A book that acts both as library and exhibition space, selecting, arranging, and housing texts and images, aligning itself with printed matter in the process.

Fantasies of the Library lets readers experience the library anew. The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas—as a platform of the future. One essay occupies the right-hand page of a two-page spread while interviews scrolls independently on the left. Bibliophilic artworks intersect both throughout the book-as-exhibition. A photo essay, “Reading Rooms Reading Machines” further interrupts the book in order to display images of libraries (old and new, real and imagined), and readers (human and machine) and features work by artists including Kader Atta, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, and others.

The book includes an essay on the institutional ordering principles of book collections; a conversation with the proprietors of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive; and a dialogue with a new media theorist about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source ebooks. The reader emerges from this book-as-exhibition with the growing conviction that the library is not only a curatorial space but a bibliological imaginary, ripe for the exploration of consequential paginated affairs. The physicality of the book—and this book—“resists the digital,” argues coeditor Etienne Turpin, “but not in a nostalgic way.”

Contributors: Erin Kissane, Hammad Nasar, Megan Shaw Prelinger, Rick Prelinger, Anna-Sophie Springer, Charles Stankievech, Katharina Tauer, Etienne Turpin, Andrew Norman Wilson, Joanna Zylinska.

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An ensemble which contends that the meaning of the Anthropocene is less a geological re-formation than it is trans-formation of both land and animal; once exposed to some of the parameters defining this transition, the reader-as-exhibition-viewer may begin to discern erratic rhythms generated by the creatures of nonconformity that inhabit, with their violence, struggles, and love the vast, machinic reality called Earth.

Land & Animal & Nonanimal turns the attention from the built space of cultural repositories to the postnatural landscapes of planet Earth. In his interview about urban soils of the Anthropocene, landscape architect Seth Denizen considers a history of land use practices that is also reflected in artist Robert Zhao Renhui’s photographs of Singapore as a scenario of continuous development. Inspired by a recent visit to the environment of Wendover in the Utah desert, Richard Pell and Lauren Allen of Pittsburgh’s Center for PostNatural History make a case for a postnatural imprint upon the geologic aspects inherent in the concept of the Anthropocene. By encountering “the last snail,” environmental historian and philosopher Thom van Dooren considers the meaning of hope and care in the context of species extinction. And while curator Natasha Ginwala’s paginated series with contributions by Bianca Baldi, Arvo Leo, Axel Staschnoy, and Karthik Pandian & Andros Zins-Browne turns to cosmological and ancestral human-animal scenarios, sound artist and researcher Mitchell Akiyama explores philosophies of consciousness against the background of the phonogram in nineteenth-century simian research.

Co-edited by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin

Design by Katharina Tauer

13 color + 39 black/white images

€15.99

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Fantasies of the Library

… is a sequence of pages wherein the reader-as-exhibition-viewer learns, rather surprisingly—but with growing conviction—that the library is not only a curatorial space, but that its bibliological imaginary is also a fertile territory for the exploration of paginated affairs in the Anthropocene.

Fantasies of the Library inaugurates the intercalations: paginated exhibition series. Virtually stacked alongside Anna-Sophie Springer’s feature essay “Melancholies of the Paginated Mind” about unorthodox responses to the institutional ordering principles of book collections, the volume includes an interview with Rick Prelinger and Megan Shaw Prelinger of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive by Hammad Nasar, Head of Research and Programmes at the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; a conversation with media theorist Joanna Zylinska about experiments on the intersections of curatorial practice and open source e-books; and a discussion between K’s co-director Charles Stankievech and platform developer Adam Hyde on new approaches to open source publishing in science and academia. The photo essay, “Reading Rooms Reading Machines,” presents views of unusual historical libraries next to works by artists such as Kader Attia, Andrew Beccone, Mark DFantasies of the Libraryion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, Andrew Norman Wilson, and others.

published by K. Verlag, Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Paperback, thread-bound, 160 pages
30 color + 15 black/white images
ISBN: 9780993907401

