On the occasion of the launch of the SangBleu typeface, Swiss Typefaces issues a book for lovers of the printed letterform. On 128 pages, “SangBleu Typeface: The King, His Court, The Explorer & The Gift” celebrates cutting­edge typography in general and the SangBleu fonts in particular. Devised as a collector’s item, it provides a unique combination of design and content: at the heart of the publication is a novella by Daniela Party, specifically written for this purpose. The book starts off with illustrations of a skull and a beheaded female warrior, followed by serpents and an Aztec ghost figure. This dark and savage imagery sets the atmosphere. Giant initials, printed in loud pink, lead into the book like drumbeats in the jungle – S – B – G – U… The title page presents the names of the five collections that form the SangBleu typeface: Empire, Kingdom, Republic, Versailles, Sunrise. Each family is displayed on a spread of 20 pages, in a layout that was freely inspired by a type specimen for Caslon Old Face from 1924. The sample pages emulate all kinds of text types, from novels and magazines to drama and poetry, in sizes big and small. Some pages feature large headlines or block quotes in italics. Others show off spectacular drop caps and strongly contrasting sizes or weights. Designers interested in seeing the Cyrillics do not miss out either. The scope and versatility of the SangBleu collection is exhibited in its entirety. All text is taken from Daniela Party’s novella. Set in the late 17th century, an era of absolutism, superstition, and colonialism, it narrates the story of Meztli, an indigenous Mexican woman with extrasensory powers. Captured by French explorer La Salle, she is sent as a gift to Louis XIV, the Sun King – a gift that would set off a series of macabre events involving witchcraft, lust, envy, and death. Designed by Swiss Typefaces, the SangBleu Typeface book was printed in five colors, four of them Pantone spot colors including metallic and neon inks, and is further enriched by a special binding with several fold­out pages – all made in Switzerland.

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PpR Journal @ Motto Berlin Wednesday November 29th, from 7pm

PpR Journal, Issue 3
The coco Issue

How do education and creativity exist together? In an age where students are faced with ‘learning outcomes’ and institutions are scrutinised on success rates and league tables, what does that mean for the student, and how does this impact on creative development, for both the individual and as an industry as a whole?
Looking at the wider context within the creative arts, including music and cinema, what does freedom to create on one’s own terms really mean, and is this possible within the frameworks of today’s commercial, art, and educational sectors? Is there an alternative model, and can it work?
This issue of PpR Journal originated from the idea of a ‘free school’. The Japanese fashion designer Yoshikazu Yamagata (writtenafterwards and Written By) founded coconogacco, an independent fashion school in Tokyo. A school where students do not follow learning outcomes and assessment criteria, and instead are free to explore their individual creative potential without such constraints. Exploring the notion of freedom singer/songwriter Tanita Tikaram discusses the creative process in an intimate conversation, Anton Gottlob photographs Kazuko Hohki of Frank Chickens, and Chikashi Suzuki joins a class of students at coconogacco.

Contributors:
Chikashi Suzuki, Anders Edstrom, Olu Odukoya, Hajime Sawatari, Anton Gottlob, Hajime Sawatari, Elizabeth Gregory, Miho Miyachi, Ayako Shuto, Laura Gardner, Maya Akashika, Sumire Hayakawa, Yoshiko Kurata, Marija Radakovic.

PERIOD. is a zine by Lena Modigh hat unapologetically focuses on the contemporary female narrative by female-only contributors.

For the fourth issue of our journal, we decided to go where relatively so few women have gone before – SPACE. Space is defined as being 100 kilometres or 60 miles above the surface of the Earth, and about 550 people have been there. Of those, 57 have been women.

We thought we were going to be getting a lot of landscapes and interiors from our contributors but as you can see, the majority of these female responses were about people: inner space or the space between us maybe? And no one did outer space, the big universe, we emailed NASA, but they never got back 😉

Contributors include Martha Cooper, Kate Monro, Erna Klewall, Lena Modigh, Yasmine Ganley, Lara Minerva, Jessica Buie, Erin Sanders-McDonagh, Matilde Søes Rasmussen, Perdita Fenn & Julia Cody.

