Dear friends,

We are pleased to invite you to the book launch of
Pope.L, My Kingdom for a Title in presence of the artist.

7–9 pm Wednesday 3 November 2021

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68, im Hinterhof
10997 Berlin
U1 Schlesisches Tor

My Kingdom for a Title is a collection of writing by Chicago–based artist Pope.L documenting his use of language as a mode of visual, narrative, and performative story telling.

The act of writing has been integral to how Pope.L works and is arguably the most consistent element in his practice. These works take various forms: scripts, short stories, scribbled notes, large scale installation, and painting—many never before released. Assembled here for the first time, My Kingdom for a Title allows the breadth of the artist’s engagement with language to be fully assessed. Within the book, Pope.L’s work is supplemented with extensive endnotes sourced by artist Kandis Williams.

Pope.L is a visual artist and edu­cator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries, and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create artworks in various formats including writing, painting, performance, installation, video, and sculpture. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope.L applies some of the same social, formal, and performative strategies to his interests in language, system, gender, race, and community. The goals for his work are several: joy, money, and uncertainty—not necessarily in that order.

Edited by Courtney Willis Blair
Endnotes by Kandis Williams
Published by New Documents in collaboration with Mitchell-Innes & Nash
First Edition (2021)

Order the book here

Between the unpublished poem “Déclinaison du temps premier I” and a translation of “Nelson Mandela “Non à l’apartheid””, this collective work brings together a series of 19 articles which present for the first time Véronique Tadjo’s oeuvre from critical perspectives. The articles examine how Tadjo, poet, storyteller and writer who situated herself as a Pan-Africanist, questions the political drifts of African current affairs and the “univocity” of history, and rethinks the plurality and complexity of European and African rituals, traditions and more in a contemporary bygone world.

Introduction
Sarah Davies Cordova & Désiré Wa Kabwe-Segatti – Véronique Tadjo, unpublished poem

Speaking (out) to Tell
Micheline Rice-Maximin – Anna-Marie De Beer
Pamela Nichols – Pierre-Louis Fort – Catherine Mazauric

Literature and Politics
Romuald Fonkoua – Dina Ligaga – Abdoulaye Imorou – Marzia Caporale

Words and Images
Odile Cazenave – Walter Putnam

Cahier d’Images / Gallery of Images

Poetics of the Imaginary
Obed Nkunzimana – Antoinette Sol – Doris L. Obieje – Charles Yaovi Mensah Kouma

Tadjo and the Art of Translation
Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi – Amy Baram Reid

Round table: Amy Baram Reid, Peter Thompson, Christopher Fotheringham & Nataša Raschi

Conclusion
Chantal Wright, translation (excerpt)

Order here

Fillip Editions – Folio Series

Following Institutions by Artists: Volume One and the eponymous convention from which both volumes take their name, this second anthology of texts continues the work of unpacking artists’ relationships to—and creation of—a larger set of structures that increasingly regulate, demarcate, and codify contemporary artistic practice: centers of economic and cultural capital; state and private apparatus; and sites of display, storage and production.

This volume’s contributing authors present a series of historical and contemporary case studies, investigating artists’ connections to various manifestations of institutionalized practice. These case studies describe practices that developed in places as disparate as Vancouver, London (Ontario), East Los Angeles, Scotland, and Trinidad and Tobago. Also included are transcripts of two debates held during the 2012 Institutions by Artists Convention, which asked: “Is there space for art outside the market and the state?” and “Should Artists Professionalize?”

With contributions by Tania Bruguera, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Dana Claxton, Christopher Cozier, Jeff Derksen, Sean Dockray, Candice Hopkins, Jesi Khadivi, Jaleh Mansoor, Philip Monk, Christopher Régimbal, Slavs and Tatars, Claire Tancons, Tania Willard and others

Order here

Original sketches for “Vrach”, 2019. Mixed techniques on print outs, 29.7 x 21 cm each.

Book launch:

Renaud Regnery | Vrach

You are cordially invited to join us for the launch of Renaud Regnery publication Vrach,
 published by Motto Books in collaboration with Klemm’s gallery.

Friday, 29 October 2021, from 7 to 9pm

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68, im Hinterhof

10997 Berlin

Vrach is Renaud Regnery’s collection of all the sketches made for the painting of the same name: Vrach, 2019, plaster, acrylic paint and alkyd lacquer on wallpaper on canvas, 200 x 135 cm. The painting is photographed at various stages of its completion and these printed images are used as the basis for further Studies. The artist reuses the loose sheets he finds in his studio: fragments of theoretical texts printed for the preparation of exhibitions, essays on the work by other artists, extracts of bank statements, failed copy of car documents etc.

Vrach is the first book of a wider collection based on the same concept.

Published by Motto Books
Edition of 150 / Order your copy here
Special Edition / Order here

72 frames from Gianfranco Baruchello Filming Marcel Duchamp (1964). A short portrait of Duchamp smoking a cigar.

