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Image by Markus Schinwald, Kurt (2008)

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Book Launch: Jean-Max Colard – Die Ausstellung meiner Träume (The
exhibition of my dreams)

Jean-Max Colard is an art critic, exhibition curator and literary scholar.
On July 5th Wolff Verlag will present the german translation of his book
L’exposition de mes rêves, MAMCO, 2013, a collection of dreams linked to
contemporary art exhibitions, either probable, imaginary or real. A set of
texts which propose through dreams another form of art exploration and
writing.

Book presentation in the presence of the author Jean-Max Colard and the
translator Christian Hartwig Steinau.

Reading of selected dreams by the actress Stefanie Tiedtke.

JEAN-MAX COLARD: art critic for Les Inrockuptibles, France Musique, France
Culture, curator of numerous exhibitions, including the Exhibition for the
100th anniversary of the writer Marguerite Duras “Duras Song” (October 15,
2014 – Jan 12, 2015) at the Centre Pompidou and the parallel to the
European Football Championships in France presented exhibition “La Grande
Galerie du Foot “(5. Jun. – July 10, 2016.) in La Villette, Paris.
JeanMaxColard.com

Free admission, In German

Jean-Max Colard: Die Ausstellung meiner Träume. Edited and translated from
French by Steinau, 118 pages, paperback, Wolff
Verlag Berlin, ISBN 978-3-941461-34-5, 14,90 Euro

SIGNS FICTION

This book aims to collect and present a comprehensive overview of the work of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. It is the result of a long and intense immersion into her archive, and intends to establish the importance of this unique artist – who did not have much recognition in the past – not only to the present day, but also to the precise political context and time to which she and her work belong.

The book presents her typewritings series, all produced between the early 1970s (some of the earliest works are dated 1972) and 1989.
Mail Art was her way to be in contact with the world outside the GDR, otherwise impossible to reach. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Reunification, the artist stopped producing any art: She felt her involvement was no longer “needed”.

At the beginning of 2015 we started to archive Ruth Wolf- Rehfeldt’s work, discovering little by little an enormous and fascinating body of work, composed by more classic poetry, simple typewriting texts, visual poetry, concrete poetry, and abstraction.
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Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt was born in Wurzen, saxony, in 1932.
In 1950 she moved to Berlin, where she still lives today. In 1954 she met the artist Robert Rehfeldt, who she married a year later. She was employed by the exhibitions department at the Academy of Arts, and spent her spare time making drawings. A few years later she started to develop what would become her typical typewriter graphics, and became an active participant in the international Mail art movement. She stopped making art after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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Four variations on nothing or talking about that which has no name is conceived as a process of examination in which art is seen as a series of encounters and situations that happen in time. Four variations, four rooms, four concepts: tool, method, idea and system – these are the underpinnings of the thought and work of Paris.
The “tools” are drawings, educational exercises, utensils, games, prototypes. Here, thought is seen as an exercise, while the tools are there to help with setting out ideas. They are not mere techniques of representation, but rather comprise a system of thought that allows us to exchange views.
The “methods” are traditionally taught in a school-style learning environment. By rethinking and playing with the concept of the classroom, the architecture is devised by Paris in such a way that it is transformed into a working process itself, as well as a set of routines that give rise to spaces of exchange in which social skills and learning habits are developed. Each classroom, where the viewer decides what he or she wants to learn or unlearn, is a structure in which the artist’s interests cross with the visitors’ experiences. Every model offers a space to discover relationships, an architecture that serves as a trigger for thinking about different ways of socializing, in a process of learning and failure combined.
The exhibition shifts scale in order to tackle the “idea”. In a small architectural installation, an object suggests that an idea is something that is always being constructed and developed. It is something transformative that we cannot fully access; something that can grow in a number of possible ways, that emerges in time, and that lies in the hands of each viewer.
Under normal circumstances, education would be the system and architecture the method, but in this exhibition this state of affairs is reversed. Education is now seen as a conceptual, logical institution that allows us to learn by association. It is a process that provides room for thought and generates ideas, sparking one or more experiences. A set of short films that are at once demonstrations of the use of the tools and brief poetic essays, and which activate ideas and processes that have already been presented in the exhibition.

