How do we create ideas, paths, and actions for a more sustainable world? How can art function as a catalyst for change? The project Sustainable Societies for the Future is founded on some of today’s most complex and urgent challenges. This publication, released on the occasion of the concurrent exhibition on view at the Malmö Art Museum and a number of seminars and events, directly addresses issues surrounding how cities and human settlements can be transformed into inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable environments.

The statements in this book feature individual and collective contributions by artists and scholars from the Nordic and North American art scenes to awaken discussion, reflection, and perspectives that reflect sustainable pathways for the world. Designed by Olga Prader, the navigation of each text is conceptually categorized through a visual lexicon that follows the mission of the 11 Global Goals set out by the UN, including biodiversity, housing, and gender equality, health and safety, and environmental justice, among other key issues.

We are at a point where sustainability alone is not sufficient. As the pages within Sustainable Societies for the Future suggests, contemporary art can serve as a key speculation into how issues of ecological challenges, access to and preservation of natural resources, social exclusion, balance of economy, forms of protest, and collective responsibilities can be approached via a political and social lens.

The exhibition Sustainable Societies for the Future runs at Malmö Art Museum from 1 February to 23 May 2021.

Order here

PM016 (2020 Remaster) (LP), Mads Emil Nielsen
Framework 3 (10” vinyl + CD), Mads Emil Nielsen + Katja Gretzinger + Nicola Ratti
Framework 2 (2 x 10” vinyl), Mads Emil Nielsen + V.A. / Andrea Neumann, Jan Jelinek, Hideki Umezawa

Browse the full catalog here

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition “Echos” at Fondazione d’Arte Erich Lindenberg, Museo Villa Pia, Porza – 27 October 2019 — 5 April 2020.

Fondazione d’Arte Erich Lindenberg is pleased to present Marion Tampon-Lajarriette, a French artist who explores the borders of memory and imagination, often referring to and using materials coming from the history of cinema, science and art. At Museo Villa Pia, Marion Tampon-Lajarriette has shown a selection of works from the past ten years, dating back to her arrival in Switzerland, in Geneva. Through video works created from 2D images, installations and furtive shots taken from performances, Marion transforms her love for cultural heritage, both old and contemporary, into a vision that verges on the fantastic, creating suspended atmospheres, between real and imaginary dimensions.

Order here

The publication delves into Dani Gal’s trilogy produced between 2011 and 2018. Each film approaches the complexities of historical accounts between ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ in the context of German, Jewish and Arab histories from a different ‘blind spot’ in historical knowledge. Cinematic tools are applied to illuminate and stage these undocumented aspects of real historical events.

Contributions from Sabeth Buchmann, Burcu Dogramaci, Noit Banai and Sa’ed Atshan are accompanied by visual and literary material and references from Gal’s extensive research practice.

Night and Fog (2011) is a re-enactment of the night of 31 May 1962, based on an interview Gal made with Michael Goldman-Gilad, a Holocaust survivor and Israeli police officer, who had undertaken the secret mission of scattering the ashes of Adolf Eichmann into the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea after he was captured in Argentina and brought to trial and executed in Israel.

As from Afar (2013) is a fictionalised account of a meeting between Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to bring Nazi criminals to justice, and Albert Speer, the chief architect of the Third Reich, using the letters they exchanged throughout the 1970s as a basis for the dialogue.

White City (2018) revolves around the complex character of Arthur Ruppin, a German Jew and one of the founders of the Zionist Settlement who promoted co-existence with the Palestinians before the establishment of the State of Israel; the film traces his visit to the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, and his 1933 meeting with Hans F. K. Günther, the leading German eugenicist of the time who became a major influence on National Socialist race theory.

Order here

“I also don’t know the five new federal states and, if I want to film there, I have to have a leading figure. It is the profiteer, development aid worker and missionary all in one. He breaks into the accession area from the West in army strength. The film is about such a salesman.” –– Harun Farocki, 1990/91
HaFI 014 publishes a typescript and archival materials related to the television film Hard Selling (1991) by Harun Farocki. For this unfinished project, Farocki documented an Adidas sales training in East Berlin in 1990. In the period after July 1991 he accompanied a West German Adidas salesman on his trade tour through Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Thus, Farocki explored the operational details of introducing the logic of free market in a country formerly trained in planned economy. Although the broadcast of Hard Selling was announced in the program booklet of the DFF—the successor to GDR television—for 13 November 1991, it did not take place. The TV-station was dissolved six weeks later.

