Including a text written by Sandra Smets specifically for the book (in NL, DE and EN).
Hold That Thought is a walk through the work of visual artist Johannes Langkamp. This book is a reflection of an archive with (digital) works of art, experiments, (kinetic) models and their documentation. In it moving images are brought to a standstill, only to be put in motion again by its reader. Walk, run, detour, stroll. Discover this book about motion, in motion.
Johannes Langkamp’s (Rotterdam, NL) work arises from wonder, curiosity, and experimentation. Consumed by the question ‘What happens if…’ he searches for the unexpected. Through an ever-expanding archive of his work — videos, photographic techniques, kinetic models, and spatial installations —Langkamp studies the interplay between process and result. These outcomes (finds or failures) capture moments from our everyday life, simulate movements, or facilitate ways to interrupt our viewing habits. Exposing material that broadens our view of reality itself.
Four Instruments is an excerpt from the Los Angeles artist-researcher’s in-progress novel, So That My Balloon Will Take Me Downward. In this chapter, genderfreak race witch K. has a perplexing encounter with a digital camera and accidentally reawakens a demonic spirit named Madame CX. Meanwhile, her research into the work of conceptual painter R.H. Quaytman leads to a painful personal discovery about the limit of her senses.
Da Grau is an iconographic research on the practice of rearing. The collection of images taken from the internet traces of representations of the gesture in the equestrian portrait to the young riders in rural and suburban areas. Samir thwarts Google algorithms to find representations of women on horseback or on motorcycles and non-western men, for this he searches these images by entering the word rearing in different languages such as the term «da grau» in Brazilian.
Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, born in 1992 in Arles and currently based in Marseille, is a French artist who graduated from the École supérieure d’art & de design Marseille-Méditerranée. In his practice, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan seizes upon small objects masquerading as mundane, quotidian, contemporary and above all apolitical. A tonic bottle or a tracksuit rolled up at the ankle. Shopping trolleys and caravan car windows. The work that he develops around these objects however undermines their claim to be anodyne; they become bearers of colonial histories and geopolitical complexes.
Samir Laghouati-Rashwan has recently shown his work in the exhibition “Hijack City” at the Scep gallery (2021, Marseille), the festival “Les Chichas de la pensée” at Magasins généraux (2021, Pantin), « Sur pierres brûlantes » at Friche de la Belle de Mai (2020, Marseille) or in « Diaspora at home » in Fondation Kadist (2022, Paris).
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Born in 1992 in Arles, lives and works in Marseille.
This fanzine is entitled “Vertige Profonde”, Vava Dudu, an exhibition that took place at the Salon du Salon in Marseille in 2017.
Vava Dudu’s solo exhibition “Vertige Profonde,” at Philippe Munda’s Marseille gallery, Salon du Salon, is visually balanced to the point of stillness. Carefully laid out grids of pen and ink drawings on notebook paper and scrawled across the thin cotton sheets that line the walls can do nothing to disturb this equilibrium. Small mounds stand out invitingly, sketched with slim lines inside abstract folds. Holes weep as the silhouettes of fingers slide into them. Disembodied breasts drip, cupped lightly in large hands. What kind of soft volume is that finger spreading beneath and around it with its insistence on the vertical axis? ‘Does it matter?’ Dudu’s drawings seem to say. There is nothing balanced about desire, and yet here it is, stilled, caught on rectangles of paper and cloth, so that one can focus on the implications just of that one mouth and the hand that is tangled around whatever it is sucking on.
“Vertige Profonde” is French for intense vertigo, but in the word profonde there is also the suggestion of a phenomenon that is underlying, as though vertigo were at the foundation of sexual play. The spinning, de-centering center of human experience. As Dudu’s iconographic drawings spill down a rosé sheet meticulously pinned to the wall, its surface tension breaking only to accommodate a wrought-iron radiator, it is easy to see her graphic accumulation as the dizziness of the body caught in time with another body. The fact that the exhibition as a whole is still, nevertheless, results from the fact that there is nothing abject about desire as Dudu envisions it. There is violence, a lack of orientation and of any ultimate climax in her work, but it does not speak to what happens to the body before or after vertigo; there is no motive and no collapse.
