In July 2019 Pablo Allison was detained and imprisoned in an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention centre in the USA where he spent almost 1 month. During his time in prison, he was able to document the lives of migrants in detention through observational sketches made by him, alongside, texts and interviews from other fellow detainees.
The Detainee Handbook aims to offer a small view into the lives of people stuck and locked into the detention/prison system of the United States of America, an industry that has profited vastly from this human tragedy, off the backs of millions of people trying to find better life expectations in the USA.
Modernism/Murderism, translated by Vasvi Oza, brings together, for the first time in English, a forgotten debate on Modern Art that took place in the pages of the Gujarati-language periodical Kumar between 1959 and 1964. Published across various issues, the debate brings into conversation Pherozeshah Rustomji Mehta, a writer and art connoisseur from Karachi, and Jyoti Bhatt, a young artist who had just begun teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda. While Mehta chose to defend what he believed were the timeless and traditional values of art, Bhatt proposed that Modern Art was no stranger to these values and in fact had much in common with them. Alongside the articles by Mehta and Bhatt, the publication also brings together responses to the debate from various readers who interjected in the ‘Readers Write’ column of the periodical, as well as notes from Kumar‘s editor, Bachubhai Ravat, who informally acted as a mediator. Offering a vantage point from which to view the entry of Modernism and its affiliated discourses into the art practices of the region, this volume proposes itself as a reader to these histories and revisits this crucial moment.
We are happy to announce of the arrival of the second printing of Radical Friends, edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, published by Torque Editions, 2022.
Contributors: Ramon Amaro, Calum Bowden, Jaya Klara Brekke, Mitchell F. Chan, Cade Diehm, eeefff, Carina Erdmann, Primavera De Filippi, Charlotte Frost, Max Hampshire, Lucile Olympe Haute, Sara Heitlinger, Lara Houston, Cadence Kinsey, Nick Koppenhagen, Kei Kreutler, Laura Lotti, Jonas Lund, Massimiliano Mollona, MetaObjects, Rhea Myers, Omsk Social Club, Bhavisha Panchia, Legacy Russell, Tina Rivers Ryan, Nathan Schneider, Sam Skinner, Sam Spike, Hito Steyerl, Alex S. Taylor, Cassie Thornton, Suzanne Treister, Stacco Troncoso, Ann Marie Utratel, Samson Young.
First publication to document the use and potential of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations in the arts that use blockchain technology and build on NFT innovations.
Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) offer unique tools for translocal peers to encode rules, relations and values into their joint ventures using blockchain technology. This new book, edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, who have been at the forefront of investigations into the relationship between DAOs and the arts, constitutes over 5 years of research with essays, interviews, exercises and prototypes from leading thinkers, artists and technologists across this emerging field.
Radical Friends is an urgent book for the 21st Century and beyond. It shows us, in the spirit of the legendary poet and artist Etel Adnan, that the technology of the future needs to be about “togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation.” – Hans Ulrich Obrist
How things are run is often more important than what is done. It may not be easy to establish alternative formats and infrastructures, but it’s certainly necessary… This collection shows that it is possible too. – Sadie Plant
This book is about friendship, despair and hope — a beautiful, must-read for all people who are asking unanswerable questions about life, love and the end of the world. – Franco “Bifo” Beradi
A River “The story here is that nothing happens. There is no resolution. Things disappear. People disappear. The earth changes. I wake up to write.” Lisa Robertson pens a narrative, part of an untitled novel in progress, about decline and invisibility as freedom. It centers on an aesthetics of decay, bodily and urban, through memories of water—specifically the flooding and ebbing of the Bièvre river.
The Depression Artist Through a writing process that offers a fractal poetics of AI and a glimpse into the future of literature, K Allado-McDowell and GPT-3—the latter an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text—coauthor a satirical account of an artist who, having abandoned their brushes in favor of NFTs, finds themselves stuck in a reclusive and stale existence until an unidentified, rhythmic pulse rouses them.
