The non-Objective World

Presenting a body of work made by Art & Language between 1965 and 1967 together with paintings by Ilya Kabakov made forty years later but very much concerned with the same critical aesthetic ideas, the publication aims to investigate the artists’ understanding and response to The Non-Objective World – Malevich’s seminal writings on Suprematism, written in 1927 and published in English in 1959 for the first time.

Edited by Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts with texts by Art & Language, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Ilya Kabakov, Rod Mengham and Andrei Nakov.

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“I have been collecting Sol LeWitt books for some time now – initially these books were used as material for a series of animations – but slowly I started buying them just to complete a collection. The search for the white spine.

Sol’s books are predominately white and when going through the shelves of book dealers I always pull out the white books with hope… repetition and repeat is a constant – I often acquire the same book twice or even three times… they all look the same.

In 2005 I produced a book called Cover Version – it featured all the covers of my Sol LeWitt books – a kind of what’s in my library compendium.

For this new piece I have fabricated an abstract version of Cover Version.

The books were laid out as if on a small table top – each book carefully measured… height, width and thickness… Certain book sellers use a similar display technique.

This was then transformed into five medium density fibre board wall mounted relief panels. Expertly cut and routed (not by me) to follow the forms given by Mr LeWitt and his publications. The painted and sanded surface made by the fabricator has been left to give the appropriate patina to the entire piece.

Books are there to be handled and not just bought and sold.”

Jonathan Monk, 2015

With a text David Platzker
Edition of 400

€15.00

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SIGNS FICTION

This book aims to collect and present a comprehensive overview of the work of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. It is the result of a long and intense immersion into her archive, and intends to establish the importance of this unique artist – who did not have much recognition in the past – not only to the present day, but also to the precise political context and time to which she and her work belong.

The book presents her typewritings series, all produced between the early 1970s (some of the earliest works are dated 1972) and 1989.
Mail Art was her way to be in contact with the world outside the GDR, otherwise impossible to reach. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Reunification, the artist stopped producing any art: She felt her involvement was no longer “needed”.

At the beginning of 2015 we started to archive Ruth Wolf- Rehfeldt’s work, discovering little by little an enormous and fascinating body of work, composed by more classic poetry, simple typewriting texts, visual poetry, concrete poetry, and abstraction.
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Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt was born in Wurzen, saxony, in 1932.
In 1950 she moved to Berlin, where she still lives today. In 1954 she met the artist Robert Rehfeldt, who she married a year later. She was employed by the exhibitions department at the Academy of Arts, and spent her spare time making drawings. A few years later she started to develop what would become her typical typewriter graphics, and became an active participant in the international Mail art movement. She stopped making art after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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Catalogue raisonné and artist book: TXT IMG brings together forty-one projects by Katharina Gaenssler, from her first photo installation in 2003 up to her latest project Bauhaus Staircase on display on the stairs of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Like her photo installations, where hundreds of single images come together to create a large-scale work, this monograph is shaped by the contrast between the fragment and the whole. It includes all the thirty-four texts that have been written to date about Gaenssler’s work and every one of the 407,954 photographs she has taken to provide the material basis for her projects. The myriad tiny individual images combine on the pages of the book to form abstract colour sequences – taken as a whole they can be interpreted anew, becoming a photographic manifestation somewhere between a colour code and a dynamic spatial expanse.

This book is published to coincide with the exhibition Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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This two-part publication has been released in March 2014 on
the occasion of the exhibition “01-72″ by Daniel Gustav Cramer
at SALTS, Basel. It consists of an artist’s book, giving more
insight into the project and a reader with texts from Quinn
Latimer, Kirsty Bell and an interview with the artist.

Daniel Gustav Cramer works in a multitude of media such as photography, sculpture, book-making and text-work, which often, when united in a show, assume a conceptual meta-structure which points towards narration and well beyond. It attempts to expose the many layers and various possible perspectives one can opt for when looking at an object. These layers have the possibility to link-up, to create possible lines that connect to each other’s cross-path in a non-linear story. Cramer is interested in the different facets of this experience, of how these motions shift and change when they gravitate towards one another.

