Tupacproject consists of the construction of a monument dedicated to Tupac Amaru Shakur, the Black Panther rapper who died in 1996 in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas Valley.

Since the opening exhibition at the Marta Herford Museum in 2005, it has stood imperturbably in front of the Gehry architecture: the life-size sculpture by Tupac Shakur.

Raised on a nearly 5 m high pedestal and with arms folded behind, shirtless and eyes lowered, the life-size monument by the Italian artist Paolo Chiasera (*1978, Bologna) is one of the first works of art that the visitors* even before entering look into Marta. And meanwhile it has become an integral part of the “museum skyline”.

For many, however, the presence of the gangsta rapper in Herford remains a mystery, as does the German rapper Marteria, who visited the Tupac statue together with rap colleague Casper last summer. Marteria lost a €50 bet because he doubted the existence of a Tupac statue in Herford.

With contributions from Lorenzo Benedetti, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pier Luigi Tazzi.

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This book accompanies a two-artist exhibition co-curated by Alessio Ascari and Shinji Nanzuka, bringing together for the very first time the work of Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama and Swiss artist HR Giger. Touring from PARCO Museum in Tokyo to PARCO Event Hall in Osaka between December 2020 and February 2021, the exhibition coincides with the 80th anniversary of Giger’s birth and features over 50 works ranging from the late 1960s to the present day.

The catalogue, designed by Swiss-based art direction firm Kasper-Florio with Samuel Bänziger, features a foreword by co-curator Alessio Ascari, a critical essay by Venus Lau, an interview with the late HR Giger by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Patrick Frey, and a recent interview with Sorayama by Ascari. It comes with a 50x70cm two-sided poster, and two 20cm die-cut stickers.

Born and trained at opposite ends of the world, Sorayama and Giger are apparently at odds—one’s bright colors are swallowed by the other’s dark chiaroscuro; one’s enthusiastic outlook on technology borders with the other’s nightmarish dystopia; one’s “super-realism” challenges the other’s surrealism—yet they share more than meets the eye. Both emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, becoming acknowledged masters of airbrush painting and influential creators beyond the boundaries of the traditional art world, blurring the relationship between commercial and personal work. But more importantly, at the very core of their practice lies a similar concern: an obsessive investigation of AI, eternal life, and the fusion of organic and apparatus. Gynoids (female androids) are predominant subjects, conjuring the post-human and the apotheosis of the woman to reveal an underlying tension between life, death, power and desire.

Hajime Sorayama (b. 1947 in Imabari, Ehime prefecture) has established his position as a legendary artist, both within Japan and internationally, for his extensive oeuvre that centers upon an ongoing pursuit for beauty in the human body and the machine. Best known for his precisely detailed, hand-painted portrayals of voluptuous women, obtained through an astoundingly artful use of a wide array of realistic expressional techniques, most prominently airbrush painting, the artist’s international recognition is inextricably tied to his signature series titled “Sexy Robot” (1978-) featuring erotic android figures clad in shiny chrome metal, and to AIBO, the award-winning robotic pet he designed for SONY in 1999.

Hans Ruedi Giger (1940–2014) was a Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer known for his biomechanical creatures, extraterrestrial landscapes, and disturbing sexual machines. In a career that spanned more than five decades, he employed a staggering variety of media, including furniture, movie props, prints, paintings and sculptures, often creating exhibition displays and total environments with the immersive quality of a wunderkammer—including, most notably, the HR Giger Museum in Gruyères. In 1979, his concept design for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) won an Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects and catapulted to fame his daunting vision of death and futurism.

Designed by Kasper-Florio
With texts by Alessio Ascari, Venus Lau, Hans Ulrich Obrist

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KALEIDOSCOPE‘s new issue #38 (spring/summer 2021), coming with a set of six covers:

Designer Grace Wales Bonner talks to Rhea Dillon about elevating Blackness within fashion, looking back to her Caribbean heritage in search for beauty, nature, and spirituality. The inspirations behind her latest collections, a trilogy exploring Britain and the Caribbean as a diasporic journey, resonate beautifully in an extensive photo story shot by Marc Asekhame.

An extensive trend report titled Office Goals addresses the office intended both as a physical space and a powerful symbol of organized labor, providing an opportunity to question contemporary methodologies of working—from automation, neoliberal dystopias and the all-you-can-work freelance economy, to elevated ideas of “everywhere studio.” Within this frame, Alessio Ascari interviews Hans Ulrich Obrist, the epitome of the globetrotting curator, about how the pandemic affected his workflow, driving him to prioritize research and a decentralized approach. The report also comprises an essay by Alessandro Bava, a visual timeline by Jonathan Olivares, and a roundtable of architects and designers with ANY, Paul Cournet, Fredi Fischli & Niels Olsen, Josh Itiola, and Oana Stănescu.