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Foreign Places

Foreign Places is conceived as an alternative travel guide, which accompanies the eponymous exhibition. The eight contributing artists were invited by Stefano Faoro, designer of this publication and also a former WIELS resident, to imagine a place for the book page in which their work is invested – whether it is a building, city or series of locations. The final text chapter features ‘A Glossary of Place Names’ by WIELS curator Caroline Dumalin, which emphatically locates the artists’ image sequences, as well as the essay ‘From Beirut to Brussels: Notes on Curating as an Exercise in Attachment’ by guest curator Grégory Castéra, who delivers a personal account of the challenges involved in working abroad and attaching oneself temporarily to a place or a practice.

Edition: 750
2016

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CURA. NO.22

COVER BY SOL CALERO
INSIDE THE COVER
Sol Calero
text by Adam Carr
PORTRAITS IN THE EXHIBITION SPACE
Johannes Cladders’ anti-museum
by Lorenzo Benedetti
EXHIBITION LITERATURE
Expanded Literature.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
by Jean-Max Colard

SPOTLIGHT
James Bridle.
 Seeing Like a Network
in conversation with Ben Vickers
Self-Portrait as a City.
Alex Israel in conversation
with Gigiotto Del Vecchio

ABOUT
Anicka Yi’s Allegorical Bouquets
by Chris Sharp

ABOUT
Kevin Beasley.
Energy Accumulates
by Rose Bouthillier

ARTIST’S PROJECT
by Amy Yao

SPOTLIGHT
Philipp Timischl
in conversation with
Pierre-Alexandre Mateos
and Charles Teyssou

A VISIT TO
Rodrigo Hernández
in conversation with
Joao Mourao & Luis Silva

SPOTLIGHT
ÅYR
in conversation with Philipp Ekardt

SPOTLIGHT
Caroline Mesquita
in conversation with
Martha Kirszenbaum

HOT!
Debora Delmar Corp.
by Judith Vrancken
Juliana Huxtable
by Whitney Mallett
Sophie Jung
by Frances Loeffler
Nancy Lupo
by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

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“I view achitecture as man himself. After all, achitecture is constructed by man. Architecture is a monument to the passion and effort of those who create it. The growth of architecture is derived from the life of its occupants. Considering architecture solely as a machine is cold. As occupants go about their daily lives, their emotions and experiences are stored within the architecture, providing it with warmth and a chance to breathe. As Le Corbusier said, achitecture is a “machine for living.” Man expects to be protected by architecture, whether it be in order to think, to cry, to dance or to sing freely.”

-Excerpt Tamami Iinuma House of Architecture

Published by Post/limArt and designed by Yoshihisa Tanaka, Tamani Iinuma’s House of Architecture presents a photographic approach to the architectural creations by celebrated modernists Le Corbusier and Kunio Mayekawa. Within, Iinuma’s photographs present a visual abstraction of form and subject, where both man as architect and building as structure stand side by side as an interdependent unit in continuous dialogue with its built environ. House of Architecture is an elegant and considered presentation of Iinuma’s imagery, allowing both image and subject further space for engagement within the structural form of the photobook.

The publication includes texts by Thibaut de Ruyter, Yuzuru Tominaga, Tadamoto Oshima and Tamami Iinuma.

All text available in Japanese and English.
Edition of 500
2016

€38.00

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For his first exhibition in Portugal, Wolfgang Tillmans (1968, Remscheid, Germany) continues to expand the possibilities for the reception of his oeuvre through a radical repositioning of its multiple dimensions. At Serralves, he pays particular attention to what he describes as his ‘Vertical Landscapes’, photographs of the natural phenomena of light when day meets night, sky meets earth, cloud meets sky. Dating from 1995 until the present, and printed in scales ranging from the standard size of photographic printing paper, to the panoramic expanse of four metres in size, the photographs encapsulate the expressive potential of Tillmans’ highly developed visual formalism, and his engagement with photography as inherently physical as it is immaterial. In their unnerving beauty, produced partially by the camera makers technical advances and partly by the photographer’s insistence on allowing those advances to show, they create a challenge to the canon of visual cool preeminent in today’s visual culture.