Dudu has a reputation for being uncategorizable, an intense iconoclast with a vision governed by irreverence and intuitive play. As a fashion stylist, she made corsets for Jean-Paul Gautier, and then started her own line of accessories using ancient beads. With Fabrice Lorrain, she won the prestigious ANDAM prize for fashion in 2001 on the basis of a series of fashion performances in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Dudu and Lorrain’s innovation was to repurpose used clothing and other material, amalgamating existing garments rather than producing clean or freshly coherent clothing. Together they made pieces for Lady Gaga, Björk, and Cat Power. In 2003, Dudu founded La Chatte, French for pussy, an electro-rock-punk-queer-pop band, for which she creates elaborate costumes like the one she wore for an interview at La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris when their album “Crash Ocean” was released in 2014. Her psychedelic stockings are reminiscent of Dr. Seuss’s early color palette. These are topped by a giant, bright yellow puffer jacket out of which two plastic, wilted, white women’s heads are spilling out of the jacket’s collar on either side of Dudu’s own.
Salon du Salon occupies two adjoining rooms on the third floor of a spacious old bourgeois apartment on l’Avenue du Prado, a wide boulevard radiating out of the center of Marseille towards the South and into the city’s richer neighborhoods. Philippe Munda has run the gallery for four years at its current location, which is also his residence. He is interested in what it means to live with others adjacent to this kind of space.
French bourgeois apartments have an internalized separation of public and private. With its cavernous ceilings, its French windows giving onto a shallow city balcony that lines the entire building, Salon du Salon is intimate without succumbing to informality. This space was designed to encompass social masquerade at the scale of the body, and so it breathes, unlike its massive post-industrial cousin.
The two rooms also separate two very distinct moods in Dudu’s work: one rosé and the other red and black. On either side of the arched doorway that opens between these spaces, Dudu and Munda installed a pair of jackets that are among the few works Dudu did not create in situ as part of her short residency leading up to the exhibition. A red jacket and a black jacket were halved and then sown together with the opposite half of its twin, so that each is red and black. The word “security” is thus split, as is a black star against a red ground. Across both is stitched the phrase, “vous n’avez pas répondu à mon regard,” which translates to “you did not respond to my gaze,” but the address is formal. I read the security jacket as the uniform of mercenary authority and the starred jacket as the representative of some mixture of punk and old-school communism, another kind of order, and only slightly less authoritarian than its twin.
If there is no collapse in “Vertige Profonde,” there is nevertheless an admission of the failure of systems to suture all subjects equally within the fabric of society, into order or counter-order. This failure on the part of the uniformed to respond to the gaze of an Other is the violent pair to desire, it is the other center-less center of society. The refusal to be ethical, the refusal to look, is ultimately the refusal to be undone by the possibility of another’s desire.
A speculative book reflecting on design and architecture centred LARPs (Live Action Role-Play) organised by the Trojan Horse collective. The book is an exploration of Live Action Role-Play as a design and architecture research tool. By inviting the reader to try on different characters, switch roles and reconsider their everyday practices, the book aims to approach issues such as identity, performativity, gender, colonialism, care and fear in the context of architecture, design and urban planning.
May 3rd at 7pm @ Motto Berlin Skalitzer Str. 68 10997, Berlin
Stationed around an art freeport megaproject in the Persian Gulf, and hopping across numerous locations real and fabricated, the book spins off into shadow-histories of synthetic colour production, abstruse citizenship schemes, nuclear warning signs, and syndromes leaking back from the future. During their idiosyncratic philosophical debates, the project employees gradually begin to sense a manic sensorium operating beneath their seemingly sterile financial and logistical systems. Troubles erupt while discussing works of art; futurist imaginaries of financialisation stumble upon the deep inertia of historical time preserved in museums and tombs. Monumental works of art pleasantly rotting in history enter into messy partnerships with volcanoes, hadopelagic planktons, and whimsical vibes of rich people. Stakes are endless while smiles are fake, as the debates swerve into the discreet horror of corporate gleefulness.