Celebrated artist duo Gilbert & George, famously challenging taboos and moralism in the art world and society alike, are pictured by Chris Rhodes in the company of pro skater and multi-hyphenate Blondey McCoy—with whom they engage in an unapologetic chat about Britishness, religion, the monarchy, happiness, drugs, gentrification, and how to stay normal and weird.

In conversation with Isabel Flower, skateboarder, multimedia artist, videographer and photographer Adam Zhu discusses his commitment to safeguard his community’s powerful cultural alchemy, capturing a new generation of artists coming of age on Downtown Manhattan’s East Side.

Associated with Gulf Futurism, art collective DIS, fashion brand Telfar, and filmmaker Mati Diop, composer Fatima Al Qadiri (photographed by Charlie Engman) meets with Courtney Malick on the occasion of her newly-released solo album, which stems from an adolescent fantasy and chooses melancholy as a space for spiritual growth.

A special, limited-edition cover introduces a series of new drawings by LA artist Paul McCarthy (photographed by Daniel Regan, interview by Massimiliano Gioni), in which the scrapes the bottom of the barrel, conjuring up cheap psychology, mind-altering drugs, Trump, Hitler, and Hollywood populism, to expose the American pathology.

ABSTRACT, our text-only editorial segment dedicated to urgent research questions of our time, critically embraces the notion of counterculture, looking at it from different angles: the phenomenon of protests and the role of pleasure; the disintegration of civilized society and psycho-deflation; Detroit techno as a liberation technology. Through three essays by Michelle Lhooq, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, and DeForrest Brown, Jr., the magazine becomes a Temporary Autonomous Zone in its own right—one in which “the only possible truth is change” (Timothy Leary).

Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test, a special supplement created in partnership with Red Bull Arts, traverses the slippages between memory, the archive, and history, excavating the personal photographs and videos entrusted to the artist over the past decade by various family members, friends, and pivotal figures of Kingston’s dancehall community.

Also featured in this issue: Ray Johnson (words by Lucas Mascatello); Nan Goldin (words by Nan Goldin); Valerio Olgiati (interview by Martti Kalliala); Michel Majerus (words by Sarah Johanna Theurer); Rachel Kushner (words by Whitney Mallett); Joshua Citarella (interview by New Models); and Slam Jam Archive (words by Katja Horvat).

And finally, “SEASON,” the magazine’s opening section, accounts for the best of this spring/summer with profiles and interviews: Tabboo! by Allan Gardner; Aria Dean by Hanna Girma; Memphis by Luis Ortega Govela; Pol Taburet by Rhea Dillon; Art Club2000 by Lola Kramer; Grant Levy-Lucero by Jesse Seegers; Priscavera by Irina Baconsky; Nancy Holt by Cat Kron; Klára Hosnedlová by Kate Brown; The Opioid Crisis Lookbook by Patrick McGraw; Ryūichi Sakamoto by Tom Mouna; Online Ceramics by Katja Horvat; Oko Ebombo by Conor McTernan; Issy Wood by Harry Burke; Public Access by Isabel Flower; D’heygere by Madeleine Holth.

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CURA. No. 21
Cover by Zoe Williams, INSIDE THE COVER
 Zoe Williams. Bodily Landscapes by Florencia Chernajovsky, PORTRAITS IN THE EXHIBITION SPACE, The Curator as Muse: Kynaston McShine, the Artist and the Museum by Lorenzo Benedetti, EXHIBITION LITERATURE: The Exhibition as Poem by Jean-Max Colard, POP-UP SECTION: DISPLAY ISSUE 02, Haim Steinbach. A Grammar of Nonsense by Frances Loeffler, ARTIST’S PROJECT: Mystical Substitution by Slavs and Tatars, ABOUT
Andra Ursuta by Myriam Ben Salah, ARTIST’S PROJECT by Puppies Puppies, SPOTLIGHT: A Transcribed Conversation between
Simon Denny and Hans Ulrich Obrist, ABOUT: Cecile B. Evans by Martha Kirszenbaum, A VISIT TO: Emily Roysdon. Comedy of Margin, Theatre, Secession, Vienna with Joao Mourao & Luis Silva, ABOUT: Charlie Billingham by James Cahill, ABOUT: Mira Dancy by Sam Korman, HOT! Andrea Crespo by Kari Rittenbach, Dora Budor by Noah Barker, Emily Mae Smith by Laura Phipps & Elisabeth Sherman, Melanie Matranga by Deborah Laks

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Overture
Jens Hoffmann, Julian Myers-Szupinska, and Liz Glass
A peculiarity of the current field of curating is an ongoing contestation over the very meaning of “to curate.” As Alice said in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Humpty Dumpty answers, “The question is which [meaning] is to be master—that’s all.”

