German for Artists. Stine Marie Jacobsen. BROKEN DIMANCHE PRESS.

Posted in art, Artist Book, books, writing on September 3rd, 2015
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GERMAN FOR ARTISTS is a hybrid pocket grammar book and an artist’s humorous reflections on the more philosophical aspects of the German language. Written by the Danish artist Stine Marie Jacobsen, the book offers a critical and very humorous linguistic introduction to the vibrant and international cultural scene in Berlin. The book looks at contemporary art through the optics of language teaching, educates the reader about art and German grammar at one and the same time.

GERMAN FOR ARTISTS offers an insight into the basic German grammar by using well-known people on the international art scene to visualise the rules. The book is designed for artists, curators and other art enthusiasts who dream of learning German. It is an easily portable book offering grammatical first aid and ready-to-use phrases, that will help your understanding of the language in the German art world. A must for all “nicht-so-gut-deutsch” – speaking cultural workers in Germany’s capital! The book offers advice to help art people in different typical social and practical situations in the Berlin art world.

€10.00

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Oslo, Norway. John Holten. Broken Dimanche Press

Posted in art, books, distribution, novel, writing on May 5th, 2015
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After his critically acclaimed debut novel The Readymades, John Holten returns with an intriguing story of love and loss that begins in the affluent and rapidly growing city of Oslo, Norway. It follows the story of William Day, an economic migrant who moves to the city to work as a mechanical engineer before chance thrusts him into the alluring world of Sybille and her artist friend Camille. As they do their best to reconcile growing differences in personality and culture, Camille’s growing influence over Sybille threatens the relationship, before her dangerous friends in the Oslo underworld finally undo William’s search for stability. This sets William – and the reader – in the direction of the novel’s horizon, which is set outside of historical time and space, taking in the history of oil exploration, Norse mythology, coronal mass ejections and post-apocalyptic landscapes.

Written with an emotional honesty, Holten places himself directly in the book as both narrator and first reader, highlighting the discrepancy between any map and the territory it represents. The second book of a project entitled Ragnarok, Oslo Norway is constructed in a unique style and set with a visually arresting layout: a self-styled literary atlas that is a pleasure to hold, it creates a new form for a reading experience in line with how we read online. The story is recounted over thirty nine chapters, each named after various streets and environs of the city of Oslo, followed by a legend that unlocks and provides information from the preceding narrative in a revealing interplay between what is real and what is fiction. Inviting a non-linear reading, Holten has galvanised a new type of literary experience that is open-ended, multi-layered, wholly contemporary.

About John Holten
John Holten is a writer and artist as well as a publisher. Born in 1984 in Ireland, he studied at University College Dublin and the Sorbonne-Paris IV before obtaining an MPhil from Trinity College Dublin. In 2011 John published his first novel The Readymades to great acclaim, and the art group he created in the novel (with Darko Dragicevic), The LGB Group, enjoyed exhibitions in many cities as well as being included in The Armory Show, New York in 2012. Having co-founded Broken Dimanche Press as an international art press in 2009, he has overseen as Editor-In-Chief more than thirty publications and attendant exhibitions, projects and public events.

€14.00

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Body Searches. Jon Ståle Ritland. Broken Dimanche Press

Posted in books, distribution, poetry, science on November 9th, 2013
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Body Searches. Jon Ståle Ritland. Broken Dimanche Press

Several processes of communication are continuously happening in the cells and organs of the body. Human language can be seen as a further development of these. Genetic material or DNA is a prerequisite for this internal communication. The four bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T) constitute what you might call the codes or the letters in the language of the genes. The sequence and composition of the letters are decisive for the synthesis of proteins and signal substances. The poems in Body Searches are inspired by the grammar of the genes and the structure of the DNA-molecule and they endeavor to try and unravel, in a new way, the old question: what is a human?

Language: English
Softcover. 54 pages. 2013

Price: €17.00

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Broken Dimanche Press @ Motto Berlin. 30.03.2012

Posted in art, events, Motto Berlin event on March 29th, 2012
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Tomorrow, Friday 30 March 2012: Broken Dimanche Press @ Motto Berlin

Book presentation, in presence of the editors
Start 7pm

Mountainislandglaciar

By Carlos Fernåndez-Pello, Javier Fresneda, Eduardo Hurtado, Regina de Miguel, Antonio R. Montesinos, Lorenzo Sandoval (Eds.)