In his most expansive project to date, Daniel Gustav Cramer let’s us glimpse into the vast experience a work can offer, from the things that happen at the the fringe of the work itself, that which surrounds it, what it entails preparing for it and what reach it can have beyond its presentation form. Cramer offers the audience to feel the halo that hovers above a certain moment, the thing that gives the work the richness, the fullness, that which strengthens the work from within. Firstly, Cramer turns not only the site of the exhibition into one enormous sculptural object but his conceptual approach to the very impetus of the idea is of sculptural nature itself. Secondly, his subject, here a series of water photographs become the vessel to experience the entire social-cultural context these images might be imbedded in, from inception to execution, the audience is involved.

For 01–72, Daniel Gustav Cramer composed a formal letter which enquires about the possibility of installing a group of his photographs in each room of each apartment in a building of his choosing, here the site of his current exhibition, where SALTS is located in. The concept is to install 72 photographs, each depicting a fragment of seawater, taken from roughly 30 meters above sea-level somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. The lens is looking down onto the open water, each water portrait appears like the previous one, but each differs in nuances, since all 72 images are taken in chronological order, in about a span of 18 minutes. Now here, the frames will occupy every room, every hallway, the attic area as well as the boiler room of this housing complex full of residential flats and store fronts. All images are framed in thin white frame and hung in a sort of gradient progression, which follows the rising of the sun, while they hang starting in the basement and follow-through up to the attic. Each portrait touches the wall of an adjacent one, thus suggesting the element of water to flow throughout the entire building. The result of this pictorial sea progression, spreading through a vertically raised architectural space, makes this a collective experience for all the inhabitants of the house.

The artist has an interest in the abstract nature of the water, its biomass and neutrality in which it just is. For the people in the house, who are all invited to live with these images for the duration of the exhibition they hold a different potential; they are all aware that their neighbors have a similar experience, they all share the notion, that above them, below them, next to them is such an image, which was taken just moments before the one they are looking at the moment. They are organically connected through an invisible thread, an image that suggests, a distance, a remoteness, the open sea, liquidity with all its massive physicalness but which here is contained within their own personal space. The repetitiveness of this image creates a certain sense of calm among the diverse environments it is hung in.

Rather than portraying a protagonist, he takes pleasure in capturing the temporal shift which occurs between watching someone or something, recording it and then contextualizing it through the language of an exhibition. Cramer creates lines, lines between his camera and the water, between a point in the Mediterranean Sea and Birsfelden, between writing a letter and the people receiving it. They in turn create a line between the neighbors themselves, between all the images hung and finally between the “object” in its entirety and the public who is visiting the exhibition.

Cramer has managed through a simple but reoccurring gesture to unite, reduce and minimize the experience of “experiencing” an artwork. In this exhibition, exposure is turned inside out and makes the site of presentation not just a platform, but one object, one experience, one sculpture. In this exhibition with the title 01–72, narrative is deconstructed and unthinkable without the space it inhabits. A letter is placed in the garage explaining the idea to the people living in the house, just next to it, on the outside wall of the garage, an extensive list documents the scope of the project, and the path these images have been taking. Inside the exhibition space one discovers the first, the 01 of the seventy-two photographs which was taken at 6.23am of and which unfolds the story and what can partly be followed. It describes what is here but also what can not be seen in the floors above, it forms a sentence without letting the viewer hear the finish of it. The sparse exhibition room leaves way for comfort or discomfortable since the viewer has to decide how or if they want to read the story that is unfolding in front of them. Fact is, Daniel Gustav Cramer consciously withdraws from the centerpiece in order to focus on the core. Daniel Gustav Cramer was born in 1975 in Düsseldorf. He lives and works in Berlin but only very rarely.

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Verbal Photography: Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov and the Moscow Archive of New Art – by Margarita & Victor Tupitsyn

Exhibition presented at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art from April 30 to July 4, 2004.

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Stan Douglas’s The Secret Agent explores the turbulent Seventies and the history of Portugal, which was shaking off a dictatorship and losing its colonies in those years.

The book contains three works by the Canadian artist. The video installation The Secret Agent (première in WIELS in October 2015) tells a story originally written by Joseph Conrad in 1907. Douglas has retained the characters and the plot, but transferred them to the turmoil of Lisbon soon after the Carnation Revolution in 1974. The book contains the original script and an extensive collection of stills and production images.

The second work in the book is Disco Angola, a series of eight staged historical photographs – four in New York, four in Angola – that show the parallels between two more or less simultaneous moments: the hedonistic glam culture of New York nightlife in the Seventies and the civil war in Angola.

