“Body to book” is an upcycling project that explores the relationship between the human body and books. It comprises six sculptures assembled from coat fragments and books, each covering a naked body. This arrangement invites explorations of sensuality and intimacy and encourages direct interaction with the subject. Through calling us to examine the subtle interactions between the body and the books, it offers new perspectives for artistic, philosophical and personal reflection on matter, media and the human condition.
Vit Havránek in conversation with the artist (5pm) ____________________________________________
Motto – 38 rue du Vertbois – 75003 Paris ____________________________________________
“body to book” is an upcycling project that explores the relationship between the human body and books. It comprises six sculptures assembled from coat fragments and books, each covering a naked body. This arrangement invites explorations of sensuality and intimacy and encourages direct interaction with the subject. Through calling us to examine the subtle interactions between the body and the books, it offers new perspectives for artistic, philosophical and personal reflection on matter, media and the human condition.
Bernhard Cella lives and works in Vienna and Trieste. Recent and past exhibitions include Color Inventory Booklaunch, Secession, Vienna (2024); Location Advantages, Vesch, Vienna (2024); Systema, Marseille (2024); Radical Matter, dieAngewandte, Vienna 2024; Xhibit – Various Exhibition Practices, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (2024).
Vít Havránek is an art historian and curator with a focus on contemporary art and critical studies. Since 2019, he has served as Vice-Rector at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and currently resides at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. From 2002 to 2019, he was the director of tranzit.cz15(12.5%), part of a network of organizations active in five Central and Eastern European countries. He has also worked as an external editor for JRP Ringier and curated or co-curated exhibitions of various scales on different continents, including In the Matter of Art in Prague, U3 Triennale in Ljubljana, Jakarta Biennial 2017, and Manifesta 8. He is a co-founder of the group PAS, and his articles have been published in books and catalogues by JRP Ringier, Centre Pompidou, MoMA, MIT Press, Sternberg Press, and others.
Vibrational Semantics explores the voice’s ability to shift seamlessly between signification and sorority, from speech sound to noise. Questions of linguistic ambiguity, embodied voicing and feeling/meaning are investigated in relation to the place and presence of the performed voice.
The project is part of Samuel Brzeski’s ongoing artistic engagement with Lydatgalleriet, involving several newly commissioned text works curated by Samuel and commissioned by Lydgalleriet.
Part of me is this poor architect dealing with the prob lem of existing structures in the city, part of me is this amateur dancer or performer who wants to return ideas of rhythm to the activity of building, or of re-appropriating the built environment. Building is also un-building, re cycling or improvising new uses for what’s already been set up in places like New York, Berlin or Stockholm, whether in a museum or in my own apartment, and th ques tion of re-appropriating privatized, urban space always somehow begins with the body, its ways of moving and the temporalities it engages when it goes to work or opens up spaces of non-work in work. There is an idea of play that prefers not to decide what is and what isn’t work, what is and what isn’t useful in the activity of building. Use, most of the time, means diverting materials or spaces from their prescribed functions, inventing ways of making these things improper again. Aside from my interventions in galleries and museums, I have done things like set up a year-long, free postal service in Stockholm, built an underground house on city property in Berlin, removed ad Vertisements from downtown areas, made music with my house keys and moonwalked around Lower Manhattan.
Artist book on the occasion of the exhibition Non-solo show, Non-group show, interview with Ei Arakawa, Nikolas Gambaroff, Nick Mauss, Nora Schultz and Klara Liden (Engl.), 236 pp. with 200 b/w images, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2010. The book is a joint project by the artists Ei Arakawa, Nikolas Gambaroff, Nick Mauss and Nora Schultz, realized on the occasion of their exhibition Non-solo, Non-group show in Zurich in 2009. It s the first monograph on Klara Liden and documents her works from the recent years – performances, videos and installations, that often incorporate found materials to explore the conditions of physical as well as of psychic spaces. It choses a form between artist book and catalogue, that draws on the DIY-aesthetic of Liden’s works and gives an overview of her artistic practice.
