Mousse #84 – Summer 2023

Opinions
ON JARGON
Pablo Larios

A HYPOTHESIS OF RESISTANCE—PART FOUR: A LECTURE ON UNDETECTABILITY
Cally Spooner

Survey
MRINALINI MUKHERJEE
(A) Overgrowth
Noopur Desai, Emilia Terracciano, Murtaza Vali
(B) Less a Thing Than the Trace of a Movement
Skye Arundhati Thomas

Monograph
PENG ZUQIANG
Touch, Gaze, Motion, Memory: On Two Recent Video Works by Peng Zuqiang
Travis Jeppesen

Fiction
YOUR LOVE IS NOT GOOD
Johanna Hedva

Monograph
LEE LOZANO
Lee Lozano’s Tools and the “Self as Center”
Amelia Jones

Visual
ANGHARAD WILLIAMS
Cars, 2022
Angharad Williams, Maurizio Cattelan

Books
Gabrielle Goliath

Tidbits
Graham Little by Max Feldman
Onyeka Igwe by KJ Abudu
Shaun Motsi by Olamiju Fajemisin
Sydney Schrader by Gloria Hasnay
Rahima Gambo by Sindi-Leigh McBride
Ştefan Bertalan by Krzysztof Kościuczuk

Thinkers
SARA AHMED: ARCHIVING UNHAPPINESS
Ana Teixeira Pinto

Criticism
I’M WITH FANTASY
Kerstin Stakemeier

Reprint
REINCARNATION AND BIOLOGY: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE ETIOLOGY OF BIRTHMARKS AND BIRTH DEFECTS
Ian Stevenson
Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Curators
A STUTTERING INSTITUTION
Kabelo Malatsie

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48-page book with photographic documentation, lyrics & additional context
Includes a download code for the album

Design by Niels Wehrspann
Translation work by Aastha Gupta, Sheraz Ahmed, Abdur Rahman Jerral, Tazyne Fatima, and Asad Sheikh

Ruhail Qaisar’s Fatima is a requiem for a dead future. The debut album release by the self-taught artist and producer screams with the trauma and decay of life in his hometown of Leh—a high-altitude plateau region in the contested Ladakh area, extending from the Himalayan to the Kunlun Ranges. Qaisar absorbs this external condition of perpetual conflict between nation states into his internal life and resulting compositions, crossing sound art, noise music and experimental filmmaking. Hauntological drones, power electronics and convulsive post-industrial dissonance create an unnerving sense of fear, anger, and alienation. A broken transistor with a knob tuned to the abyss is bombarded with the cries and bitter laughter of a city’s inhabitants tyrannized, not only by military occupation but the soft-power subjugation of the tourism industry.

Following 2016’s Ltalam EP—released under Qaisar’s now-defunct Sister moniker—Fatima serves to transmit memories carried through the events, local mythos and personal recollections of growing up between the remote agrarian villages of Ladakh and the urban center of its joint capital—Leh. The album was mixed between that area, and a DIY home studio in New Delhi, where the artist amalgamates his collected found sounds and field recordings into unrecognizable hybrids. Discordant pads and atmospherics on the dark ambient of Daily Hunger is disrupted by a crashing, pounding reverb, while contributor Elvin Brandhi shrieks towards its horrifying conclusion in the squelching, scratching sound of something soft being chewed.

An anti-lingual conjuring of metaphysical totems in music, Fatima is a seething chronicle of experience through the dynamics of riots, violence, colonization, unemployment, PTSD, and self-abuse. The cycling tumult of Namgang hosts a menacing whisper that echoes the hissing fury of something like Einstürzende Neubauten and Lydia Lunch’s Thirsty Animal, while a trouncing distorted bass line on Fatima’s Poplar circles a voice that barks, The Western Civilization Show has been discontinued.

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In 2019, Karolin Meunier presented the performance Aller-retour et aller for the first time at Arsenal Cinema in Berlin. This was followed by a screening of the film Wanda (1970) by Barbara Loden, one of the most important works of independent filmmaking by female directors. For HaFI 017, Meunier documents her performance script. Among other references, she engages with Nathalie Léger’s book Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden (2012) by translating text excerpts in dialogue with a friend. In this essayistic novel, Léger follows the traces of the film in her search for the actress and director Barbara Loden.

