Gay Area Telephone Directory is an artefact from another age. It is an exact facsimile of an American telephone directory published in December 1983 by Gay International Inc. and targeted at a queer population. The phonebook is a now-obsolete format, but before mobile phones and the internet every household had one by the landline. This queer directory featured listings and advertisements for businesses friendly towards or catering to lesbian and gay men at a time when such visibility was a rare and possibly dangerous thing. 1983 was a watershed year for LGBTQ people. The first HIV/AIDS cases were reported barely two years before, marking the beginning of the health crisis that would go on to kill more than half a million (primarily LGBTQ) people within the next ten years. In addition to serving as a portrait of a community and its culture at a crucial stage of development, Gay Areas Telephone Directory stands as a time capsule of lost generation(s) felled by AIDS.

Originally published in 1983 by Gay International Inc. Facsimile edition

Slipcase design by Joe Gilmore

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Folds. Tauba Auerbach.

Texts by Emmanuelle Dauplay, Edwin Abbott Abbott, and Italo Calvino

In connection with Tauba Auerbach’s exhibition “Tetrachromat” at Bergen Kunsthall, Folds presents Auerbach’s eponymous painting series for the first time in book form. In these paintings Auerbach twists and folds the canvas before applying the paint. In its stretched form the flat canvas conjures a trompe l’oeil rendering of its previous three-dimensional state. Transferred to the medium of the book, the paintings are presented here in a new and unexpected way alongside mathematical diagrams and three texts.

Auerbach works with a number of printed media, and the book enjoys a quite central position in her oeuvre: from highly sophisticated book sculptures that are somewhere between physical objects and non-narrative books, to a series of individually made artist books—most recently [2,3] (2011), a pop-up book where six detailed paper sculptures emerge from the book’s pages.

Co-published with Bergen Kunsthall
Design by Joe Gilmore, Qubik, with Tauba Auerbach

D 28€

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