Part performance transcript, part conceptual writing exercise, this project works from an extract from Sam Riviere’s poem Miserable I hope you do too. The original text was rewritten and recombined into multiple possibilities of form and content. The variations of this text were then recited – from memory – in a semi-improvisational way over a four hour performance that took place at Black Box Theatre in Oslo. Focusing on the meditative pace and rhythmic intonation of the original poem, various alternative possibilities for the poetic narrative were imagined and explored, creating a generative palimpsest of poetic experience that was shared with the audience. Here, the text from the performance is transcribed, allowing the poem to further mutate and shift from the realm of the voice back onto the space of the page.
With an introduction by the original poet, Sam Riviere.
We are happy to invite you about a special event coming up that we’re certain will pique the interest of those who delight in the fusion of music, video art, and performance.
X-IMG presents a program of audio-visual excess and dark dance music on May 18th at Ohm, Berlin.
Jubal Brown and Tasman Richardson, who recently awed us with a stunning reading and performance at our bookstore, are now set to light up the stage.
Diese Publikation vereint Quellen, Referenzen, Bildmaterial und den Rohtext des Theaterstückes hexen flexen, das im August 2021 am Theater Basel uraufgeführt wurde.
Sie stellt eine Vernetzung unserer gemeinsamen Recherche über Hexen dar und bildet eine Kontextualisierung der künstlerischen Arbeit, indem sie zwischen akademischer Herangehensweise, künstlerischer Forschung und intuitiver Vernetzung changiert. Wir bezeichnen die Verben hexen und flexen als eine Praxis, die mit Überschreibungen spielt und in der es explizit um Rückeroberung von Raum, Begriffen und Körpern geht.
Die Publikation hat kein Ende – sie stellt einen Ausschnitt aus der andauernden Recherche von Louisa Raspé und Jana Furrer dar, welche mit Johanna Schäfer und Mona Mayer geteilt und weitergewebt wurde. So ist eine Art Gewebe entstanden in weitreichender Kompliz:innenschaft; mit all jenen, die vertreten und auch nicht vertreten sind.
Please join us for the book launch of ANSKA with author Agnė Juodvalkytė and a performance by Tania Elstermeyer.
Friday 17 February 2023 from 6 pm
Motto (im Hinterhaus) Skalitzer Str. 68 Berlin, 10997
Agnė Juodvalkytė (b. 1987, Vilnius, Lithuania) is a visual artist currently living in Berlin and Vilnius. Her practice is focused on abstract painting and textiles mostly. She received BA in Painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts (2010) and studied Visual Arts in Spain at the Universidad de Castilla La Mancha (UCLM, Cuenca) (2009). Her recent shows include solo exhibition Tools for the Future (ANSKA) at Galerie Bernau, Bernau bei Berlin (2022); Sweet Dreams Foundation at Nida Art Colony, Nida (2022); ‘Gathering’ at Atletika, Vilnius (2021); ANSKA at Blake & Vargas, Berlin (2021); group show Audra at Pamario gallery, Juodkrantė (2021); Terpė at (AV17) gallery, Vilnius (2020).
Tania Elstermeyers textual compositions bring registers of lyrical writing to mind, which are performed in alliance to a distinctive kind of music beyond established genres. During her performances, sceneries resemblant of theater backdrops are created, ultimately by operating with a vocabulary that is minimalism. Her work slivers traditional outlines of narrator and spectatorship by luring oneself into spaces of intimacy that attract interest and cause discomfort. (Text by Oliver Wellmann)
Authors: Agnė Juodvalkytė Publisher: Year: 2023 Pages: 224 Dimensions: 17 x 24 cm Language: English ISBN: 978-3-00-074288-0
Edited by Philippe Gerlach and Agnė Juodvalkytė Design by Marijn Degenaar Texts by Brad Feuerhelm, Juri Marian Gross, Marija Repšytė, and Nele Ruckelshausen
Through photographs of the studio process and visual sketches the first publication ANSKA by artist Agnė Juodvalkytė offers an overview of the artist’s studio practice from the past years while creating a sensory world of recollection. The book marks the conclusion of the ANSKA cycle in her work.