15.99€
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Traversals.  Anna-Sophie Springer / K.Verlag Press

TRAVERSALS is based on a series of conceptual interviews with Dora Garcia, Chris Kraus, Mark von Schlegell, Charles Stankievech, and Jacob Wren originally produced for an installation in an art gallery. As a re-issue of these texts the forthcoming publication continues K.’s interest in the book-as-exhibition. Each invited contributor has found a unique way to explore the hybrid spaces between genres and art forms, and the discussions focus especially on the role and relationship between visual art and writing. While the interview process was rather formalised––with one set of five identical questions posed to each person in the first round, and then five individual questions asked in a second round in response to the first five answers––the texts themselves delight through a personal tone and a great openness for both idiosyncratic trajectories and unexpected trasversals between the five different chapters.

The material was originally produced for the piece TRAVERSALS (With Ladder) shown in the exhibition 5x5Castelló2011 at Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Castelló, Spain (8 July – 18 September 2011).

On the occasion of 5×5 the interviews were pinned to the wall in a grid while a sliding library ladder allowed for a playfully embodied reading experience. The spatialised format revealed the parallels in the conversations as well as their differences – particularly as the conversations evolve.

€ 16.00

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The Subjective Object, Anna-Sophie Springer (Ed.), published by K Verlag.

THE SUBJECTIVE OBJECT engages with the controversial site of the ethnographic museum and the role of the archive. In particular, the 1920’s photographic archive of the indigenous people of India by the German physical anthropologist and racist theorist Egon von Eickstedt (1892–1965) serves as a case study for an investigation into the role of historical artifacts in light of contemporary political situations. The nine interviews with curators, artists, anthropologists, and social workers provide the core of the book actively discussing the complicated issues around the archive’s function in producing knowledge. An annotated thread of images serves as a critical apparatus addressing the visual history of ethnographic display and classification practices—both in the scientific field as well as the cultural field at large. Questioning the assumption that the archive presents the “fact” of the “Other,” three literary texts counterpoint the inherent fantasies within scientific research. Just as the book begins with an archive—the Eickstedt photos—the book ends with a new archive—photos of the exhibition “The Subjective Object—(Re)Appropriating Anthropological Images” at the GRASSI Ethnographic Museum of Leipzig—illustrating the project’s desire to not only engage with the history of display but also to propose a future of display strategies and social engagement.

INTERVIEWS WITH: Carola Krebs, Meghnath, Theo Rathgeber, Nora Sternfeld, Alexandra Karentzos, Christopher Pinney, Philip Scheffner, Britta Lange, Jesko Fezer + Raqs Media Collective
LITERARY TEXTS BY: Franz Kafka, Brion Gysin + Suzan-Lori Parks
DESIGN BY: Timm Häneke
LANGUAGE: German and English

D 10 €

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Loveland. Charles Stankievech.

Concept + Design by Charles Stankievech
With Texts by M.P. Shiel, Mark von Schlegell, Mark Lanctôt + Anna-Sophie Springer

LOVELAND is a monograph conceptualised and designed by Canadian artist Charles Stankievech that collects primary sources, fiction and critical texts for his artwork produced for the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Sobey Art Award in the Fall of 2011. Typical of the artist’s research methodology, the book links a spectrum of fields across a broad span of history. Somewhere between the two poles of colour field painting and military colonisation in the Arctic, Stankievech has created a dense web that connects the birth of synthetic pigment and chemical warfare to the Romantic landscape and contemporary geopolitical issues. As curator Mark Lanctôt writes in his critical essay: “Stankievech’s work … directs us away from a-political modernist pictorial utopias towards something more telling: how the relationship between the narrative of history and the site it is connected to can veer into unsuspecting directions, escaping our perceived mastery over it.”

An exquisite edition of 300 with letterpress embossed cover, collation of unique paper stock for each section and 5 colour offset printing.

D 22€

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