Martijn in’t Veld
Happy Potatoes and Sad Silkscreens at Motto Books
On display until January 4th, 2020
Browse publications and prints here.
This book is published as part of Marianne Heier’s project or osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024.
Marianne Heier performed her project And Their Spirits Live On, first at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan and then at Oslo’s former Museum of Contemporary Art.
How can a centuries-old plaster cast of a two thousand-year-old sculpture speak to us today?Plaster copies of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures have formed the basis for much of the history of art. Right up until modern times artists in the western tradition learned to draw and shape works from such models. When the National Gallery was built, the central building housed a collection of these classical plaster casts. Marianne Heier has chosen to make a performance among the plaster copies at the Academy of Art in Milan where she herself studied, and later in the empty bank premises which until recently housed the Museum of Contemporary Art – drawing attention to the potential power in these figures. They are archetypes that we still refer to, although we are often unaware of this. Heier’s performance takes the form of a museum guided tour in which she takes the role of guide, situating the plaster sculptures in wider histories. Using texts taken from classical mythology and political resistance movements, she shows the potentially radical possibilities of the sculptures. The mythology from which these classical figures are taken is full of critiques of power, gender issues and identity politics that perhaps suggest a need for civil courage in the political climate of our own times.
The performance was co-curated by osloBIENNALEN curators and Alessandra Pioselli and was produced in collaboration with students and employees at the Project School in Oslo.
Happy Potatoes and Sad Silkscreens at Motto Books
As the Happy Potato Press, Martijn in’t Veld has been publishing books, prints and other printed matter since 2019. Please join us for a wintery-xmas-drink and the presentation of various potatoes on December 11th, 18:00h. Among the things on display will be a severed arm, the weather report from the day Richard Brautigan died, a young girl stealing fishes and the ever expanding city of New York.
Anne Neukamp Book Launch at Motto Berlin. December 13, 6-9pm
This monograph presents the first comprehensive survey of Anne Neukamp’s work. It embraces a vast
selection of the artist’s works from the past seven years alongside texts by Kassandra Nakas, Reinhard
Spieler and Johanna da Rocha Abreu, thereby offering the reader an immersive insight into the world of
Neukamp’s painting.
‘A stage is being set for us. Forms are blocked and angled into space, complete with consideration of the
need to bridge a distance and to draw the viewer in. As we approach the canvas, the beautiful execution,
the smooth surfaces painted by hand, the neutral yet lush bottom layer almost lulls us into complacency.
But then come the black and white strokes, like slashes, laid over or intersecting the crisp outlines of—
well, what is it? A face or a bifurcated B? It doesn’t matter. Assertions held about the symbols and image
being to shift. The flatness falls away and you find yourself eye-to-eye with the openings and gaps in the
canvas like tunnels, and you finally have to let go of any lingering inertia. The figurative associations, the
meaning both historical and implies, don’t ask for definition, they ask you to completely recondition the
means by which you seek definition.’ —Johanna da Rocha Abreu
Criminal Garden
Hiroshi Takizawa at Motto Berlin
Criminal Garden
Project01: “Assumption”
Criminal profiling is used as an investigation technique to hypothesize on a suspect figure. An assumed portrait is inferred and emerges from what is left of a particular setting or crime scene. I am intrigued by the development of such assumed figures, as well as the fact that these profiles are fictional and nonexistent unless replaced by an asserted criminal.
“Assumption” consists of scanned images of objects found in ordinary surroundings. Instead of shooting or scanning a flat surface, I chose to scan objects with uneven surfaces as a method to emphasize the distortion of the outcome. As a result, the images are highly detailed, yet far from the objects’ original shapes and forms. The method also allows me to illustrate that the process of reproduction can result in a fictitious representation of an object. To me, there is a similarity in the process of profiling and scanning in the sense that both processes creates a fictional and imaginary image. In this work, I aim create an image of a fictitious profile, although there may not be any criminal context to it. What interests me is that the scanned objects gain a fictional character that reveals the possibility of an additional dimension to its existence, and furthermore, a suggestion that the fictional existence is in fact closer to reality.
Putting together. About Libraries, Books, Images, Words.