Mochu works with video and text arranged as installations, lectures, and publications. Techno-scientific fictions feature prominently in his practice, often overlapping with instances or figures drawn from art history and philosophy. Recent projects have explored mad geologies, psychedelic subcultures, and Indian Modernist painting. Mochu is a recipient of the Edith-Russ-Haus grant for Media Art and his practice has previously been supported by Ashkal Alwan, India Foundation for the Arts, and The Sarai Programme. Exhibitions include the 9th Asia-Pacific Triennial, Sharjah Biennial 13, 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and Transmediale BWPWAP. He currently lives in Delhi and Istanbul.
Published by Reliable Copy in collaboration with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Order the book here
The Library of Mr. & Mrs. Neutra uses the built environment of Richard and Dione Neutra’s VDL House (1932/1965) as a space for site-specific research into the content and material structure of the modernist architect’s library. Working to document the volumes collected in the Los Angeles residence and studio’s extensive library, this book indexes the specific, lived history of a personal book collection marked by its owner’s professional, personal, and familial relationships.
Published on the occasion of Built In organized in the fall of 2021, co-curated by Erik Benjamins and Marta, Los Angeles.
This book is an extension and continuation of an artwork titled Proposal for a House Museum of an Unknown Crying Man by artist Mahmoud Khaled, in which he imagines a house museum for an anonymous person who has entered Egypt’s queer history as an „unknown crying man“ and iconic image.
Mahmoud Khaled was able to continue and complete his work on the performative publication A Book on a Proposed House Museum for an Unknown Crying Man during his residency as a Fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2020 and 2021.
With texts by Sara El Adl, Bassam El Baroni, Edwin Nasr, Hannah Elsisi, Lina Attalah, Ismail Fayed, Hicham Awad.
Autobiography is a series by Tonini Editore, published monthly. Each volume will be dedicated to an artist, who will be free to carry out the topic of the autobiography by means of text or visual supports.
The selection of the artists participating to the series is coordinated by a scientific committee made up of six renown personalities in the world of the art research and collection: Pedro Barbosa (collector and founder of the Coleção Moraes – Barbosa), Alex Bacon (art historian), Claudio Guenzani (gallery owner in Milan, owner of the Studio Guenzani), Michele Lombardelli (artist, composer, typographer and consultant for several publishing houses), Shwetal Ashvin Patel (writer and researcher, founding member of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale), Christoph Schifferli (collector and scholar), Valentino Tonini (director of the homonymous publishing house).
Rehabilitation of Ancestors is an artist’s book based on the media research of Vienna-based artist Yoshinori Niwa. In recent years, Niwa has tried to diversify his approach by using different media forms, from direct interventions in the space, such as performances and happenings, to public campaigns using traditional media. For example, in the work “Dragging Adolf Hitler out of Private Space” (2018), he dared to place an advertisement in a daily newspaper, which is now considered as an old media, and planned to contact the elderly generation in order to get to know their ancestors who lived during the Nazi regime, which casts a dark shadow over Austria. Web works such as “Having a Birthday Party for Someone” (2019), a week-long random viewing of more than 600 videos of private birthday parties uploaded to YouTube but left unseen by most people, are an example of how people socialise in the age of social media. (2019), which was inspired by the way people socialize in the age of social media. In this age of high performance visual media, which are now easily accessible to everyone, the artist is determined to grasp a new image of humanity and to move society forward in the face of these changing roles.
Planning: Yoshinori Niwa Editing: Mika Maruyama Text by: Beatrice Forchini, Curatorial Assistant, Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation for Contemporary Art (TBA21), Jeremy Epstein, Gallerist, Eder Asanti, Takahiro Okuwaki, Curator, Aomori Museum of Art, Sebastian Cichocki, Chief Curator, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw Chief Curator, Museum of Modern Art), Ana Maria Montenegro Jaramio) (Artist, Curator of the 45th Salon Nacional de Artistas)
