A comprehensive monograph on the seminal work of Greenlandic-Danish visual artist and thinker Pia Arke (1958–2007)

With contributions by Pia Arke, Lars Kiel Bertelsen, Tine Bryld, Erik Gant, Søren Jønsson Granat, Mirjam Joensen, Stefan Jonsson, Carsten Juhl, Anders Jørgensen, Mette Jørgensen, Inge Kleivan, Kuratorisk Aktion, Jan-Erik Lundström, Iben Mondrup, Sara Olsvig, Søren Bro Pold, Irit Rogoff, Mette Sandbye, Kirsten Thisted, and Finn Thrane.

The richly illustrated 400-page book constitutes the first survey in print of Pia Arke’s collected works, practice, and methodology. In essays and images, the book documents Arke’s lifelong artistic engagement with the silence that surrounds Denmark’s colonial presence in Greenland since 1721 and examines how she by unearthing the ‘little’ history of Greenland’s colonization managed to say something decisive about the much ‘bigger’ history of Western imperialism and the dynamics of today’s world order.

In addition, the book contains a DVD presenting a selection of Arke’s individual and collaborative video works.

€42.00

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KARL HOLMQVIST, WORD SQUARES. COMPAGNIA/MOTTO BOOKS 2017,
PUBLISHED WITH THE KIND SUPPORT OF THE CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN, GENEVA, TO COINCIDE WITH THE ARTIST’S EXHIBITION, 31.5.– 27.8.2017.

WORD SQUARES DESIGNED BY KARL HOLMQVIST AND BENEDIKT REICHENBACH.

€25.00

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BOOK LAUCH

The Ruin to Come.
Walid Sadek.
Motto Books & Taipei Biennial 2016

Thursday 15 June, 2017 starting at 6:00 pm
Venue: Agial Art Gallery, 63 Abdel Aziz St., Hamra, Beirut, Lebanon.

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These collected essays, written in Beirut over a period of 10 years between 2006 and 2016, look at the conditions of living under a temporality theorized as the “protracted now” of a civil war, one structurally capable of perpetuating the conditions of its own dominance. This protracted now, these essays argue, remains untranquil in the many unfinished strains of a troubled history that resist falling back into a settled and distant past.

What unites the diverse essays of this book is an investment in the concept of labor, understood as both interminable and his­torical: the labor of min, the labor of the corpse, the labor of near­blindness and the labor of missing. These labors are interminable since they persist in a disinclination to join the various calls for regeneration and resurrection implicit in state-sanctioned and market-driven projects for the reconstruction of Lebanon. They are also historical since they frame this disinclination as an anti-historicist position open to a non-linear conception of memory that attempts to name the many pasts slighted by a forward-looking rush towards better futures.

Together, these labors develop into a critique of hope as a reac­tionary sentiment that numbs collective action in the present and propose that within the folds of war lie moments of political significance that can be recovered and thought through, in order to initiate a livable living built with the unwelcome but necessary knowledge shouldered by unreconciled survivors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Petra Feriancová is an artist who has developed a linguistic code over the years, through which she combines biographical aspects and reflections of a universal nature. What appears as a distinctive feature of her research, namely the use of documentary materials from family archives, or objects of affection related to autobiographical aspects, makes her oeuvre into a complex work that goes beyond the narration or simple description of intimate events to reach an abstract dimension. Before her other artists have explored these modes and processes, linking artistic endeavor to their personal lives, authorial aspects to biographical fragments, developing personal languages and innovative linguistic models. Annette Messager, for example, has made her collections of newspaper clippings, sketches and notes into a way to take possession of the life and events that come to her knowledge. “All day long I browse through, gather, put in order, classify, sort, and I reduce it all into the form of many albums,” she said. “These collections then become my illustrated life.” So in the chapel of Sant Nicolau another work appears in the exhibition space, a carpenter’s workbench bearing a metric scale with casts of vegetables that represent tools of comparison to understand the phases of growth of a fetus in the mother’s womb. The need to measure space and time is the way to determine a territory of belonging and to understand, in the individual sphere, aspects outside the life of the artist herself, placed in relation to autobiographical factors.