On the cover of this issue is Thomas Ruff’s 1989 portrait of a young Hans Ulrich Obrist. If this fresh-faced guy has done more than most to consolidate the identity of the curator—as a ubiquitous, cosmopolitan character, tirelessly promoting him- or herself, an exhibitionist of the global age—he has also presided over that identity’s confusion and multiplication. Is the curator, as Obrist often describes the role, a catalyst? Or is she, to quote Obrist’s frequent collaborator Suzanne Pagé, a modest commis de l’artiste, an “artist’s clerk”?

Curating has become a global concern, yet many languages still even lack a steady term for it. Meanwhile, in some circles, “curation” has a gained a buzzword-ish currency, signaling taste and discrimination across a dizzying array of cultural activities, from so-called “data curation” to creating playlists and dinner menus. The hope, it seems, is that a renewed connoisseurship might discern value amid the profusions of a global market—separate the wheat from the cultural chaff—even if it means, too, that Kanye West now has as much claim on the term “curator” as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev or Okwui Enwezor. The more we stretch the word, it seems, the easier it becomes to hijack. It is time for some clarity.

In Attitude, João Ribas meditates on this semantic drift of the word “curating” into marketing, where it is proposed as a cure-all for digital excess and consumer glut. Following John Searle, who warns that the terms we use control the field of meaning, Ribas argues that contemporary curators must battle to retain the understanding that “curating” has held historically in the field of art, beyond connoisseurship and mere selection. He emphasizes in particular the spatial and temporal character of exhibitions, which may still offer the possibility of resisting the behavioral paradigms inflicted by capitalist urbanism and digital technology.

Geopolitical space is a central concern for several essays in this issue. In Back in the Day, Clémentine Deliss contends with the Museum of Modern Art’s notorious 1984 exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and the Modern, which “remains bedeviled by criticisms and emotional refutations that are hard to dissolve.” Comparing that exhibition’s model of “formal affinity” to a recent exhibition by the Senegalese artist and curator El Hadji Sy, she argues for exhibitionary methods that might “effect a remediating affirmation” of ethnographic objects in order to recover something of their “conceptual code.” Missing in Action republishes passages from Rasheed Araeen’s introduction to his 1989 exhibition of British Afro-Asian artists, The Other Story. By assembling the fragments of their collective story, Araeen dismantles the chauvinism of a “master art history” that had excluded non-Western contemporary artists.

In Assessments, Claire Bishop, Cristina Freire, Tobi Maier, and Octavio Zaya address the exhibition Histórias Mestiças (Mestizo Histories), a trenchant critique of Brazil’s racial democracy curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo. The writers find consonance around one remarkable installation that juxtaposed photographs of indigenous people by Claudia Andujar, 18th-century watercolors of the “discovery” of Brazil by Joaquim José de Miranda, and drawings from the 1970s by Taniki Manippi-theri, a Yanomami shaman. Says Bishop, “Such an anthropological gaze can diminish the present-ism of contemporary art and allow it to become a method or system of thinking. Would that more curators, in more countries, had the nerve to investigate so unflinchingly cherished national myths.” Curators’ Favorites asks contributors to elaborate on an exhibition that has inspired their thinking. Guy Brett describes a 1979 installation by the Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles, an allegory aimed at the military dictatorship in power at the time. Natasha Ginwala contends with The One Year Drawing Project, an experimental exchange of artworks across Sri Lanka meditating on the traumas of that nation’s civil war. And Vincent Honoré considers the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Geneva, claiming the museum itself as a “constant, ever-changing exhibition.”

Six x Six challenges curators to name the exhibitions that have mattered most to them. In this issue, Ionit Behar, Astria Suparak, Inti Guerrero, Gianni Jetzer, Sarah Demeuse, and Nikola Dietrich assemble their miniature pantheons. In Rigorous Research, the scholar Vittoria Martini deliberates the little-discussed 1970 Venice Biennale, a turning point for that venerable institution. In the gap opened by a political stalemate, the staff assumed control, and embraced experimentation and research. Research and reflection also connect the two essays in Rear Mirror. Ruba Katrib details the thinking behind her exhibition Puddle, pothole, portal, co-curated with the artist Camille Henrot at SculptureCenter, New York, describing their attempt to capture something of the weird, rambunctious spatiality of early Disney animations. Scott Rothkopf evinces, in turn, the extraordinary spatial and conceptual deliberation behind his recent Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Across this issue, then, the specificity of curatorial labor emerges—the thought needed to build aggregate meaning from disparate things in space. The word “curating” is not infinitely plastic. This, for us, is what it means. We all know how Humpy Dumpty ended up.

