“I also don’t know the five new federal states and, if I want to film there, I have to have a leading figure. It is the profiteer, development aid worker and missionary all in one. He breaks into the accession area from the West in army strength. The film is about such a salesman.” –– Harun Farocki, 1990/91
HaFI 014 publishes a typescript and archival materials related to the television film Hard Selling (1991) by Harun Farocki. For this unfinished project, Farocki documented an Adidas sales training in East Berlin in 1990. In the period after July 1991 he accompanied a West German Adidas salesman on his trade tour through Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Thus, Farocki explored the operational details of introducing the logic of free market in a country formerly trained in planned economy. Although the broadcast of Hard Selling was announced in the program booklet of the DFF—the successor to GDR television—for 13 November 1991, it did not take place. The TV-station was dissolved six weeks later.

The artist Elske Rosenfeld follows the film stills, fragments of conversations and announcement texts of Farocki’s Hard Selling. She mobilizes the figure of the “window” as a frame to transpose the languages and gazes at shop windows, screens and trainers into a poetic-analytical editing. In the resulting text/image essay Rosenfeld updates her ongoing archive of gaze-images. An editorial note by Doreen Mende introduces HaFI 014.

Elske Rosenfeld, born 1974 in Halle/S. (GDR), works in different media and formats. Her primary focus and material are the histories of state-socialism and its dissidences, and the revolution of 1989/90. Documents and archives are starting points for organising spaces in which these hi/stories can come to be present. Her ongoing project “A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures” investigates how political events manifest and come to be archived in the bodies of their protagonists.

—

„Auch kenne ich die fünf neuen Bundesländer nicht und muss, wenn ich dort filmen will, eine Leitfigur haben. Es ist der Geschäftemacher, Entwicklungshelfer und Missionar in einem. Er bricht in Armeestärke vom Westen aus in das Beitrittsgebiet ein. Im Film geht es um einen solchen Verkäufer.“ –– Harun Farocki, 1990/91

HaFI 014 publiziert ein Typoskript sowie Archivmaterialien, die im Bezug stehen zu dem Fernsehfilm Hard Selling (1991) von Harun Farocki. Für dieses nicht zuende gebrachte Projekt filmte Farocki im Jahr 1990 eine Adidas-Verkaufsschulung in Ost-Berlin. In der Zeit nach dem Juli 1991 begleitete er einen westdeutschen Adidas-Vertreter auf seiner Handelstour durch Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. So erforschte Farocki die operativen Details der Einführung der Logik des freien Marktes in einem ehemals planwirtschaftlich organisierten Land. Obwohl die Ausstrahlung von Hard Selling im Programmheft des DFF – dem Nachfolger des Fernsehens der DDR – für den 13. November 1991 angekündigt ist, kam es nie dazu. Der Sender wurde sechs Wochen später aufgelöst.

Die Künstlerin Elske Rosenfeld folgt den Filmstills, Gesprächsfragmenten und Ankündigungstexten von Farockis Hard Selling. Die Figur des „Fensters“ (im Sinne von frame) dient ihr als Instrument, um die Sprachen und Blicke auf Schaufenster, Bildschirme und Turnschuhe poetisch-analytisch zu montieren. In ihrem Text/Bild-Essay aktualisiert Rosenfeld ihr fortlaufendes Archiv von Blick-Bildern. Eine editorische Notiz von Doreen Mende führt in HaFI 014 ein.

Elske Rosenfeld (geb. 1974, Halle/S.) forscht als Künstlerin, Autorin und Kulturarbeiterin zur Geschichte der Dissidenz in Osteuropa und zu den Ereignissen von 1989/90. Ausgehend von historischen Dokumenten und Archiven organisiert sie Räume, in denen diese Geschichte/n gegenwärtig werden können. In ihrem aktuellen künstlerischen Forschungsprojekt “A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures” untersucht sie den Körper als Austragungsort und Archiv politischer Ereignisse.

Order here

After studying photography at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, Peter Woelck worked as a professional photographer in the GDR for various companies and magazines. Moreover, he independently created a vast amount of artistic works, especially in the field of portrait and architectural photography. Photographs of the construction of the Berlin Television Tower, cityscapes of Leipzig, and intense portraits from the 60s through the 80s document how life used to be in a country that no longer exists. On the other hand, there are photographs from the post-reunification period, during which Woelck repeatedly tried to establish himself as a freelance advertising photographer. Thus, the pictures also tell of a break in the photographer’s biography, the kind of experience that affected many people of his generation.
The book documents the attempt to bring the eclectic diversity of the archive into a sequence of images that does not strive for a photo-historical classification but rather allows a specific and subjective narration to emerge from today’s perspective.

The book includes texts by Wilhelm Klotzek, Woelck’s son, who not only co-manages the estate in collaboration with the Laura Mars Gallery but also artistically deals with the legacy, by writer and publicist Peter Richter, and by curator Bettina Klein.

“Dancing in Connewitz” was published in 2014 on the occasion of a second exhibition of Peter Woelck’s photographs, “PeWo’s Bericht zur Lage der Jugend” (Laura Mars Gallery, Berlin), and was supported by the Stiftung Kunstfonds with funds from VG Bild-Kunst.

Order here

The first album of Ophelia, a band composed of the artist Emilie Pitoiset and two members of Aluk Todolo, Shantidas Riedacker and Matthieu Canaguier.