2019
Flipbook
Edition of 200

Order Amuser Duchamp
Order The Crossing
Order Retard

Photo credit: Anna Azzali. Courtesy of Mousse Publishing.

Book launch:

The Artist’s Novel: The Novel as a Medium in the Visual Arts

David Maroto

In conversation with Krist Gruijthuijsen

Wednesday, 27 October 2021, 8pm

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68, im Hinterhof
10997 Berlin

Publication in two volumes:

Part 1. A New Medium (theoretical essay)

Part 2. The Fantasy of the Novel (novel)

Why do artists write novels? What does the artist’s novel do to the visual arts? How should such a novel be experienced? In recent years, there has been a proliferation of visual artists who create novels as part of their wider art projects. They do so in order to address artistic issues by means of novelistic devices, favoring a sort of art predicated on process and subjectivity, introducing notions such as fiction, narrative, and imagination. In this sense, it is possible to speak of a new medium in the visual arts; yet, very little is known about it.

Join us for an evening of discussion during the launch of David Maroto’s The Artist’s Novel: The Novel as a Medium in the Visual Arts (Mousse Publishing, 2020). This two-volume book is the first to explore in depth the subject of the artist’s novel. Part 1: A New Medium aims to critically elucidate the pressing questions posed by the emergence of a new artistic medium with a theoretical approach to a number of key case studies.

Part 2: The Fantasy of the Novel is a research project in the form of a novel, which examines the process of creation of an artist’s novel. The protagonist is in the position of a detective who tries to understand the conditions under which an artist decides to write, and how such a thing is possible within an artistic setting.

Curator and art critic Krist Gruijthuijsen will accompany David in the discussion in order to examine the different ways contemporary artists have employed the artist’s novel, and its impact on the curatorial and institutional context in which it appears and with which it interacts.

Bios

David Maroto is a Spanish visual artist based in the Netherlands and a PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art, with an extensive international artistic practice. In 2011, he spent time at a residency in ISCP New York, where he met curator Joanna Zielińska and began a collaboration called The Book Lovers, a research project based on the creation of a collection and bibliography of artists’ novels with the continuous support of M HKA (Antwerp). This collaboration has enabled them to engage with a host of international institutions. David has published numerous articles and edited various publications, including Artist Novels (Sternberg Press, 2015); Tamam Shud (Sternberg Press, 2018); and Obieg Magazine no. 8, ‘Art & Literature: A Mongrel’s Guide‘ (2018).

Krist Gruijthuijsen is a curator, art critic, and director of KW Institute for Contemporary Art. He was artistic director of the Grazer Kunstverein in Graz in 2012–16 and has been course director of the MA fine arts department at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam since 2011. He is one of the co-founding directors of Kunstverein in Amsterdam and has organised numerous exhibitions and projects over the past decade, including Manifesta 7 (Trentino-South Tyrol,IT), Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center (Istanbul), Artists Space (New York), Swiss Institute (New York), Galeria Vermelho (São Paulo), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Arnolfini (Bristol, UK), Project Arts Centre (Dublin), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City, US), and Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane). Gruijthuijsen has produced, edited, and published extensively with JRP|Ringier Sternberg Press, Mousse Publishing, Printed Matter, Walther König, and Kunstverein Publishing, among which The Encyclopaedia of Fictional Artists (JRP|Ringier, 2010).

This project is possible thanks to the generous support of the Mondriaan Fund.

Friday 22nd October

From 6pm @ Motto Berlin

MISTAKE or Miracle?

a collaborative project between artist Jana Nowack and writer Dayna Grosz.

Order the book here

MISTAKE or Miracle? is a collaborative project between artist Jana Nowack and writer Dayna Grosz. The images and lyrics explore something of the beyond – beyond the concrete, beyond the material, beyond thought and beyond this planet. While the spark of this work was ignited off the blank canvas of a snow-filled Scandinavian landscape, it very slowly and very quietly matured into, well, what can we say? something very mysterious within the void of an infinite nothingness. To be honest, we stopped trying to make sense of it all as soon as we realized we were migrating through the fragility of this very uncertain century. The rest, as always, is up for interpretation.

Dayna Grosz is a writer whose work has been published and shortlisted in the Büro BDP Writing Prize 2020. Her writing also appears in The Angel City Review and Another Chicago Magazine, with additional work forthcoming in A) GLIMPSE) OF). She lives in Berlin, Germany, where she hosts the experimental poetry show CRYPTOMNESIA on Cashmere Radio.

Jana Nowack is a Berlin based artist who studied photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig and communication design and photography at the University of Arts in Bremen, Germany. Her work encompasses photography and video installations and was part of exhibitions at KN-Space for Art in Context in Berlin, the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, at Halle 14, Spinnerei in Leipzig, Spring Break Art Show in Los Angeles/US and C.G.Boerner in New York/US.

Photographs: Jana Nowack
Poems: Dayna Grosz

Edition: 150

Order here