The artist Elske Rosenfeld follows the film stills, fragments of conversations and announcement texts of Farocki’s Hard Selling. She mobilizes the figure of the “window” as a frame to transpose the languages and gazes at shop windows, screens and trainers into a poetic-analytical editing. In the resulting text/image essay Rosenfeld updates her ongoing archive of gaze-images. An editorial note by Doreen Mende introduces HaFI 014.

Elske Rosenfeld, born 1974 in Halle/S. (GDR), works in different media and formats. Her primary focus and material are the histories of state-socialism and its dissidences, and the revolution of 1989/90. Documents and archives are starting points for organising spaces in which these hi/stories can come to be present. Her ongoing project “A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures” investigates how political events manifest and come to be archived in the bodies of their protagonists.

—

„Auch kenne ich die fünf neuen Bundesländer nicht und muss, wenn ich dort filmen will, eine Leitfigur haben. Es ist der Geschäftemacher, Entwicklungshelfer und Missionar in einem. Er bricht in Armeestärke vom Westen aus in das Beitrittsgebiet ein. Im Film geht es um einen solchen Verkäufer.“ –– Harun Farocki, 1990/91

HaFI 014 publiziert ein Typoskript sowie Archivmaterialien, die im Bezug stehen zu dem Fernsehfilm Hard Selling (1991) von Harun Farocki. Für dieses nicht zuende gebrachte Projekt filmte Farocki im Jahr 1990 eine Adidas-Verkaufsschulung in Ost-Berlin. In der Zeit nach dem Juli 1991 begleitete er einen westdeutschen Adidas-Vertreter auf seiner Handelstour durch Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. So erforschte Farocki die operativen Details der Einführung der Logik des freien Marktes in einem ehemals planwirtschaftlich organisierten Land. Obwohl die Ausstrahlung von Hard Selling im Programmheft des DFF – dem Nachfolger des Fernsehens der DDR – für den 13. November 1991 angekündigt ist, kam es nie dazu. Der Sender wurde sechs Wochen später aufgelöst.

Die Künstlerin Elske Rosenfeld folgt den Filmstills, Gesprächsfragmenten und Ankündigungstexten von Farockis Hard Selling. Die Figur des „Fensters“ (im Sinne von frame) dient ihr als Instrument, um die Sprachen und Blicke auf Schaufenster, Bildschirme und Turnschuhe poetisch-analytisch zu montieren. In ihrem Text/Bild-Essay aktualisiert Rosenfeld ihr fortlaufendes Archiv von Blick-Bildern. Eine editorische Notiz von Doreen Mende führt in HaFI 014 ein.

Elske Rosenfeld (geb. 1974, Halle/S.) forscht als Künstlerin, Autorin und Kulturarbeiterin zur Geschichte der Dissidenz in Osteuropa und zu den Ereignissen von 1989/90. Ausgehend von historischen Dokumenten und Archiven organisiert sie Räume, in denen diese Geschichte/n gegenwärtig werden können. In ihrem aktuellen künstlerischen Forschungsprojekt “A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures” untersucht sie den Körper als Austragungsort und Archiv politischer Ereignisse.

Order here

After studying photography at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, Peter Woelck worked as a professional photographer in the GDR for various companies and magazines. Moreover, he independently created a vast amount of artistic works, especially in the field of portrait and architectural photography. Photographs of the construction of the Berlin Television Tower, cityscapes of Leipzig, and intense portraits from the 60s through the 80s document how life used to be in a country that no longer exists. On the other hand, there are photographs from the post-reunification period, during which Woelck repeatedly tried to establish himself as a freelance advertising photographer. Thus, the pictures also tell of a break in the photographer’s biography, the kind of experience that affected many people of his generation.
The book documents the attempt to bring the eclectic diversity of the archive into a sequence of images that does not strive for a photo-historical classification but rather allows a specific and subjective narration to emerge from today’s perspective.

The book includes texts by Wilhelm Klotzek, Woelck’s son, who not only co-manages the estate in collaboration with the Laura Mars Gallery but also artistically deals with the legacy, by writer and publicist Peter Richter, and by curator Bettina Klein.

“Dancing in Connewitz” was published in 2014 on the occasion of a second exhibition of Peter Woelck’s photographs, “PeWo’s Bericht zur Lage der Jugend” (Laura Mars Gallery, Berlin), and was supported by the Stiftung Kunstfonds with funds from VG Bild-Kunst.

Order here

The first album of Ophelia, a band composed of the artist Emilie Pitoiset and two members of Aluk Todolo, Shantidas Riedacker and Matthieu Canaguier.

Limited edition of 300 copies numbered and signed

Emilie Pitoiset (voice, texts)
Matthieu Canaguier (guitare)
Shantidas Riedacker (guitare)

Centre national des arts plastiques – Le Confort Moderne

Order here