Basement Jazz In building an imaginary milieu for Dora Budor’s practice, Marina Vishmidt is drawn to the category of “infrastructure,” in the sense of both artists who poeticize or pattern voids into significant structure, and a transversal way of working that is attentive to the conditions of possibility in exhibition. In architectural, economic, linguistic, and organizational ways, Budor generates a transformation of gaps and absences.
Focus on: Fujiko Nakaya Big Talk Is Talking about the Weather Into Pure White Darkness: The Ecology of Fujiko Nakaya An early member of Experiments in Art and Technology and a crucial figure for Japanese video art, Fujiko Nakaya is mostly known for her sculptural and installation ecosystems using fog. Here, Stuart Comer, Michelle Kuo, Astrida Neimanis, and Sarah Johanna Theurer discuss the artist’s environmental awareness, the poetics of the fog, and what it means to talk about the weather, while Reiko Setsuda retraces Nakaya’s collaborative and networked thinking. Nakaya’s approach does not objectify nature but treats the global environment as an organic ecosystem shaped by social, political, and technological relations.
Object-Oriented: Toward a Regeneration of Art Criticism as Literary Practice Could the key to art criticism’s present-future redemption be found in the past? Travis Jeppesen muses on the origins of critical commentary, guiding our way through the dispute opposing “art criticism” and “art writing.” Via an analysis of different categories, such as meta- and ficto-criticism, Jeppesen debunks how a “poetics of indeterminacy” may grace and empower a form of art writing that is a vanguard practice within the wider genre of art criticism.
The House in Which We Live Seamlessly moving from the page into sculpture, installation, and performance, and often focusing on histories of queer community, Caspar Heinemann responds to a short but significant period in British history with humor and irreverence, and with an intimate and melancholic material sensitivity. Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe reflects on Heinemann’s linguistic play with poetic negations and absences.
A Hypothesis of Resistance In the first of a series of five essays aimed at examining the temporalities of performance, defying and eclipsing the standardization that drives individual and collective bodies to perform toward an entirely metric-oriented future, Cally Spooner intertwines the psoas major muscle; Donald W. Winnicott’s studies on developmental psychology; motherhood; and chrononormativity.
Concrete Poetry Through installations that combine conceptual rigor with revolutionary poetry, Ignacio Gatica investigates the long shadow of neoliberalism in Chile. Harry Burke peruses how the weaknesses and contradictions of Chilean politics’ recent history interweave with Gatica’s practice, pointing to social movements whose demands extend beyond the constitutional forms of liberal democracy.
Tidbits: Céline Mathieu by Leila Peacock; Jerzy Bereś by Krzysztof Kościuczuk; David Moser by Laura McLean-Ferris; Ayo Akingbade by Faridah Folawiyo; Steph Huang by Olivia Aherne; Selma Selman by Arnisa Caterina Zeqo; Simon Lehner by Christina Lehnert; Deborah-Joyce Holman by Olamiju Fajemisin; Francisco Tropa by Simone Menegoi.
Between 28 April 2020 and 3 September 2021, Giulia Casartelli painted and sent 111 watercolour postcards to as many selected recipients. Each postcard reproduced a fragment of the short story Clementina Butterfingers (Edizioni postali tigre, 2022), written by the artist from 2014 to 2020. On 26 September 2021, Giulia started a trip to visit the locations where the postcards are now displayed. She photographed (or has asked the addressees to photograph) these intimate spaces and reproduced them in watercolour. 111 stanze is an archive of this journey.
Texts by Giulia Casartelli, Camilla Pietrabissa, Elena M. R. Rizzi Translation: Johanna Bishop Book design: Federico Antonini
Motto Books is pleased to invite you to the presentation of Panya Routes, hosted by the African Centre for Cities and Stokvel Gallery with guest Mokena Makeka.
