Martin Zet: NEKROLOG / OBITUARY – Book Launch
Saturday, April 16 at 7pm in Motto Berlin
Accompanied by
KINO TIC – video compilation
COVER PAINTINGS – vitrines installation
BOOK MANIA – a complete survey on the author’s book production.
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NEKROLOG / OBITUARY
25€
Buy it
Alexandra Leykauf. Roma Publications @ Motto Berlin. 17.03.2016
Alexandra Leykauf, in conversation with Dominikus Müller about her new book published by Roma Publications
from 7pm
Book excerpt:
Caroline Soyez Petithomme: … the reproduction of your own work is always at stake, and even more so here in the context of the current book: an artist’s book and an autonomous work playing with the publication format as opposed to a conventional exhibition catalogue or a classical artist’s monograph. Was this a way for you to ‘get around’ the reproduction of your works?
Alexandra Leykauf: … I consider installation views not only as documents of a past situation, but as something like shards, pieces of a whole — to stay with the metaphor of the kaleidoscope you introduced. You’ve suggested earlier that there is an “elsewhere” that arises within the various layers of reproduction in my work; maybe here that’s located between the pages of this book.
CSP: And is it also a way to mirror your own process of creation — where the book remains the initial vehicle and source of your work, here to return again as a form, as in the current book …?
AL: … yes, at the end of our conversation we return to the book, but also to the beginning: an observation of the act of looking and of our own position towards that at which we look.
Alexandra Leykauf
Roma Publications
ISBN 9789491843563
28€
Buy it
Bridges, tunnels, pipelines, hydroelectric lines, public transit, dams, ports, navigational aids for waterways and
airspace, communication towers—infrastructure is the foundation of our economy and society. Filmed using a
35mm motion picture camera, this project provides a core sample of infrastructure interventions in Canada’s
landscape. Drawing on statistical information on expenditures since 1947 in order to proportionally represent
investment in different sectors, the artists chose these one hundred objects and locations as a subset reflecting diversity
of region and type. Presented in random order, they function as a rigorous dérive through nodes in the network of a material body that can be thought of as comprising a single piece of architecture.
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Project book includes essays by Jonathan Shaughnessy, Richard William Hill, and Carlotta Daró
Published by Oakville Galleries
Monday March 14th
From 7:00pm
Motto is pleased to present a pop-up bookstore at Wendy’s Subway, a non-profit library and workspace located in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The store will be open Feb 19-28, 12-7 p.m., with a talk by Where’s Lucy Hunter & R. Lyon / Artwork by Kayla Guthrie at 7 p.m. on Sunday 21.02.16. This pop-up is the first in a series of curated libraries, shops, and collections displayed in the storefront of Wendy’s Subway’s new Bushwick location.
Where is a think tank and publishing platform headquartered in a shipping container in Brooklyn, NY. It is co-produced by historian Lucy Hunter and artist R.Lyon, who use the think tank as an opportunity to research information theory through experiments with the exhibition format. They publish their findings in book-length on-demand publications. For their talk at Wendy’s Subway, Hunter and Lyon will discuss, among other things: libraries, completeness, empire, and the past. Refreshments will be on hand to lighten the load. The talk will begin promptly at 8pm.
Kayla Guthrie will display a page from her most recent artist book, Sunsets Working (in collaboration with Nathan Antolik, calligraphy, and published by Bodega, New York) in the window. Kayla Guthrie is an artist working in writing, sound, and visual mediums. Her EP Blue was released in 2015 by Mixed Media Recordings. She has performed at Greene Naftali, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Massimo de Carlo (London), and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the curator of Intra Phenom, a New York-based performance series presenting the work of female artists in live and durational genres.
Wendy’s Subway
*New Location*
379 Bushwick Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11206
Edition Taube Book Launch @ Motto Berlin
Thursday January 28
from 7pm
Anahita Razmi: Tutti – a Score for 19 Vloggers
Booklaunch / Screening / Talk
with Anahita Razmi, Designers Constanze Hein and Jan Blessing and Jonas Beuchert / Edition Taube
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Tutti –
Italian word, literally meaning „all“ or „together“. Used as a musical term, for the whole orchestra as opposed to the soloist.
Applied similarly to choral music, where the whole section or choir is called to sing.
Tutti – a work
19 YouTube Vloggers are reading 13 political speech text excerpts.
The video readings are put together into a timed choir on 19 monitors, that are arranged in the exhibition space.
