Steve Bishop
Strangers’ Guide to Home Territories
1st edition, 250 copies

Photos taken at the following exhibitions:
Standard Ballad (2015)
Carlos/Ishikawa, London

You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To (2016)
Supportico Lopez/6817 Los Angeles

Insulated by the Boundary (2016)
AND NOW, Dallas

1st edition, 250 copies
60 C-prints on Fuji Crystal Archive photo paper
Screen printed PVC jacket
ISBN: 9782940524518
Published by Motto Books, Supportico Lopez

35€
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music by
yzno (http://vojkohuter.com/)
dialog (https://soundcloud.com/ddialog)
possa (https://soundcloud.com/possasilvan)

(((Sweet Tribology)))
Premiere in Germany at Motto Berlin

radio picnic
chocolate records
40 women

Sunday 23.10.2016
14:00 > 16:00

FM portable radios welcome
Free event outside
Hot chocolate and glüwein

Motto
Skalitzer Str. 68, im Hinterhof, Berlin 10997, +49 30 48816407

Broadcast by Reboot FM 88.4 FM between 15:00 and 16:00
http://reboot.fm/

Artists:

Camille Antoine, Felicia Atkinson, Frieda Beukenkamp, Dinah Bird, Maya Boquet, Emma Bugg, Tania Buisse, Andrea Cohen, Lou Conboy, Selena De Carvalho, Kate Geck, Emmanuelle Gibello, Rosalind Hall, Hanna Hartman, Carola Haupt, Julie Honoré, Cat Hope, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Zoe Irvine, Coraline Janvier, Shannon Johnson, Anne Laplantine, Sally Ann McIntyre, Mish Meijers, Miss Despoinas, Rosa Menkman, Maria Papadomanolaki, Edith Perrenot, Nadège Philippe-Janon, Sally Rees, Eve Risser, Elissa Ritson, Anne-Laure Robin, Sabio Design, Pip Stafford, Rachel Tribout, Maia Urstad, Valérie Vivancos, Tricky Walsh, Sarah Washington.

https://sweet-sweet-tribology.hotglue.me/home

Everything is About to Happen (Porto): artists’ books and editions @ Fundação de Serralves, Porto
Opening Friday 14 October
Exhibition from October 15 2016 to February 12 2017.

Works by Patrícia Almeida and David-Alexandre Guéniot, Karl Holmqvist, Janice Kerbel, Sara McKillop, Kristen Mueller, Luís Muñoz-Santini, Preston is My Paris, Simon Popper, Erik Steinbrecher, Fritz Welch, Nicole Wermers.

‘Everything is About to Happen (Porto): Artists’ Books and Editions’ is dedicated to the most recent developments in the field of artists’ books as a medium and context for contemporary art. The exhibition presents more than 200 works ? many of them published in small, hard to find editions ? to give an overview of the most recent developments in the field of artists’ books. Through them it looks at burlesque reversals, authorship fluidity, sub-activism, unproductive labour, nonsensical and non-linear languages as tools to reaffirm and question our collective desire for collectivity. It suggests that artists’ books should be seen both as individual artistic expressions and as participants in a forum whose culture and freedom are essential to our future.

For the duration of the exhibition, the Serralves bookstore will become an integral part of the show and present recent artists’ books that respond to the concerns it articulates. The bookstore selection is curated by Gregorio Magnani in collaboration with Motto, Berlin.

Artists’ books ? works of art that adopt the format and particular modes of distribution of the book ? first came to prominence in the mid-1960s. They offered artists a cheap and easily distributed art form that responded to the widespread desire to bring art out of the gallery context. After almost disappearing from view in the 1980s, artists’ books found new energy as a form of artistic expression in the mid-1990s. Then, the wide availability of increasingly affordable digital editing and printing technologies paired with the ease of communication afforded by the internet made it relatively easy to publish or self-publish a book or fanzine. Artists could adopt the book as their chosen medium and become publishers of themselves or choose to rely on a vast network of artist lead, small, adventurous, and often short lived, publishing houses. It was a media that allowed them to be in full control of their own work ? from the first glimpse of an idea, through its development in editing and publishing, to its final marketing. This was liberating: it allowed free experimentation that bypassed the need for institutional support and validation and relied instead on an alternative peer-to-peer network. It also responded perfectly to the 1990s dream of self-empowerment embodying its promise to make each of us a one-man-act on a constant path of self-reinvention. Today the hope of a non-exploitative relation between capital and independent cultural producers seems as unrealistic as the 1960s notion of liberation through commerce. In the creative arts, self-expression reads more and more as labour performed as entertainment for somebody else’s gain. But the productive power of the shared language that constituted the community around artists’ books remains. It relies on low costs, high affective investments, peer-to-peer exchanges and on the focus on the ability of the book to create social exchanges. Threatened by capital’s capacity to survive its crisis through the consumption and production of social spaces, it reaffirms its communal energy by acknowledging the dangers it faces.