The exhibition will be site specific, in its response to the particular architectural context of its presentation in the museum and through the inclusion of new photographic material. It will also allude to ideas of the ‘universal’ through the everywhere-ness of sky and water, in which glimpses of the human body and particular social, natural and architectural situations and places from around the world emerge. Presented as a visual and architectural intervention across 1000 sq metres of the Serralves Museum’s galleries, together with a suite of installations of newly produced video works, the exhibition promises to be an immersive environment of threshold states.

Since establishing his reputation in the youth and club culture of 1990s London, Tillmans has become one of the most influential artists of our time. His continued exploration of photography as a means to communicate reality is one that inspires and moves in its wonder and its intelligence. For Tillmans, reality is not only visual, social, economic and political, it is organic, bodily, and phenomenal, from the bodies of friends and family to the constellations of cities and plants, the celestial galaxies of night skies and the exquisite abstractions created from the impact of light in photographic process itself. If the medium of photography and its processes provide the foundation to Tillmans’ work, his engagement with place, and his choreographic use of space and scale constitute a world, in which images of people and places and object-like registrations of light are part of an interconnected, physical and cosmic whole.

‘Wolfgang Tillmans: On the Verge of Visibility’ is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto and curated by Suzanne Cotter, Director, assisted by exhibition curator Paula Fernandes.

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Palm Tree Studies in South Tyrol and Beyond

A peculiar phenomenon of the Northern Italian city Merano is its large population of palm trees. The majority of the Merano palm trees belong to the species Trachycarpus fortunei, which was brought to Europe from East Asia in the 1830s. The first palms were planted in the city around 1880 as Merano was transforming into a health resort and a tourist destination. With her artists’ book Palm Tree Studies in South Tyrol and Beyond, Nanna Debois Buhl seeks to trace the palm trees’ botanical trajectories and symbolic dimensions.
The publication presents Buhl’s research through a collection of materials including conversations with the Merano-based botanist Otto Huber, the design scholar specialized in wallpapers Joanna Banham, and the architect Susanne Stacher specialized in alpine architecture, as well as photos and photograms by the artist, old postcards and touristic posters of Merano, historical and scientific images of palm trees. Through this manifold material, the publication unfolds the “cultural biography” of the palm tree in Merano and elaborates on the incorporation of this exotic element in 19th century design and garden culture in the region and on a larger scale, also creating a link to utopian alpine architecture and its relation to landscape.

Published on the occasion of the public art exhibition Art & Nature 2016 Walking With Senses, Merano Spring Festival, Merano, Italy, March 24 – June 5, 2016 Curated by BAU.

Nanna Debois Buhl is a visual artist who lives and works in Copenhagen and New York. Her practice is a continuous investigation of historical and cultural knowledge through botany, animal life, imagery, and architectural components. She participated in The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, New York (2008-09), and received her MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2006). Her installations and films have been exhibited widely, recently at Pérez Art Museum, FL; SculptureCenter, NY; Art in General, NY; The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; El Museo del Barrio, NY; Lunds Konsthall, Sweden; Kunsthal Charlottenborg; Kunsthallen Brandts; Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde; and Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark.

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ISSUE #30 — Summer 2015/2016
An Innocent Mind Has No Fear

In celebration of its 30th issue, 032c and artist-director RALF SCHMERBERG teamed up to create “An Innocent Mind Has No Fear,” a proposal for the ultimate Berlin film with a libretto by writer HELENE HEGEMANN. It is a manifesto about life in the post-contemporary era, where cultural promiscuity has dissolved into a condition of spiritual bankruptcy. Heat and compression have melted the meaning from our past algorithms, while aimless citizens wander in search of a new morality. The bandwidth of pleasure-pain has become endless.

Welcome to 032c Issue XXX!

Artist STERLING RUBY shares his archive of workwear, a collection of clothing that appears as next century’s post-apocalyptic craft. Developed initially as a uniform for his Los Angeles studio, the garments are part of a larger, self-cannibalizing material practice that includes his sculptures and paintings.

Austerity bully, refugee haven, neither, or both? — In light of Germany’s newfound powerful and complex role on the world stage, journalist Joachim Bessing and sociologist Heinz Bude seek to untangle the psyche of a country through its mysterious figurehead leader, ANGELA MERKEL.