Damiàn Navarro, Olaf Nicolai, Stéphanie Serra
Saturday November 23, from 7pm at Motto Berlin.
Join us for a discussion around the practice of assembling, which will lead to the question of researched and found material and its montage possibilities. We will look at Damián Navarro’s rotorelief stickers and collecting process, and Olaf Nicolai’s editing practice in the 3 volumes of Conversation Pieces that link the library of the Roman gallerist Maria Colao to the art historian Mario Praz through his house (Walther König) and Stéphanie Serra’s written project on libraries, Through the Words of Others (fink).
Screening: Conversation Piece, Luchino Visconti, 1974 (subtitles in English)
Damián Navarro is an artist who works in Lausanne (Switzerland). He plays with collected object-documents to dig into realities, and repeatedly attempts to reshape the topics he addresses.
Olaf Nicolai is a German conceptual artist who works in Berlin. His work includes a major interest in books, literature and editing as well as its possible special forms.
Stéphanie Serra is a Swiss writer and researcher working on French films made by writers between 1950 and 1975.
In addition to the talk, an intervention in the Motto bookstore showcases will turn around the on-going looping.store website project developed by Pablo Perez and Damián Navarro and aims to share part of his stickers collection.
Recent publications as well as the fink twice series from edition fink will be on display
http://www.editionfink.ch/
Criminal Garden
Hiroshi Takizawa at Motto Berlin, November 16th 2019, from 7pm
Project01: “Assumption”
Criminal profiling is used as an investigation technique to hypothesise on a suspect figure. An assumed portrait is inferred and emerges from what is left of a particular setting or crime scene. I am intrigued by the development of such assumed figures, as well as the fact that these profiles are fictional and nonexistent unless replaced by an asserted criminal.
“Assumption” consists of scanned images of objects found in ordinary surroundings. Instead of shooting or scanning a flat surface, I chose to scan objects with uneven surfaces as a method to emphasize the distortion of the outcome. As a result, the images are highly detailed, yet far from the objects’ original shapes and forms. The method also allows me to illustrate that the process of reproduction can result in a fictitious representation of an object. To me, there is a similarity in the process of profiling and scanning in the sense that both processes creates a fictional and imaginary image. In this work, I aim create an image of a fictitious profile, although there may not be any criminal context to it. What interests me is that the scanned objects gain a fictional character that reveals the possibility of an additional dimension to its existence, and furthermore, a suggestion that the fictional existence is in fact closer to reality.
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Criminal Garden
Hiroshi Takizawa
First Edition
Format:Rolling paper / pvc rod / pvc cover
Type of printing : Offset
Size: 3364mm × 265mm
Number of Pages 2
Edition 80
Images Hiroshi Takizawa
Published Hiroshi Takizawa
Translation Martha Aida
Design Yuto Takamuro
Printed in Germany
Images copyright@2019 Hiroshi Takizawa
This glossary is meant to accompany the three-volume publication The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 1, 2 and 3. It reflects the concerns contained in those volumes. It marks the beginning of a long-term process of creating a dictionary of terms with which to understand and eventually destabilize the complex ways through which a future Neural Capitalism will work in creating contemporary forms of neural subsumption. Neural subsumption is a future condition brought about by an assemblage of networked neural technologies that will link our brainwaves to the Internet of Everything (IoE) and then encode them to use in advanced data analysis. No thought conscious or unconscious will be left unrecorded, encoded or surveyed. Furthermore this data will be used for a future form of data inscription upon the connectome: the data set describing the con- nection matrix of the nervous system and which represents the network of anatomical connections linking neural elements together. This in the end constitutes what I have called the Statisticon. Warren Neidich is an interdisciplinary artist and theorist working between Berlin and New York. He studied photography, art, neuro- science, medicine, ophthalmology, and architecture. Recently his practice has focused on performance, sculpture, video and film to investigate the contested milieus of the social brain. He is founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, New York and Berlin, 2015–2019. Its’ curriculum focuses upon the emerging conditions of cognitive capitalism in which the brain and the mind are the new factories of the 21st century. In 1995 he conceived of the website artbrain.org and the Journal of Neuroaesthetics. It officially appeared on the web in 1997 and concentrates on the capacity of artistic practice to deregulate and estrange the social-political-cultural milieu in the end activating the material brain’s neural plastic potential.