22 October 2022 from 12pm
Stokvel Gallery *NEW ADDRESS* 27 Boxes 4th Ave, Melville Johannesburg, South Africa
Independent art spaces on the African continent have flourished, particularly over the past twenty years in tandem with a youthful population in fast-urbanising cities. This book takes the reader on a journey to discover their DIY-DIT working principles: horizontality, second chance, elasticity, performativity and convergence. The itinerary begins at an empty plinth in Cape Town to closely track the performative and artistic afterlife of a colonialist statue whose toppling turned public space into common space. Next stop: Nairobi, Accra, Cairo, Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam — all rapidly changing cities of flux. The author visits five non-profit platforms that build narratives in public space by stitching together art and everyday life. They create their own panya routes, or backroad infrastructures of divergent kinds, in response to prevailing uncertainty. Working largely in collaborative economies and solidarity networks through refusal and reimagination, these “off-spaces” demonstrate institution building as artistic practice. By thinking and dreaming beyond the status quo, they fast-forward to creatively inhabit city futures that have already arrived in the global South. The key platforms featured in the book’s research are: The GoDown Arts Centre, ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, Townhouse Gallery, Zoma Museum and Nafasi Art Space.
Edited by Mika Hayashi Ebbesen Graphic design by Márcia Novais Published by Motto Books, 2022
Please join us for the research presentation of “The secrets of Lake Balkhash: community narratives, memories, and landscapes of past and futures” with author Aigerim Kapar.
Following the first launch in Bor, this event co-hosted by Slavs and Tatars will also serve as the Berlin launch of the publication As you go… the roads under your feet, towards the new future (Mousse/Rockbund Museum, 2022).
21 October 2022 from 6.30 pm
Motto Berlin Skalitzer Str. 68 (im Hinterhof) 10997 Berlin
“The secrets of Lake Balkhash” focuses on the study of local values of Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan and how these values impact the everyday lives of local communities. Lake Balkhash is one of the biggest endorheic water bodies in the world and has a millennia-long history of sociocultural life, ecological traditions, and seminomadic management methods. The region also represents the position of the Kazakh Steppe, where the interests of China and Russia intersect. Today, the industrialization and militarization of the colonial Soviet period continue to prevail and frame the basin as a zone of ecological and social crisis. Lake Balkhash may disappear in twenty years and faces a similar situation to the drainage of the Aral Sea by the Soviet government in the 1950s for the purposes of agricultural production.
“The secrets of Lake Balkhash” aims to rethink the history of the region through a decolonial lens and study the future of the region reimagined by local communities. The research project is part of Artcom Platform’s Care for Balkhash initiative, and As you go… the roads under your feet, towards the new future, a long-term project and research inquiry that reflects on the Belt and Road Initiative and how it will alter the aesthetics and practices of everyday life in different local contexts of Ethiopia, Serbia, Slovenia, Uzbekistan, China, Kazakhstan. It was conceived and initiated by Biljana Ćirić in 2019 after conducting curatorial research in East Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Europe, where the project is now situated. The three-year project has been conducted via individuals, cells, organizations, and institutions: Zdenka Badovinac (Ljubljana), Robel Temesgen and Sinkneh Eshetu (Addis Ababa), What Could/Should Curating Do? (Belgrade), Artcom Platform (Astana/Almaty), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou), and Public Library (Bor). The project does not attempt yet another critical investigation into Chinese colonialism, but rather seeks to unpack the complexities that certain regions are confronting within their current connections to the Belt and Road Initiative, as well as their established commonalities.