In the wake of Hood By Air’s sexually charged takeover of the shop windows at Barneys New York, creative directors SHAYNE OLIVER (HBA), DENNIS FREEDMAN (Barneys), and BABAK RADBOY (Telfar) discuss public transportation, dermatology, and the legacy of Helmut Lang over martini glasses filled with ceviche. Meanwhile, writer HANNAH BLACK unpacks the significance of Hood By Air’s silicone replicas of male models into a pyramid of fashion-commodity-death.

THE LOTTA-DELPHINE COMPLEX — At a time when industry wisdom is crowd-sourced and the consumer holds more power than ever before, 032c’s Jina Khayyer speaks to LVMH executive DELPHINE ARNAULT and mega-stylist LOTTA VOLKOVA, two equal yet opposite centers of gravity in the contemporary fashion landscape.

In tandem with his friends Jeff Koons, Jeffrey Deitch, and Maurizio Cattelan, the Cypriot industrialist and art collector DAKIS JOANNOU has turned an “unreasonable love for art” into a Zeitgeist-shaping pile of acquisitions. 032c’s Thom Bettridge travels to Greece at the apex of the financial crisis to uncover the mysteries behind the tinted windows of Joannou’s pop art battleship, Guilty.

“People, for me, are function. Is that awful?” — After being awarded Britain’s best mens- and womenswear designer in the same year, J.W. ANDERSON receives a visit from architect Jack Self, who administers a personality test at the designer’s home in London The verdict: Anderson is an accomplished devil’s advocate and a hyper-capitalist par excellence. Anderson explains why he prefers interviews to psychotherapy, and how the fashion industry is an autobahn: You can go as fast as you like, as long as you don’t take your hands off the wheel.

“It seems like the only way out is to speed up what is already at work”— Anthropologist JASON PINE shares his field research into homemade meth-cooking in rural Missouri and explains how a backwater drug epidemic is in fact the chemical embodiment of mainstream capitalism.

After bringing art criticism to the masses with Ways of Seeing, author and artist JOHN BERGER gave half of his 1972 Booker Prize money to the Black Panthers and used the other half to relocate to a village in the French Alps. Writer Niklas Maak brings us a portrait of Berger’s life as a rural futurist on the occasion of The Seasons in Quincy, a film initiated by his longtime friend Tilda Swinton.

COLLIER SCHORR and LOTTA VOLKOVA team up for an editorial feature, while enigmatic fashion designer CHRISTOPHE DECARNIN makes his debut as a fashion photographer in a celebration of the American West.

Juergen Teller makes peace with a soccer rival, a Renaissance accountant predicts the future of menswear, and the anti-aging industry performs a Swiss Air First Class takeover of the Bauhaus tradition — all this and more in SELECT, a 32-page bonanza of our favorite products of the season.

032c Issue 30 is available now, with a choice of two covers: COLLIER SCHORR shooting Gosha Rubchinskiy and Balanciaga on the left, and RALF SCHMERBERG shooting Gucci on the right.

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EDITORIAL

When considering the art field as being a raft in speculative time, the tendency is to seek comfort in numbers, regressive ideas such as another return to painting[1] or hedging bets on all sides whilst pursuing an unreasonable personal growth fetish.

These are classic reactions to a perceived risk that arises as a result of readjusting to new data. Uncertainty, if left unmediated, will pose a risk not just to market stability but to conceptual stability as it becomes more and more difficult to differentiate between artists and ads; artworks and hype-objects; or content and sponsored content – keeping us in a state of high drama too complex to decode. For example artists who consciously use marketing strategies as art are contextually mixed up with masses of artists who simply run a marketing strategy. Or, equally, galleries with a reputation for long-term quality regularly use their weight to inflate very short-lived speculative art. It is in these differences that art barters itself off very quickly to sometimes uninteresting effects holding us in a certain inappropriate narrative if we are not careful.

Up until a hundred years ago, it was normal to assume that all art aimed at “beauty” or varying degrees of “representation” and that anything but, would not be considered art. Later, after The Fountain, this evolved into the politics of mass production leading to whatever fallacy that we have today – perhaps a speculative bias targeted at an erroneously projected future consensus. It may be worth considering ditching all retroactive rhetoric about “safe places” in favor of heightening one’s own form of perception (perhaps even through enhancement), to adapt to the new environment and to filter through informational debris.

Inside the art world…

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