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CURA. No.20

FALL 2015
Cover by Allison Katz

INSIDE THE COVER Allison Katz. Pungent Painting text by Ruba Katrib – PORTRAITS IN THE EXHIBITION SPACE Wim Beeren and Tomorrow’s Museum by Lorenzo Benedetti – TALKING ABOUT Why Poetry? by Jean-Max Colard – POP-UP SECTION: DISPLAY ISSUE 01 You Display, I Display, We Display by Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade – ABOUT Josh Kline by Ciara Moloney – PROJECT A Wonderful World Under Construction by GCC – SPOTLIGHT Ryan Gander in conversation with Adam Carr – ABOUT Michael E. Smith by Jenny Jaskey – A VISIT TO Pedro Barateiro: The Current Situation / Palmeiras Bravas, Museu Colecão Berardo, Lisboa with João Mourão & Luís Silva – ABOUT Marguerite Humeau by Hans Ulrich Obrist – HOT! – Olga Balema by Chris Sharp – Darja Bajagić by Franklin Melendez – Sascha Braunig by Rose Bouthillier – Rachel Rose by Frances Loeffler – PROJECT Villa Design Group 
and Nicoletta Lambertucci – PROJECT Lena Henke and Anna Gritz

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In this issue: A 60 page diary of the Venice Architecture Biennale by Juergen Teller, an interview and visual essay with Luc Tuymans, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Asad Raza on art, Andy Murray & the U.S. Open, an interview with ARS’ Gerfried Stocker, an essay by Joe Fyfe, menswear from Jil Sander, Issey Miyake, Louis Vuitton and Dries Van Noten.

Editor: Olu Michael Odukoya
Language: English
Pages: 189
Size: 27.5 x 21 cm
Binding: Softcover

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Mousse Magazine #28

In This Issue:
Kathryn Andrews, Art & the Web, Manon de Boer, Tony Conrad, France Fiction, Rob Johannesma, K8 Hardy, Tobias Kaspar, Morag Keil, Sung Hwan Kim, Letter to a Blind Man, Helen Marten, John Miller, Mike Nelson, James Richards, Ben Rivers, Eva Rothschild, Thomas Schütte, Gabriel Sierra, Javier Téllez, Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating IV , Fredrik Vaerslev, Gernot Wieland

Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating: Why Mediate Art?
by Maria Lind / edited by Jens Hoffmann / artwork by Marysia Lewandowska

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Mousse Magazine no. 27

In December, Ute Meta Bauer and Dan Graham met up in New York for a conversation whose scope was determined by their many shared interests and long friendship, as well as a passion for literature that, inevitably, is connected to an extraordinary storytelling ability. Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stuart Comer got together with William (Bill) Leavitt for a long conversation just a few months after his first retrospective at Los Angeles MOCA, an event that John Baldessari celebrates in his introductory portrait of the artist.

For PART OF THE PROCESS, Ronald Van de Sompel talked with Sven Augustijnen about the artist’s new film, Spectres, which focuses on the decolonization of the Belgian Congo, especially the circumstances surrounding the murder of Patrice Lumumba. A dark work that tracks the phantoms of history into their most hidden retreats.You need to read Chus Martínez’s text at samba rhythm. Samba is a movement of the body that reverberates in the movement of the social body. It is also a way to neutralize the system, as the author explains. The art world is flooded with printed matter. Dieter Roelstraete analyzes this phenomenon for PORTFOLIO in relation to the work of Zin Taylor, who is unquestionably an exquisite narrator. To Andrew Berardini, the greatest achievement of Brian Bress’s work is that it makes us keenly aware of how much television entertainment has shaped our mental processes. Yarn Man and his bizarre friends make this clear to us.Building houses out of nothing and against all odds. Abraham Cruzvillegas has translated the experience of autoconstruccion into several initiatives, which he talked about with Vincenzo de Bellis. Fiete Stolte lives in a parallel reality. Not a different world from ours, but the same one according to a different model of time. One where nights are not always dark, nor days always light. Jennifer Allen tried to synchronize herself with the artist’s new calendar, for HARK!

ARTIST PROJECT: Jeremy Deller, introduced by an interview with Peter Eleey.

TEN FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS OF CURATING, a project curated by Jens Hoffmann, sponsored by Fiorucci Art Trust and Mousse Publishing, explores the multifaceted physiognomy of the curator. The third of ten dossiers features João Ribas answering the question “What to do with the contemporary?” plus selected illustrations by Matthew Buckingham

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