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See you at Chicago Art Book Fair this weekend!

To what extent can we imagine community, exchange, and collective projects that no longer fall back on the dominant narratives of nation, fatherland, and family? This question posed by Terre Thaemlitz in an exchange featured in the 16th edition of zweikommasieben is ever more pressing in a time, where the political and social fabric of western societies seems to disintegrate. The search for possible answers thus is subliminally present throughout the magazine—in the contribution on the independent Milan venue Macao, but also in interviews with NON-affiliate Farai or the American experimentalist Steve Hauschildt. Even the most hopeful answers remain ambivalent in the end it seems; ultimately there won’t be any utopias. „There’s a sun in the sky,“ as Laurel Halo points out in the magazine, „but it’s burning ever hotter.“
zweikommasieben #16 features interviews with Steve Hauschildt, Laurel Halo, DVA Damas, Mechatok, Farai, Parrish Smith and portraits on Nina of Golden Pudel and V.I.S., as well as Casual Gabberz’ Ēvil Grimace & Von Bikräv. There’s also an extended mail exchange with Terre Thaemlitz, “A Short History of the Aesthetics of Excess in Hip Hop”, various columns and a photo essay, plus contributions by Das Ding, Macao, Laraaji and German Army.

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Opening November 7th, at Kunsthalle Wien. Starts at 7PM.
Exhibition 08.11.2017 – 28.01.2018

What is the role of art publishing today? How have artists adapted modes of publishing as a tool for their practice? How has the notion of artists’ publishing activity changed, given the ever-increasing amount of fairs and an ever-evolving number of book-related collections in contemporary art museums? Publishing has developed a favorite site and medium for aesthetic and artistic experimentation. It has also become an alternative space for promoting unrestricted individual or collective discourse. The multi-part exhibition project Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017 explores the potentials of publishing – in the form of books, magazines, journals, artistic interventions, websites – as a particular medium and context both to circulate information, knowledge – and to produce art.

Instead of looking at the already historicized and analyzed period of the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition will highlight how a recent generation of artists use publishing as a productive tool for their practice. The focus lies on the period from 1989 until 2017, taking 1989 as symbolic date to underline the shift from analogue to digital. On a political level, 1989 with the fall of the Berlin wall marks a significant date. On a social level, it is an important year as it indicates the invention of the World Wide Web.

THE BOOKSHOP AS MEDIUM

The bookshop curated by Gregorio Magnani and Motto Books presents a selection of artist’s books published between the late 1980’s and the present. Together these publications offer a privileged overview of the unexpected flourishing of the book as artistic and creative medium. At the same time the bookstore highlights the wide international network of artists and small independent publishers whose collaborations and shared interests are the motors for the artist’s book renaissance.

More information here

Browse the selection of 160 publications included in the show here

“First the air is blue and then / it is bluer and then green and then / black I am blacking out and yet / my mask is powerful / It pumps my blood with power”

And Yet My Mask is Powerful emerges from an exhibition by multimedia artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, held at Carroll / Fletcher in London in 2016. Carrying on from their earlier project The Incidental Insurgents (2012-2015), the artists address the apocalyptic logic of perpetual crisis that characterizes the contemporary moment. The project takes its title from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving Into the Wreck,” and like that of the poem, its mise-en-scène is a field of wreckage. Here, the artists visit destroyed villages in occupied Palestine, documenting groups of Palestinian youths wearing copies of Neolithic masks. These masks, some of the oldest in the world, were originally found in the West Bank and are now stored in private Israeli collections; they have been copied and 3D-printed by the artists from online exhibition photographs.

The book uses computer screenshots of images framed in software windows, layering them across the pages along with scans and typographic interventions. The work suggests a sense of collapse and return, but one oriented toward futurity, reworking the Arab world’s apocalyptic imaginary into another, parallel, unrealized time.

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