A century of injured men. Bernhard Cella. Album Verlag

Posted in photography on December 30th, 2022
Tags: , , , , , ,

Bernhard Cella’s sweeping pictorial documentary of convalescent men present us with an iconography of a century of medical progress and, by the same token, with a typology of the mise en scenes of soon-to-be homecoming patients. These staged pictures open up a counter narrative to that of vigorous, unscathed, and invulnerable masculinity. They invariably invoke calamitous moments, sustained injuries, the scars of war as well as the causes and circumstances preceding a fateful event that no camera was there to capture. Their insistence on calm, deceleration, casual gestures, and lightheartedness in the photographer’s presence cannot hide this fact. Or, as Paul Virilio put it, “images are ammunition, cameras are weapons.”

Order here

Temporary City Berlin. Revolver Publishing

Posted in Exhibition catalogue on December 29th, 2022
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

One space, One structure, A set of regulations.

Temporary City is an exhibition that starts from the basis: the artist. No theme or curator is involved. During the course of one week fifteen artists worked in the Atelierhof Kreuzberg and challenged, negotiated and discussed their practices in order to use these as a base to develop an exhibition. Their works were presented on an architectural structure, an ‘obstacle’ designed for the show. The result of this process could be seen during the exhibition Temporary City Berlin 2009.

Artists: Anton Cotteleer, Ilke De Vries, Yoko Enoki, Paul Hendrikse, Anouk Kruithof, Nicolas Leus, Katrin Plavcak, Olivier Schrauwen, Nele Tas, Iris Van Dongen, Stijn Van Dorpe, Ada Van Hoorebeke, Tamara Van San, Sarah Westphal, Nada Sebestyén.

Texts, Introduction: Nele Tas; Exhibition Diary: Christophe Van Gerrewey; No Such Things as a Plan: Andreas Müller; St Curatus at the Crossroads: Christoph Tannert.

Order here

The Playground Talk. Romana Ruban

Posted in illustration on December 21st, 2022
Tags: , , , , , ,

In her exhibition ‘The Playground Talk’, closing her residency at Officina Neukölln, Romana Ruban creates the echo of a dialogue between kids that she overheard during a trip to Odesa. The playground chitchat consists of dreams about the neighbor’s car and is carved into a zine with simple but lighthearted illustrations. The linocut prints appeal to both the inner child and the responsible adult. With these kids’ quotes, the artist wishes to show not only a playful childhood and the joy of simple things, but she also wants to bring up a few questions. Are we dreaming in the right direction? What do we stand for in the end?

The idea for a zine came up in 2021, right after the trip, but was on hold. Officina’s residency for artists in exile gave new layers and meanings to the imprint of the peaceful past, as Romana fled Ukraine to Germany after the full-scale invasion of Russia.

Order here

MIKE HENTZ: WORKS 1. Mike Hentz. Buch Handlung Welt

Posted in Uncategorized on December 15th, 2022
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Signed copy

Published in 1979-1980
Hand bound, untrimmed edition 2022 from the original print run

Japanese writing and translation by Yoshio Shirakawa

Swiss-American graphic designer, musician, photographer and performance artist Mike Hentz ranks among the pioneers of new media art. He co-founded the legendary performance group Minus Delta t and the artist groups Frigo, Radio Bellevue and the European Media Art Lab. In the 1990s he realized the project Piazza Virtuale with Van Gogh TV and a great many interactive cable and satellite television shows with University TV. Hentz also taught at art schools in Germany, Switzerland and various Eastern European countries.

Order here

Coll.#01. Martin Vácha, Daniel Quisek, Andrea Vacovská (Eds.). Displaay Type Foundry

Posted in graphic design, typography on December 14th, 2022
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Coll.#01 is the first comprehensive catalogue of Displaay’s current typeface collection. It is a guide to twenty typeface families as well as an insight into upcoming typefaces and custom projects. For bookworms, it can serve as a tour guide through the labyrinth of wikipedia topics that occupy our minds. Available with three different coloured edges, red, green and blue.

Displaay is an independent type foundry established in 2014 and based in Prague, Czech Republic.

Order here

50 anniversaries. Freek Lomme. Set Margins’

Posted in photography, poster, Zines on December 9th, 2022
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

50-year-olds: they’re hung up in streets, stuck in dull, damp plastic sleeves; they are taped to lampposts, to electricity substations or traffic signs, or they’re attached to trees with drawing pins.

This publication and exhibition explore the typically Dutch tradition of publicly displaying home made photo collages throughout streets and neighborhoods in celebration of a person’s 50th birthday.

Almost reminiscent of missing pet posters, amateur portrait photographs are distributed and displayed by being taped onto lamp posts and stapled to trees by friends or relatives, at the mercy of public opinion. Exposed to judgment and ridicule by friends, family and strangers, due to the usually demeaning nature of the photographs through unflattering holiday photos and the likes, individuals are exposed, raised out of anonymity and placed in the public eye.