With Contributions from: Pavla Ascher, Santiago Eraso, Juan Freire, Emanuele Guidi, John Holten, Nicolas Malevé, Markus Miessen, Laurence Rassel, Alan Pauls, Maria Ptqk, Urzsula Wozniak

Artist’s catalogue / Anthology
Spanish/English dual editions
190 pages
ISBN: 978-3-943196-01-6

After a game-changing year when Europe, in all its tangible and intangible consequences reached far and wide, BDP are proud to announce one of our most ambitious compilations of art, writing and research on our contemporary’s troubled, shape-shifting realities. In a unique dual book publication (English/Spanish editions) edited by the group ‘Correspondence from Eyjafjallajökull’ the book contains the artistic results and research of the group, along with eleven probing and insightful carefully selected ‘collaborations’. These diverse entries take many forms, including fiction, essay, polemnic,

After working together as a research group centering around the event that was Eyjafjallajökull in May 2010, ‘Correspondence from Eyjafjallajökull’ went about re-examining the idea of Europe. With no air traffic possible, Europe found itself connected in a very physical way, a unity that is the opposite in many ways of how ‘Europe’ has been so recently conceived. Through various forms of artistic research and development new, kaleidoscopic perspectives of Europe came about, moving from peripheries such as Turkey and Iceland itself, inward to the imaginative world of European identity creation.

With a strong focus on the problematic nature of European discourse as it is currently offered, the recent rise of protests movements in Spain appear in contributions from Maria Ptqk, Emanuele Guidi, Juan Freire and Santiago Eraso: the 15th May Movement in Spain and The Arab Spring pre-dated but also foretold the wider Occupy movement of 2012, an incredible year in which protest and the right to protest swept the world in myriad forms. The playful use of fiction to create stories and identity is evident in contributions from Pavla Ascher, John Holten and Alan Pauls. Re-imagining the line of Europe’s borders opens the anthology with Urzsula Wozniak’s essay on Turkey’s relationship with Europe, while Markus Miesson offers an extension of the realm of what can be thought of as ‘Europe’ with an extract from his East Coast Europe project.

http://brokendimanche.eu/

The Readymades. John Holten. Broken Dimanche Press

Posted in art, books, distribution, history, literature, writing on August 31st, 2011
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The Readymades. John Holten. Broken Dimanche Press

John Holten’s debut novel The Readymades uses and abuses a number of literary genres: found texts from the history of modern art, witness testimonies, press releases and the narrative style of art-historical accounts. The novel emerges from one of Félix Fénéon’s infamous three-sentence ‘novels’ – appropriated mini-stories from French newspapers – and from the starting point of Fénéon’s narrative readymade, Holten has extrapolated a whole missing art movement and their contemporary European picaresque saga.

The action begins during October 2008 in Paris, with John, a young Irish publisher, meeting the jaded Serbian artist Djordje Bojić. Bojić tells John about the manuscript he is writing: the history of the LGB Group – an Eastern European neo-avant-garde collective that arose in the turbulent environment of mid-1990s Belgrade, when Bojić and his friends, recently returned from the war in Bosnia, started to produce art in order to escape the hysterical nationalism all around them.

Bojić’s manuscript makes up the final part of the novel. Starting out as an academic attempt to document the LGB Group, the sober attitude of the art-historical account soon collapses, and the narrative gradually turns into a disclosing life-story of violence and existential decay. As the manuscript moves closer to the horrific truths of Bojić’s own war experiences, the testimony gradually fails, becomes full of mute lacunas in order to finally reach the ineffable climax of the testimony: the aphasia of trauma, the dumbness of loss, and the ultimate silence of Bojić’s own death.

By juxtaposing the experience of war, the urge for artistic creation and the act of narrating the past, The Readymades launches a double strategy in which the artistic gesture becomes an attempt to overcome war, while simultaneously forced to partake in it. Because art (at least since the original Dada gesture) has sought its own raison d’être in an ongoing dialectic of defiance, transgression and negation of the status quo, it must inevitably find its own dynamic intrinsically linked to acts of violence. With a unique book design, this mise-en-abyme presents a book-within-a-book that takes the reader on a journey to the darker corners of contemporary European history. In collaboration with the Serbian artist and filmmaker Darko Dragičević, Holten has produced a catalogue of LGB artworks and memorabilia, presented both in the book and in exhibition-spaces throughout Europe this coming autumn. In other words: The Readymades is not just a novel, but also an on-going ‘fictitious event’, pushing against any sedate conception of what the literary novel can achieve today, at once not afraid of today’s ‘reality hunger’, nor the legacy of postmodernism.

340 pp., 32 b&w ill.
18.5 x 13 cm
ISBN: 978-3-00-032627-1

D 18€

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