‘Everything is About to Happen (Porto): Artists’ Books and Editions’ is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, and is curated by Gregorio Magnani.

How (…) things that don’t exist
How to (talk about) things that don’t exist focuses on the processes that led to the artworks and arguments in ‘How to (…) things that don’t exist — an exhibition developed out of the 31st São Pau¬lo Biennial’ presented at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto. The publication continues the ide¬as and discussions that generated the exhibition and proposes unexpected synapses between different subject areas: Education; Reverse Colonialism; and Right to the City — Criminalization of the Poor. It includes a wide variety of texts, chronicles, lyrics, historical documents, drawings, collages, paintings, film stills and photographs many of which specifically conceived for this book by artists, curators, art historians, writ-ers, researchers, pedagogues, sociologists, urban planners, journalists, social workers and activists.

Como (falar sobre) coisas que não existem
Como (falar sobre) coisas que não existem centra‑se nos processos que conduziram as obras e discussões presentes na exposição “Como (…) coisas que não existem — uma exposição desenvolvida a partir da 31a Bienal de São Paulo” apresentada no Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves no Porto. A publicação propõe sinapses inesperadas entre os diversos temas tratados: Educação; Colonialismo Invertido; e Direito a Cidade ― Criminalização da Pobreza e inclui uma variedade de textos, cronicas, letras de musicas, documentos históricos, desenhos, colagens, pinturas, fotogramas e fotografias — alguns concebidos especificamente para este livro — da autoria de artistas, curadores, historiadores de arte, escritores, investigadores, pedagogos, sociólogos, urbanistas, jornalistas, assistentes sociais e ativistas.

39.90 €

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Matthew Clifford Green is a young painter based in Los Angeles.

On his canvasses Matthew Clifford Green expends the material of oil paint in a near-facetious way, creating works that border the monstrous with the cartoonish. As the surface of his works mound and extend off the canvas, the act of viewership becomes tactile despite its distance, blending sight with touch. The crudeness of Green’s painting style results in works that bend the formal nature of color and the oil medium towards the realm of hyper simplicity, while carefully dodging the fine line of affected naivety.

He has already held plenty solo exhibitions.

IDEA CAR is the artist’s first book of scribbled poetry.

Published by 2nd Cannons Publications & Motto Books in an Edition of 500

20€

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Roman Signer
A Step Towards the Sea

at Motto Zürich Müllerstrasse 57
on the 17th of September in the presence of

Roman Signer
Lorenzo Giusti
Li Zhenhua

The conversation starts at 5pm and will be held in German.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Roman Signer. Films and Installation, hosted at the MAN (Nuoro, Italy, April – July, 2016), A Step Towards the Sea is not only a catalogue, but a book to all effects and purposes, which tells the relationship between one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists and Italy. Signer’s relationship with the country is a special one, bearing in mind some of his most renown works, produced on the Stromboli volcano, or the numerous actions and sculptures that revolve around an Italian iconic subject such as the Ape Piaggio. The central section of the book is dedicated to Sardinia, with a conversation between Lorenzo Giusti and the artist and a photographic essay by Barbara Signer. A text by Barbara Casavecchia contextualizes Signer’s Italian dimension by introducing the viewing of Reisen Italien, the unreleased film included in the enclosed DVD: a personal collection of filmic notes produced by the artist in the course of his journeys with the family in the Nineties. The essay by Rachel Withers introduces the hefty iconographic setting of his entire Super-8 production, which consists of 205 clips made between 1975 and 1989 and presented in a large installation within the exhibition in Nuoro. The book is accompanied by a DVD which, in addition to the unreleased film, gathers all of the actions Signer carried out in Italy starting from the Nineties (Stromboli, Civitella d’Agliano, the Maremma, Venice) and a piece he produced specifically for the exhibition, after which the book is titled.

http://humboldtbooks.com/

‘Books and Elephant’. Simon Popper @ Motto Berlin.
Opening September 3rd, 7-9 pm

Exhibition September 4th until October 10th, 2016.

