Fantasies of the Library. Anna-Sophie Springer, Etienne Turpin (Eds.). The MIT Press

Posted in writing on May 21st, 2022
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A book that acts both as library and exhibition space, selecting, arranging, and housing texts and images, aligning itself with printed matter in the process.

Fantasies of the Library lets readers experience the library anew. The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas—as a platform of the future. One essay occupies the right-hand page of a two-page spread while interviews scrolls independently on the left. Bibliophilic artworks intersect both throughout the book-as-exhibition. A photo essay, “Reading Rooms Reading Machines” further interrupts the book in order to display images of libraries (old and new, real and imagined), and readers (human and machine) and features work by artists including Kader Atta, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, and others.

The book includes an essay on the institutional ordering principles of book collections; a conversation with the proprietors of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive; and a dialogue with a new media theorist about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source ebooks. The reader emerges from this book-as-exhibition with the growing conviction that the library is not only a curatorial space but a bibliological imaginary, ripe for the exploration of consequential paginated affairs. The physicality of the book—and this book—“resists the digital,” argues coeditor Etienne Turpin, “but not in a nostalgic way.”

Contributors: Erin Kissane, Hammad Nasar, Megan Shaw Prelinger, Rick Prelinger, Anna-Sophie Springer, Charles Stankievech, Katharina Tauer, Etienne Turpin, Andrew Norman Wilson, Joanna Zylinska.

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Traversals. Anna-Sophie Springer / K. Verlag | Press

Posted in writing on October 10th, 2014
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Traversals.  Anna-Sophie Springer / K.Verlag Press

TRAVERSALS is based on a series of conceptual interviews with Dora Garcia, Chris Kraus, Mark von Schlegell, Charles Stankievech, and Jacob Wren originally produced for an installation in an art gallery. As a re-issue of these texts the forthcoming publication continues K.’s interest in the book-as-exhibition. Each invited contributor has found a unique way to explore the hybrid spaces between genres and art forms, and the discussions focus especially on the role and relationship between visual art and writing. While the interview process was rather formalised––with one set of five identical questions posed to each person in the first round, and then five individual questions asked in a second round in response to the first five answers––the texts themselves delight through a personal tone and a great openness for both idiosyncratic trajectories and unexpected trasversals between the five different chapters.

The material was originally produced for the piece TRAVERSALS (With Ladder) shown in the exhibition 5x5Castelló2011 at Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Castelló, Spain (8 July – 18 September 2011).

On the occasion of 5×5 the interviews were pinned to the wall in a grid while a sliding library ladder allowed for a playfully embodied reading experience. The spatialised format revealed the parallels in the conversations as well as their differences – particularly as the conversations evolve.

€ 16.00

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Loveland. Charles Stankievech. K. Verlag

Posted in literature, writing on November 3rd, 2011
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Loveland. Charles Stankievech.

Concept + Design by Charles Stankievech
With Texts by M.P. Shiel, Mark von Schlegell, Mark Lanctôt + Anna-Sophie Springer

LOVELAND is a monograph conceptualised and designed by Canadian artist Charles Stankievech that collects primary sources, fiction and critical texts for his artwork produced for the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Sobey Art Award in the Fall of 2011. Typical of the artist’s research methodology, the book links a spectrum of fields across a broad span of history. Somewhere between the two poles of colour field painting and military colonisation in the Arctic, Stankievech has created a dense web that connects the birth of synthetic pigment and chemical warfare to the Romantic landscape and contemporary geopolitical issues. As curator Mark Lanctôt writes in his critical essay: “Stankievech’s work … directs us away from a-political modernist pictorial utopias towards something more telling: how the relationship between the narrative of history and the site it is connected to can veer into unsuspecting directions, escaping our perceived mastery over it.”

An exquisite edition of 300 with letterpress embossed cover, collation of unique paper stock for each section and 5 colour offset printing.

D 22€

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