Limited edition of 300 copies numbered and signed

Emilie Pitoiset (voice, texts)
Matthieu Canaguier (guitare)
Shantidas Riedacker (guitare)

Centre national des arts plastiques – Le Confort Moderne

Order here

Published by Motto Books

Catalogue of Theodora Allen’s solo exhibition Saturnine
Kunsthal Aarhus
14.05–18.07.2021

On a summer evening in July 1610, under the humid Padua sky, Galileo peered through his crude telescope to discover the rings of Saturn, the furthest planet then known. While Galileo set his sight on Saturn, it came into view slowly. Ancient Greek and Roman theory, and later medieval psychology, had correlated four planets with each of the elements and temporal ‘humours’; Jupiter’s persuasion prevailed in the blood and affected a sanguine nature; Mars ruled aggression; the moon was cause for an apathetic disposition. The fourth and final humour, inspired by ringed Saturn, was responsible for melancholy. It is for this reason we have the term ‘saturnine’ to describe sadness. The sight of Saturn is one of sorrow.

Kunsthal Aarhus presents Saturnine, the first institutional solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based contemporary artist Theodora Allen. Interweaving the artist’s emblematic use of symbols, the exhibition engages with a history of Saturn, the celestial body said to have been the cause of a melancholic disposition – from ancient myth and the Middle Ages through to the present. At times appearing as itself, a large ringed orb, and at others as affect, the figure of the planet joins Allen’s representations of recurrent motifs that are informed by cultural and emotional influence.

Alongside Saturn, depictions of markers such as serpents, wildfires, moths, hourglasses and hallucinogenic plants present a language that is seen rather than uttered. Within the emblematic tradition – a form positioned squarely between visual arts and literature, grappling equally with both image and text – Allen’s compositions exist as propositions of impossibilities. As concepts, they transport the viewer elsewhere: into different times, different narratives. Steeped in mythmaking and iconography, the paintings are resonant with the visionary work of poets and painters in early Symbolist graphic arts, as well as resurgences of this aesthetic in the zeitgeist of 1970s California, addressing cyclical, enduring themes of human versus nature that withstand in our contemporary moment.

Order here

OEI # 90-91: Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology offers the first English language overview of the history of concrete and visual poetry production in socialist Yugoslavia between 1968 and 1983. By focusing on mass-produced examples of concrete poetry, this publication presents these poetic experiments as organically linked to social movements, critical theories, and youth cultural revolutions. In his extensive introduction, Sezgin Boynik, the guest editor of this special issue of OEI, discusses concrete and visual poetry in socialist Yugo-slavia as an uneven and combined development, and emphasizes its confrontational and organizational aspects. By means of interviews, translations, reproductions, and theoretical and historical statements, OEI # 90-91 offers a picture of a very lively scene of concrete and visual poetry in Yugoslavia, which unfortunately is not as recognized interna-tionally as it would deserve. Hoping that OEI # 90-91 could contribute to this task in a substantial way, we present episodes from the early years of OHO formation and its complex theories of words and things; an interview with Rastko Močnik on programmed art and political formalism; militant polemics of Goran Babić; Signalist contradictions; subjective structural devices of Judita Šalgo; zaum experiments of Vojislav Despotov; detective meta-texts of Slavoj Žižek; poetic self-management studies of Vujica Rešin Tucić; a feminist historicisation of Ažin school for experimental poetry; democratisation of visual poetry by Westeast; selections from special issues of the journals Pitanja, Problemi, Ulaznica, Dometi, Delo, Koraci, Vidik, Pegaz, and many other materials translated here for the first time and presented in one publication.

Order here

In the exhibition “The scene in which I find myself / Or, where does my body belong” Ruth Buchanan presented 50 years of collecting at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Aotearoa New Zealand. This show had one core question: where is power centered? Through asking this question Buchanan and the institution have encountered celebratory moments of risk and experimentation and at the same time come face-to-face with the ways in which individual perspectives are encoded into institutions, and society at large, to form what is recognised as important and valuable. The project has made visible what Audre Lorde describes as the problem of the “mythic norm”. The symposium, “Uneven Bodies” acted on the imbalances exposed in the exhibition and invited discussions on considered approaches that weave in and out of the institution in order to re calibrate the ways in which we produce, engage with, and can shape collections. The content is gathered together in its entirety for this reader and acts as a transcript of a live event and holds onto that liveliness through the variety of forms and tones taken in each of the papers. At the same time, each contribution offers in its own way a template for how we can imagine collecting for the future; full of powerful languages we still need to learn how to speak, together.

Order here

Catalogue of Steve Bishop’s solo exhibition ‘Start Over Every Morning’ (2019) at Kunstverein Braunschweig:

In his artistic practice Steve Bishop explores how mental states can be materialized and conveyed in space, through installations often involving personal belongings and mementos. By subtly distorting familiar, often intimate domestic scenarios, Bishop creates intermediate worlds in which concepts of time are suspended, and clear boundaries between private and public space, exhibition and non-exhibition are blurred.

In the exhibition, we encounter the remnants of a celebration recently passed. Constructed in the main room is a simple white kitchen, which surreally extends over the entire length of the space. Here the profoundly everyday nature of the counter meets the attempt to grasp abstract concepts of infinity. A blankness pervades the room which is punctuated by a few scattered objects: leftover cake is carefully stowed away in Tupperware boxes, recordings of jazz instrumentals drift out from a radio, and outside garden furniture is already tucked in under its plastic cover. A longing to preserve fleeting situations repeatedly arises, no matter how temporary the moment might be. In a second room, found photographs are framed together with pages of text taken from a largely forgotten self-help organization called Re-evaluation Counseling. Slogans call for self-empowerment and optimization, and one might also discern from the neat surroundings that a desire for structure, for inner and outer clarity, seems to be as desirable as it is acutely endangered.

Publishers: Kunstverein Braunschweig; Motto Books; Floating Opera Press

Buy it here