The third work, Luanda–Kinshasa, is a 6-hour jazz film set in 1974. It contains eleven songs recorded in the legendary 30th Street Studio, where Miles Davis, Glenn Gould and others have worked.

Stan Douglas is an artist. His films, videos and photographs have been shown internationally since 1970 at events such as Documenta ix, x and xi (1992, 1997, 2002) and three Venice biennials (1990, 2001, 2005). He has had solo exhibitions in leading museums in Europe and North America. Douglas lives and works in Vancouver.

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition INTERREGNUM at Wiels, 9 October 2015 – 10 January 2016.

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This book is published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition produced by the Wiels and curated by Dirk Snauwaert and Charlotte Friling. It held at the Manège de Sury, Mons (European Capital of Culture), from June to October 2015.

This project takes as its starting point the history of Mons and the Borinage, comparing it with the history of the modern age on an international scale, and relating it to the present time through the voices of some twenty artists questioning our times and our environment.

What we generally call “modernity,” that history of multiple conquests targeting control over reality through technology and science, also refers to the exploration through art of the hidden dimensions of our behaviour, our ideas and our subjectivity.

Atopolis proposes to rediscover models of social and cultural utopia developed by personalities from our region, but the exhibition also unveils captivating works created by artists who are watchful and critical of the era of globalisation in which we are living, that of uniform channels of information and free trade, leading both to an unprecedented connectivity and to a loss of frames of reference.

Atopolis, a title which echoes the ideas of Edouard Glissant, a writer who has philosophised about identities and migratory movements, seems an excellent metaphor of our digital era, given the importance it grants to the development of models of cohabiting and coexistence which seem to hark back to the social utopias that have emerged from our region.

This publication is composed of two interdepedent parts: one with the texts of four different authors on all the works at show; the second one with visual and textual elements from the Mundaneum Archives, excerpts of texts of Edouard Glissant, Raoul Vaneigem, Paul Lafargue, a.o., and unpublished material of Allan Sekula on the Borinage.

With Saâdane Afif, Nevin Aladağ, Francis Alÿs, Danai Anesiadou, El Anatsui, Yto Barrada, Huma Bhabha, Vincen Beeckman, Vlassis Caniaris, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Meschac Gaba, Jef Geys, Thomas Hirschhorn, David Medalla, Adrian Melis, Benoit Platéus, Walter Swennen, Diego Tonus, Jack Whitten…

Edited Sébastien Biset and Raphaël Pirenne (sic)

Textes by Jan Baetens, Sébastien Biset, Yves Citton, Charlotte Friling, Raphaël Pirenne, Dirk Snauwaert, Yoann Van Parys, Elvan Zabunyan.

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Catalogue, Zora Mann interview with Julie Church.

This catalogue follows a project proposal presented in Paris, Fiac- Lafayette, in 2015.

The presentation comprises a curtain made out of recycled flip flops that are found littered on beaches and in waterways of Kenya. Flip flops are one of the largest marine pollutants on the Indian Ocean beaches, nowadays there are several artisans in Kenya working on a recycling project of these materials, which started in late nineties initiated by marine conservationist Julie Church.

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Zora Mann (Amershan, 1979), lives and works in Berlin. She studied art at Villa Arson in Nice. She grew up between Africa, USA and Germany.

Julie Church (Kenya) a marine conservationist, founder and director of Ocean Sole – the Flipflop Recycling Company, lives and works in Kenya. She studied environmental sciences at the University of Cape Town, and adopted these skills to the marine environment namely in Kenya, Tanzania and Indonesia. She is passionate about the Ocean and creating opportunities for a better world through art and trade.

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For over twenty years, Michel Blazy (b. 1966 Monaco) has developed an atypical work in the French art scene, which portrays the transformations of matter, which plays with time and life cycles.

This monograph traces the entire career, from his first pieces in 1990 until 2014. An abundant iconography presented chronologically for understanding the evolution of the work. It reveals the metamorphosis and the process of the works themselves.

Questioning our relationship to time and death, he produces works that contain the possibilities of their own demise, thus desecrating the immutability of form.

Text: Valérie Da Costa, Xavier Franceschi, Olivier Michelon, Ralph Rugoff

Co-published with Frac Ile de France
Design: Baldinger • Vu-Huu

Paperback with screen printed dusk jacket, Japanese binding

€45.00

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