Tutti – a booklet
A publication in relation to this work.
Tutti – a presentation
A screening of video excerpts and some thoughts on vlog aesthetics, political phrasings, repetition, echo and appropriation,
individual and collective, spatial and material arrangements and the coming together of the booklet.
Publication Studio. Carl Skoggard @ Motto Berlin 14.11.2015
from 7pm
Presentation of Walter Benjamin’s Sonnets by translator Carl Skoggard
The presentation will include an introduction to Benjamin’s sonnet writing, a reading of a selection of sonnets in English (Carl Skoggard) and German (Ursula Tax), and a discussion at the end.
Walter Benjamin’s sonnets, written to mourn his friend Fritz Heinle, constitute an important though little-known part of the philosopher’s literary achievement and a unique contribution to the history of the German sonnet. Benjamin would add to their number over a decade, having begun his project soon after the outbreak of World War I and the suicide of his friend. They were among the writings that Benjamin, forced to flee France, entrusted to Georges Bataille in 1940 for safekeeping. Here, for the first time, readers of English are offered translations of all 73 “Heinle sonnets” along with the original German text and an extensive commentary.
Carl Skoggard is the translator of Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood circa 1900 and The “Berlin Chronicle” Notices, both Publication Studio. Previously Skoggard served as the staff writer of Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors. His translation of Ein Jahr in Arkadien, a 1805 gay fiction by Duke August of Saxe-Gotha an Altenburg, appeared in 1999 as Year in Arcadia.
DAVID HORVITZ. MOOD DISORDER BOOK LAUNCH
AT 11:59 PM.
IN RANDY’S DONUTS PARKING LOT, LOS ANGELES.
Xiu Xiu will have a gong to whisper into.*
Ed Steck will call in from Tampa Bay, FL and read poems over speaker phone.**
Michael Smoler will be telepathically reading poems from a donut store in London simultaneously with the launch.
Books will be sold for $15 us cash out of the trunk of my mom’s car. No receipts will be given.
* Xiu Xiu will buy dounuts for the first 21 people who whisper into the gong.
** Unless he falls asleep.
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Mood Disorder documents the propagation of a photograph of David Horvitz across the internet. The image—a self portrait of the artist with his head in his hands, ocean waves crashing in the background—was initially uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons, and placed on various Wikipedia pages. From there, the image began to circulate, appearing on over a hundred websites as a “stock” photo to illustrate articles on a wide range of mental health and wellness issues.
David Horvitz: Mood Disorder
With a text by Ed Steck. Co-published by Chert and Motto Books, Berlin. Designed by The Future.
35 × 25 cm
72 Pages, Staple bound
ISBN: 978-1-927354-23-0
First Edition (2015)
18€
Elisa Storelli and Constantin Engelmann @ Motto Berlin 15.9.2015
from 19.00
Time Piece (additive synthesis bell)
This installation changes the time at Motto. Its bell strikes the hours according to the sci-fi time “System Sin 1.0” (developed by the artists). In place of the regular hours in UTC time, the hours in “System Sin 1.0” are spread along a sinusoidal curve, so that their duration varies throughout the day.
In “System Sin 1.0 time”, as in ancient Rome, day and night are fixed by sunrise and sunset. Between these solar events, sin hours shorten towards noon and midnight. As the duration of daylight increases or decreases slightly every day, the duration of sin hours varies accordingly.
Visvaldas Morkevičius – Public Secrets @ Motto Berlin. 08.09.2015
from 7pm
Visvaldas Morkevičius’ photo book project Public Secrets can be seen as a visual anthropological essay, inquiring on the possibility of voyeurism on self-proclaimed objects of gaze. The book compiles individuals and their bodies that incidentally demand to be looked at, and documents environments and settings that provide the scenography for these staged disclosures.
City patterns, nightlife shots and semi-private spaces are taken into the coming back and forth query, varying in physical and intimate distances. This conceptual camera movement results in pictures of queer places and behaviours, somehow too familiar for a viewer to be identified as ‘secrets’. Precisely the forwardness is uncanny in this book, the voluntary elimination of private, secret and counter, or intelligibly devised disguises that no longer hide, but expose.
Visvaldas Morkevičius (b. 1990, lives and works in Vilnius) is a Lithuanian photographer and media artist whose work situates itself in between fashion, documentary and artistic fields. His minimalistic visual regard holds interest in subcultural scenes, bodily identities and urban lifestyles.