germany) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He completed his studies in the class of Rebecca Warren at the Kunstak.
The work of the artist takes as its subject the current neoliberal system and its impact on the individual, as measured under Marxist analysis. It particularly approaches issues such as working conditions, school dropouts, stress-related illnesses, anxiety and loneliness, the housing crisis, and overpopulation as so many causes leading to alienation in our contemporary societies. Also at the heart of his questioning is the analysis of a sense of loss of points of reference, of a form of time distortion generated by these stress conditions. The artist seeks to extract the waking hallucination – the onirism – from these crisis situations. Robert Brambora practice primarily develops itself in two ways: he creates on the one hand paintings and ceramics, in the realm of traditional techniques and media, and on the other hand large format panels upon which texts are laser-engraved. The most recent text works address issues such as the real estate market crisis and financial speculation. These texts are based on political journals, excerpts of conversations and comments from internet forums, as well as personal notes. The artist draws equally from scientific articles from medical journals, evoking afflictions related to anxiety, as well as theoretical essays on the economic competition faced by individuals. These extracts are then reworked, superimposed on each other to create a three-dimensional pictorial space, which sometimes evokes the outlines of architecture.
The Forest and The Little One is an invitation to enjoy the complex world of the forest and its simple joys. It is meant for every child and adult looking for a walking companion and adventure in nature.
This children’s book is part of the project Neringa Forest Architecture, established at Nida Art Colony, a subdivision of Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2020.