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His mustache looked like it would tickle. That’s probably the only reason why I didn’t want to kiss him.

He was a weirdo, but not weird enough, if you know what I mean. He certainly had a flair for details. It wasn’t that. I mean, it’s not like he was wearing a mullet, no. Nor like the kind of guy to gift me a Chinatown Gucci bag. He hated scented soaps and he’d drag me out of any decent party if he found scenty sticks near the toilet. That kind of thing drove him nuts. It’s not like he had anything against grapefruit.

Early on in our friendship, he gave me a box of Gioconda pencils from Koh-I-Noor. He knew how to get me hooked. But that damn mustache. It was so thick, so neatly trimmed. He paid too much attention to the kind of things I didn’t want to pay attention to. The cappuccino foam in it, however, was a kind of turn-on.

This is no doubt why you are holding this book in your hands. His mustache, right? Admit it. It’s the bowl of bonbons by the register. But then you go undercover, under the sheets to find a lot of nudity, thwarted porn. Ja, ja, ja: bodies. Corporeality. Corporation, cooperation. Protest. Violence. Religion. Collage. A torn sheet at the back. A misbound book? A defect or just vulnerable?

Selbsthilfe ist auch keine Lösung (even self-help is not a solution) and Protestvorbild Frankreich (protest “role model” in France?) is the only text you can make out other than mine. You’re meant to struggle to read it, or maybe Erik (who has no mustache) was being intentionally casual about the way he cut out these pictures. It’s an awareness of being sloppy that is so aware, it’s no longer sloppy. A man standing with his fist held high. He’s standing in the window frame of an apartment at least one story up from the ground. He is forty and mad and he enjoys his Bud. His form of protest is a form of solidarity from the sofa. A window protest: comfy. So fucking clever. Then there’s the picture abutting it of a woman holding out her bra. We are meant to take it. She’s offering it to us. Go ahead. She wants you to.

And then there’s the spooning bodies with their tube socks in a wad next to… a bed. A solar bed. You got it? This book is brown sugar. Stinky Swiss cheese. Bad, bad, good, good.

April von Stauffenberg

 

€10.00

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WATER PAPER CUT

Paul Thek and Jason Dodge
February – March 2017

Schinkel Pavillon

Edition of 200. Each hand bound with different inserts

48€
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A new collection of poetry by Roberto Harrison.
Publisher by The Green Lantern Press.

Language: English
Pages: 240
Size: 15.2 x 23 cm
Weight: 448 g
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 9780988418585

€20.00

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Exhibition catalogue featuring works by Jan Groth, including drawing, sculpture, tapestry and wall drawing. With written contributions by Martin Clark, Steinar Sekkingstad, Richard Tuttle and an interview with Jan Groth by Fredrik Værslev.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Jan Groth, Festspillutstillingen 2017, May 25 – August 13, 2017.
Design by Blank Blank. Published by Bergen Kunsthall.

€30.00

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Mashid Mohadjerin is an award-winning photojournalist and visual artist whose work has taken her all over the world. Her photo essays focus primarily on identity issues and the human condition, with subjects such as migration, minority groups, and the socially displaced. In this book, she portrays the women who played an important role in the recent uprisings that began in Tunisia, spread to Egypt, and then swept through other parts of the Middle East. Coming from different ideological and social backgrounds, these women defy stereotypes. Collected images (both historical and current) and articles that circulated on social media at the time offer visual context for the portraits.

€16.00

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Brian Kennon at Motto.
Opening reception 06.06.2017
from 6pm

For the exhibition in our courtyard’s vitrines, Brian Kennon will be exhibiting a new series of prints and works on paper.

A survey of 15 years of his artists’ book output will be on display in the shop

http://briankennon.com/