“In Agnė Juodvalkytė’s work, the weave that is bound by cloth, ash, dirt, and dye, invokes memory, utility, and hand-infused labor. The stains, folds, and strained fraying edges of her chosen material are also infused, caked, and distressed to provide new readings of production. There is something familiar in her use of textiles. Each fold of fabric is detailed by a weave birthed from the center spiraling out in an obstinate mosaic of emotion wrought from the plunder of self.” — Brad Feuerhelm
“I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad” is an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. Invested in queer theory and institutional critique, she sets out to perform the artist “differently” through a process of negation and passivity, inadvertently causing her relationship with the institution’s curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Louwerens’ labor as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begins to overlap and blend under the name of “performance.” “I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad” is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability.
Pia Louwerens is a performance artist and researcher from the Netherlands, living in Brussels. Her research revolves around the becoming of the artistic subject, the I who writes, speaks and makes, in relation to the (institutional) context. From 2019 – 2020 Louwerens was working as embedded artistic researcher at a big research project, for which she was embedded in an art institution. Through this research she attempted to perform or practice the artist, and thereby the institution, differently. Her work usually takes the shape of a performance in which she speaks, switching between registers of the actual, the possible, the professional and the anxious artist.
This book is an anomalous and layered object. It is split into chapters, following the way the Matrice exhibition was developed and completed over many months of work. Some key phases in the construction of the project in fact took place in the period prior to its opening, in a form that straddles the private dimension of an artist’s work and the public dimension of the exhibition. As also discussed in the critical text, Jacopo moved his studio to the spaces of the Fondazione Carispezia in the months preceding its opening. Here, within a triangular, uterine structure, the physical ‘matrix’ of the exhibition to be precise, he produced most of the works that would then be exhibited. And indeed many things took place inside it. The catalogue thus attempts to account for all of this. The colour photographs were taken by photographer Andrea Rossetti to document the two moments in which the project came into being. The first is made up of the so-called ‘invisible exhibition’: in order to understand the genesis of Matrice, we in fact need to understand how the exhibition is the final result of the ‘real’ exhibition that no one but the artist and very few others had the pleasure of seeing. All the works in this closed space, built in the very heart of the Foundation space, were in fact displayed on the walls, yet destined never to be seen by any visitor and then to be brutally dismembered. As the photos show, the works displayed are covered with a series of sheets to prevent them from being seen during Jacopo’s performance a few days prior to the opening. Only the photographs installed horizontally above the sculptures are partially visible. In the centre of the room, on the other hand, we can still see the tools used in the creation of the works, and the musical instruments that would later be played during the performance. The second moment taken by Rossetti consists of the actual Matrice exhibition itself, which the public could then view during its opening months. Andrea is one of the world’s leading exponents of that fine art which is the documentation of artworks and especially of contemporary art exhibitions. It is indeed an approach that requires great sensitivity and critical outlook. It is a translation process in which a – fruitful – betrayal of the material to be translated is and always will be necessary. A loving and respectful betrayal which was indeed requested by Benassi when he brought Rossetti on board for this task. The two sections of the catalogue must therefore be seen as a true collaboration between the two, in the wake of the many already developed by Jacopo with other artists in the fields of performance and sound research. The black-and-white photographs in the book were instead all taken by Jacopo Benassi or devised, prepared and coordinated by him. They recount the most performative and moving moments of the exhibition and its making, and are very much integrated with Andrea Rossetti’s work, adopting the same brutality with which Jacopo intervened in the Foundation exhibition space.