Published by Archive Books.
Buy it here
Tales 37, Lago di Braies, Dolomiti, Italy, September 2011
Published by Motto Books and ENSP Arles
numbered edition of 500
PROVENCE AW 19/20 is more than punk adjacent. We spent an afternoon at home with Pietro Mattioli, poring over portraits of club-goers he took during the last years of the 1970s at Club Hey, Zürich’s first punk and new wave nightclub. These images are juxtaposed with more recent shots of patrons at House Of Mixed Emotions, a series of club nights in Zürichs Longstreet Bar.
Punk manifests in many ways, and apolitical it is not. A study of the genre could not have been dedicated to paper without considering its intersectional nuance. In two interviews, Big Joanie, the Black-British feminist punk trio and Sissi Zoebeli of Thema Selection discuss the inevitability of activist pursuit as marginalized people in specific creative and temporal contexts. In conversation with Anne Gruber, Ulrike Ottinger waxes nostalgic on her feminist and decolonial education, as well as her seminal 1977 film, Madame X—An Absolute Ruler. The two met at Ottinger’s home on Bodensee, at the foot of the Alps.
Six postcards, conceived by Edgars Gluhovs, showing different crops of an image of the long-missing Lord Lucan have been scattered freely amongst the pages of this publication. Some things you’ve got to work for, others simply drop into your lap.
In the LITERATURE section of this punk-themed edition of PROVENCE, writer, curator, publicist, and editor, Hans-Christian Dany, offers a translated excerpt from his latest book, MA-1 Mode und Uniform, which is dedicated to the bomber jacket. “Deception and camouflage are part of the game when no one is supposed to know all too well how anyone else pays the rent”. Overleaf, in a passage from When Surface Was Depth (2002), London-based novelist Michael Bracewell reflects on the relationship between art, counter-cultures and subcultures, and their liquidation into a mainstream.
We have no less than three editorials in ART & FASHION, two of which are dedicated to a single designer. Mikael Gregorsky shoots Aganovich, avant-garde haute-couture, styled by Alessia Ansalone; Kristina Nagel takes her lens to experimental designer Lou de Bètoly’s latest collection, styled by our fashion editor Nina Hollensteiner; lastly, Nadine Fraczkowski journeys to a small village near Düsseldorf to capture Leila, a nineteen-year-old gymnastics enthusiast.
IN-HOUSE furthers our investigation into the nature of the contemporary gallery, which we pursued in the previous two issues. This time, we explore the phenomenon of in-house magazines founded by galleries and art institutions. We speak with Lionel Bovier, director of the MAMCO in Geneva, and Randy Kennedy, executive editor of Ursula, Hauser & Wirth’s new publication, to gain insight as to this recent art world industry trend.
To control which stories are and are not told is a great responsibility. Kari Rittenbach offers a view from the other side of the desk, with a distillate of her rejected pitches and unfinished articles—the stories that never reached a platform beyond the inboxes of her editors.
Following this course, we’ve included REVIEW, a section comprising contributions by artists, curators and critics who we invited to challenge the format of the contemporary exhibition review.
On a trip to Hangzhou, China, we visited Li Lin, the art collector and founder of JNBY. Meanwhile, in Beijing, curator Egija Inzule spoke to Anna Eschbach and Antoine Angerer of I: project space about their latest initiative, The Nightlife Residency, an interdisciplinary project focused on extracting the social potential of the city’s club-culture through a contemporary art practice. Further south, Wang Gongquan, proprietor of the Tsingpu Retreat offered advice as to the tricky business of balancing a public civil rights activism presence with a foray into the luxury hospitality business—what’s a man to do?
Hannes Grassegger wears flip-flops and makes notes on Bitcoin from Richard Branson’s island refuge, and over in Austria, our deputy editor Olamiju Fajemisin questions Ei Arakawa and Sarah Chow on the union of magic and concept from a medieval castle-cum-summer school atop a hill in the middle of Salzburg. Read all about it in REPORT.
PROVENCE. Biannual. Subscribe. Sorry.