Aigerim Kapar (b. 1987, Kazakhstan) is an interdependent curator, interdisciplinary researcher, and a decolonial activist based in Almaty and Astana. Kapar founded Artcom Platform, a Central Asian community-based contemporary art and public engagement organization in 2015. She has also been organizing Art Collider, a school where art meets science bringing communities together since 2017. Kapar curates a hybrid reality project Steppe Space, an important space for contemporary art and culture of Central Asia, and initiated projects of care for lake ecosystems SOS Taldykol and Balqashqa Qamqor in 2020. Her key previous works include Re-membering: Dialogues of Memories (2019), an international intergenerational project in memory of survivors and victims of twentieth-century political repressions in Kazakhstan, and Time&Astana: After Future (2017–18), an urban art research and engagement project. Kapar is currently a resident at Slavs and Tatars’ program in Moabit. www.instagram.com/aigerimkapar
Photo courtesy of Mousse Publishing
As you go… the roads under your feet, towards the new future. Published by Rockbund Art Museum and Mousse Publishing, 2022 Edited by Biljana Ćirić
Contributions by Zdenka Badovinac, Aziza Abdulfatah Busser, Robert Bobnič, Biljana Ćirić, Marija Glavaš, Sinkneh Eshetu, Chen Liang, Salem Mekuria, Aigerim Kapar, Dragan Stojmenovič, Larys Frogier, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Robel Temesgen, Jelica Javanovič, Alex Ulko, Kaja Kraner, Tara McDowell, Оasphy Zheng, Enanye Kibret, Gebeyehu Desalew, Manuel Borja-Villel, Mabel Tapia, and Ocean & Wavz.
Bodybuilders is a photographic project by London and Milan based photographer and DJ, Alien that investigates themes of identity, extravaganza and new means of self-expression by documenting 30 of the most intriguing club performers in the UK.
Sitting at a crossroads between visual and performing arts, gender studies, queer activism and positive affirmation, Bodybuilders shows how bodies can be built, distorted and transformed against the binary of systematic male domination.
Bodybuilders includes introductory texts by co-author of The Xenofeminist Manifesto, Helen Hester and Inferno London’s founder, Lewis G. Burton.
Listeners who know much of anything about Bryn Jones’ work as Muslimgauze know that he was prolific in both his work and Muhammadunize, has what could be called a classic feel to it, with a very familiar blend of drones, string instruments, and synths, and varying percussion/break-beat patterns, in turn mixed with a number of hard-to-catch vocal samples. It’s a formula used many times in the past by Jones, yet somehow he still manages to keep things just fresh enough, investing songs like the first and second “Khalifate” and especially both slamming versions of “Imad Akel” with enough unexpected touches. He incorporates the basic power of his work in the tracks as well, with both beauty and a nervy, hard-to-define tension as the songs progress.
The sound palette of Muhammadunize is very similar to his ambient-techno albums such as Mullah Said and Gun Aramaic, down to the rhythms and the trademark tanpura drones and keys in C minor. The difference is that it’s a bit more aggressive and faster-paced than the aforementioned albums, thus utilising a similar dark atmosphere to a more immediate and in-your-face effect, especially as noted by the drum-kit urban-sounding pulse of Imad Akel, one of the high points on this album. However, my favorite track here is the closer Fatah Guerrilla (also title track of the whole triple album), featuring a rapid echoed rhythm along with a barrage of percussion popping up and echoing every so often, sounding like they’re flying through the room at a quick pace; the piece also features a beautiful flute melody which combines with the busy rhythm section in an interesting way.
Recorded and mixed at Abraham Mosque, Manchester 1996. Dedicated to a Palestinian State. Free from Zionist abuse of human rights.
Handful of Earth is an ongoing visual exploration of man’s connection to his living environment and day-to-day life in mountain areas.
„Even as a child, I was fascinated with the mysterious atmosphere of mountain scenery. In 2014 I started to volunteer for a local NGO, and my instinctive drive to explore led me back to them. I kept the pictures taken during my mountain hikes for about two years. Then the puzzle behind the project started to take shape. To me, a place can have a certain sound of its own, which is why I tried to put into pictures emotions generated by music. Handful of Earth is both the first part of this project and the title of an album combining traditional and contemporary music. Its inspiration comes from genres like ambient, electroacoustic and experimental music.” – Andrei Becheru