In HaFI 017: Aller-retour et aller, Meunier’s artistic gestures of experimental translation echoes the intertwining of these three women’s quest by dissolving the biographies of the film character, the actress, and the novelist: “A woman telling her own story through that of another woman.” (Nathalie Léger). The pamphlet includes an afterword by Clio Nicastro.

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Texts by Brad Feuerhelm, Juri Marian Gross, Marija Repšytė, and Nele Ruckelshausen
Edited by Philippe Gerlach and Agnė Juodvalkytė
Design by Marijn Degenaar

Through photographs of the studio process and visual sketches the first publication ANSKA by artist Agnė Juodvalkytė offers an overview of the artist’s studio practice from the past years while creating a sensory world of recollection. The book marks the conclusion of the ANSKA cycle in her work.

“In Agnė Juodvalkytė’s work, the weave that is bound by cloth, ash, dirt, and dye, invokes memory, utility, and hand-infused labor. The stains, folds, and strained fraying edges of her chosen material are also infused, caked, and distressed to provide new readings of production. There is something familiar in her use of textiles. Each fold of fabric is detailed by a weave birthed from the center spiraling out in an obstinate mosaic of emotion wrought from the plunder of self.”
— Brad Feuerhelm

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Top Stories, #19-20: How to Get Rid of Pimples

How to Get Rid of Pimples is Cookie Mueller’s first and only fiction publication, where she spins short, strange tales of friends healed by her miraculous acne cure. Although the stories revolve around her description of others, Cookie herself outshines her characters, with an unmistakable voice that is astute, grotesque, and undeniably hers – as if Flannery O’Connor became a New York downtown diva. With photos by Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin, and David Armstrong, How to Get Rid of Pimples conjures a vision of the remarkable world of Cookie Mueller.

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“I’m interested in the resonances, the re-habitualizations, and the echoes of that historical moment in the contemporary.”

For more than three decades, Tony Cokes (b. 1956, Richmond, USA; lives and works in Providence, USA) has been exploring in his work the ideology and affect politics of media and popular culture as well as their social impact. Starting from a fundamental critique of the representation and visual commodification of African-American communities in film, television, advertising, and music videos, Cokes has developed a unique form of video essay that radically rejects ­representational imagery. These fast-paced works consist of found text and sound material from diverse sources such as critical theory, online journalism, literature, and­ popular music.

The US artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany also marks the first ­comprehensive collaboration between Kunstverein München and Haus der Kunst. The thematic starting point for Cokes’s new productions is the ideological and propagandistic entanglements of both exhibition venues during the Nazi era as well as their cultural-political role in the context of the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972.

The publication Fragments, or just Moments accompanies the eponymous exhibition and translates stills from the newly produced video essays into a book format while examining the significance of Cokes’s work in terms of a contemporary approach to institutional critique. The essays are written by Tina M. Campt and Tom Holert, with an introduction by Emma Enderby and Elena Setzer (Haus der Kunst) as well as Maurin Dietrich, Gloria Hasnay, and Gina Merz (Kunstverein München).

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Album is a short illustrated history of film in Tangier, and of Tangier on film, told through the stories and archives of the Cinémathèque de Tanger, North Africa’s first art house cinema.

With contributions by Philippe Azoury, Ahmed Boughaba, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Carles Guerra, Bouchra Khalili, Luc Sante

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The images in this book are preparative studies for large paintings. The 220 x 220 cm enameled aluminum frames are fixed on motorised axes, which allow the paintings to turn at 90 or 180 degrees. When it flips, the figure reveals its duplicity; elusive lines on a twisted path, bouncing back and forth from an illusion to another… “A duck with a fish in its beak” becomes “a rabbit with a carrot in between the ears”. “Nothing special” becomes “Something special”. “A saw in a log” becomes “a crocodile love”, etc.

First edition, 2023

About the author:
Under various pseudonyms Cornelius de Bill Baboul has received the Berlin Art Prize (DE), was nominated for the Aperture PhotoBook Award (US), has entered private and public collections such as MACBA (Barcelona), has been published by Nieves (CH) and exhibited at Paris-Photo (FR), MoMA PS1 (US), Swiss Institute (US), Huis Marseille (NL), Bank Gallery (JP). His work appears in the international press like the British Journal of Photography (UK), Purple (FR), CURA. (IT), Aperture (US), Elephant (UK), Zeit Magazin (DE), The New York Times (US), The Paris Review (US), Luncheon (UK), It’s Nice That (UK).

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