To an extent the street becomes an exhibition space for the non art-oriented person. It’s a document of the democratisation of the public domain, through a tradition which allows artistic expression and experimentation for anyone, under the gaze of a watchful even if disengaged audience.

The presented collection of posters, possibly a study of non-intentional art under the scrutiny of the public eye, constitutes an archive and an ode to amateur, home made graphic design, made possible through the democratisation of artistic means and software such as word art, paint and clip art. A non-hierarchical demonstration of taste and aesthetic is catapulted into the streets and now gathered in the exhibition space. Perhaps involuntarily, the posters bear a sense of humour and irony to the rest of the on-looking public.

Order here

PART 01 SONG MOUNTAIN AREA THE CENTRE DIRECTION. Fanny Zaman. a.pass

Posted in Uncategorized on December 6th, 2022
Tags: , , , , ,

PART 01 SONG MOUNTAIN AREA THE CENTRE DIRECTION (book and DVD) presents a portrait of a mountain. The mountain is situated in the Chinese district Dengfeng in the center of Henan province. The mountain is holy and the area “energetic” and famous for its martial arts tradition.
The mountain base is inhabited and the surrounding area is mainly a mining district. This combination of activities, this coalition of dust and bodies, is it coincidental, collateral or merely a minor detail in the eternal realms of Chinese cosmology? THE CENTRE DIRECTION is a critical portrait of a mountain at the crossroad of rumors, facts and choreography.

Order here

Latefa Wiersch. artpop_insta. Latefa Wiersch. Kunsthaus Langenthal; Präsens Editionen

Posted in Exhibition catalogue on November 22nd, 2022
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Latefa Wiersch. Original Features”, Kunsthaus Langenthal, 25 August – 13 November 2022.

All texts and images originally published on Instagram @artpop_insta between 2018 and 2022.

The Kunsthaus Langenthal presents the first institutional solo exhibition of the work of Latefa Wiersch (*1982 in Dortmund, Germany, lives and works in Zurich). Her work is populated by liminal beings that combine elements of human and animal, plant, object, and machine, and that pupate and transform. Drawing on observations of everyday life and a provocative sense of humor, these figures tell stories about social realities and the life of the artist. Against the background of current discourses on identity, Latefa Wiersch confronts the gaps in her own history. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a performance with the Dandara Modesto and Rhoda Davids Abel.

Text & Images: Latefa Wiersch
Graphic Design: Dorothee Dähler
Editing: Eva-Maria Knüsel
Proof Reading: Thomas Skelton-Robinson

Edition of 300

Order here

Passing Images: Art in the Post-Digital Age. Marie-France Rafael. Floating Opera Press

Posted in politics on November 17th, 2022
Tags: , , , ,

Since the 2010s, the line between public and private, online and offline have increasingly become blurred by digitalization and social media. In contemporary art, digitality has assumed a new type of presence—no longer only as a virtual sphere of sociality, but increasingly as a technological interface that structures our embodied experiences. What is presented in an “exhibition“? And how should we write about the new types of post-digital images we are seeing (in them)? In Passing Images: Art in the Post-Digital Age, Marie-France Rafael provides an attempt to write with art, rather than just about it. Rafael aims to retrace the living spirit of art and the procedural-performative experience of art in her writing.

Marie-France Rafael is a tenure-track professur at the Zurich University of the Arts. She studied art history and film studies in Berlin and Paris, and holds a PhD in art history. From 2011 to 2015, she was a research associate at the Free University of Berlin and until 2019 taught at the Muthesius University Kiel, Department of Spatial Strategies/Curatorial Spaces. Her interview book with French artist Brice Dellsperger, On Gender Performance, was published with Floating Opera Press in 2019.

Order here

JULIO LE PARC — A MONOGRAPH. Le Livre Art Publishing

Posted in Monograph on November 1st, 2022
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Le Livre Art Publishing is proud to announce the upcoming release of Julio Le Parc, the most comprehensive monograph to date on revered Argentinian artist Julio Le Parc. Following Le Parc’s prolific and visionary body of work, this extensive 492 page volume takes a deeper look into the intellectual and creative process of the artist.

Featuring a critical anthology dating back to 1967, an opening essay by Jean de Loisy, an entire section dedicated to Julio Le Parc’s writings and over 600 color plates, this monograph takes us on a journey through the innovative and ground-breaking work of the artist, thus surveying the pivotal « Before Paris » era before diving into the Surfaces and Color Surfaces periods, and continuing its exploration with Contortions, Light, Installations, Games, Alchemies, and Le Parc’s Virtual Museum.

An in-depth photo-biography of the artist further deepens our understanding of Le Parc’s portrayal, along with an anthology of texts by Mario Benedetti, Alberto Biasi, Jorge Romero Brest, Jean Clay, Gérard Fromanger, Julián Gállego, François Morellet, Pablo Neruda, Jean-Louis Pradel, Paco Rabanne, Pierre Restany, and Julio Le Parc.

Order here