For his exhibition at Motto Berlin, Simon Popper’s work can be broadly understood by its degrees of visual and linguistic separation, that is, through its titles (its naming) and the relations between what the works appear to be, what they are and what they might become. This often rests upon a hinge of wordplay or punning and visual tropes to break down or collapse objects and ideas characterised by a sense of the comedic or the deadpan – but in all seriousness – in a logic of displacement or derangement.
The permeation of a kind of working dyslexia (real and imagined) or visual/linguistic displacement extends to Popper’s methodology in general and to each operation in particular. It’s his way of creating or making things in the world and for the world and his reason for doing it in the first place. This displacement or making other of art, books or just things is as much about the pleasure of creating opportunities as it is about unmaking them, a kind of non-productivity or ‘patience work’ in its ‘purposelessness’ in the folly of its ways. It could be understood as a ‘negative’ making or anti-artisanal production by producing something not just along the lines of value or even the commodity – at least notionally. It’s almost as if the artist was a cottage industry but without the industry, production without product in the simple act of doing.
The work of Simon Popper is an invitation to delinquency, an abandonment of one’s place anchoring a rational centred self into some altogether other self in another place, ordered and classified by systematic play and caprice if only for a moment. The ideal space these works might inhabit would be something like a contemporary ‘room of one’s own’, that now impossibly dissolving bourgeois space, away from the order of things, from the exhaustion of life and from a life surrounded by exhausted objects.

David Bussel

Exhibition proposed by Gregorio Magnani

A Step Towards the Sea tells the relationship between the artist and Italy through a selection of installation views and video works. The accompanying DVD includes an unreleased film and a documentation on every actions carried out in Italy by Signer since the 1990s.
Signer’s bond with the country is a special one, bearing in mind some of his most renown works, produced on the Stromboli volcano, or the numerous actions and sculptures that revolve around an Italian iconic subject such as the Ape Piaggio. The central section of the book is dedicated to Sardinia, with a conversation between Lorenzo Giusti and the artist and a photographic essay by Barbara Signer. A text by Barbara Casavecchia contextualizes Signer’s Italian dimension by introducing the viewing of Reisen Italien: a personal collection of filmic notes produced by the artist in the course of his journeys with the family in the 1990s. The essay by Rachel Withers introduces the hefty iconographic setting of his entire Super-8 production, which consists of 205 clips filmed between 1975 and 1989 and presented in a large installation within the exhibition in Nuoro. The book is accompanied by a DVD which, in addition to the unreleased film, gathers all of the actions Signer carried out in Italy starting from the 1990s and a piece he produced specifically for the exhibition, after which the book is titled.
Published following the exhibition “Roman Signer. Films and Installation,” at the MAN, Nuoro, from April 22 to July 3rd, 2016.
Born 1938 in Appenzell, Switzerland, Roman Signer lives and works in St. Gallen.

€30.00

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“I walked up the marble staircase into the grandest space of the house, a large drawing room with double height ceilings and windows, which performed its role with great pomp and circumstance. It was a mixed metaphor of styles—Louis XIV, Beaux Arts, Georgian—all insisting upon resplendence. I sighed, thinking a thought I had many times before: that this house was what separated me from my father, who remained for me a perpetual arriviste. I conceded to myself that this had always been a house for new money. It would be designated as a mansion, distinct from the discreet brownstones preferred by the originary Dutch New York upper-crust. Only when the new money flushed in during the Gilded Age did mansions start getting built with ballrooms, vaulted ceilings, and glitzy stylistic affectations. This home was never meant for modesty; conspicuous consumption is part of its structural integrity.”

Framed by two academically-styled essays, the heart of 1130 Fifth Avenue is a narrative which traces Kovner’s cathartic process following the mysterious death of his billionaire father. Kovner meets a psychic who prescribes him a regimen of peculiar art therapy. This remedy brings Kovner to write a tell-all, which is met with public success. The writing of the book-in-book opens as many questions as it addresses.

1130 Fifth Avenue is a continuation of Kovner’s project, Classy. In a series of works, viewers use Kovner as an avatar to experience the problems of inherited privilege: complicity in the hegemony of the wealthy, the compromised subjectivity of not having earned what one has, and the ambivalence of inheriting a role in society.

€18.00

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