Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form documents the groundbreaking retrospective curated by Elena Filipovic with the artists Danh Vo, Carol Bove, and Tino Sehgal that traveled to Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, Fondation Beyeler in Basel, and MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt in 2010 and 2011.

Following Marije de Wit’s work that shows her contemplative attitude towards sculpture, presentation, image, representation, abstraction, meaning and value, the works in There is so much thinking to be done keep introspecting their own status. The works are things just as much as they are interfaces in between things and thinking about what they are. Sculptural and painterly motifs that are self-invented, taken from ancient art and from the realms of advertisement, ask out loud whether they’re doodles, ornament or image.

As some works are shaped by trackable gestures – meaning that both what is shown and how it is made are equally on display – these works ask at what moment we decide when images are images. In line with De Wit’s belief that constantly refreshing our outlook is the most helpful thing to do, the works are placed in dense groups. This way they are put to work to hold each other in their active situation of perpetual contemplation.

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Foreign Places

Foreign Places is conceived as an alternative travel guide, which accompanies the eponymous exhibition. The eight contributing artists were invited by Stefano Faoro, designer of this publication and also a former WIELS resident, to imagine a place for the book page in which their work is invested – whether it is a building, city or series of locations. The final text chapter features ‘A Glossary of Place Names’ by WIELS curator Caroline Dumalin, which emphatically locates the artists’ image sequences, as well as the essay ‘From Beirut to Brussels: Notes on Curating as an Exercise in Attachment’ by guest curator Grégory Castéra, who delivers a personal account of the challenges involved in working abroad and attaching oneself temporarily to a place or a practice.

Edition: 750
2016

20.00 €
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Stan Douglas’s The Secret Agent explores the turbulent Seventies and the history of Portugal, which was shaking off a dictatorship and losing its colonies in those years.

The book contains three works by the Canadian artist. The video installation The Secret Agent (première in WIELS in October 2015) tells a story originally written by Joseph Conrad in 1907. Douglas has retained the characters and the plot, but transferred them to the turmoil of Lisbon soon after the Carnation Revolution in 1974. The book contains the original script and an extensive collection of stills and production images.

The second work in the book is Disco Angola, a series of eight staged historical photographs – four in New York, four in Angola – that show the parallels between two more or less simultaneous moments: the hedonistic glam culture of New York nightlife in the Seventies and the civil war in Angola.

The third work, Luanda–Kinshasa, is a 6-hour jazz film set in 1974. It contains eleven songs recorded in the legendary 30th Street Studio, where Miles Davis, Glenn Gould and others have worked.

Stan Douglas is an artist. His films, videos and photographs have been shown internationally since 1970 at events such as Documenta ix, x and xi (1992, 1997, 2002) and three Venice biennials (1990, 2001, 2005). He has had solo exhibitions in leading museums in Europe and North America. Douglas lives and works in Vancouver.

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition INTERREGNUM at Wiels, 9 October 2015 – 10 January 2016.

€39.90

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What would it mean for choreography to perform as an exhibition? This question is the point of departure for Work/Travail/Arbeid.

The exhibition took place at WIELS over a duration of 9 weeks from March 20 to May 17, 2015, featuring the original and most extensive version of the project. All subsequent versions are conceived to be exhibited for a duration of 9 days, with an exhibition choreography specifically devised and composed for the concrete spaces of other museum venues.

Volume #1:
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker
Work/Travail/Arbeid
Rosas & Ictus

Volume #2
Vortex Temporum
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker / Rosas / Ictus

Volume #3
Essays
Bojana Cvejic, André Lepecki, Brian Dillon, Catherine Wood, Douglas Crimp

Volume #4
Anne van Aerschot, Babette Mangolte, Herman Sorgeloos

€50.00

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ABOUT SPACE – Souvenirs; contains a series of playful artist interviews.

The project was initiated after some screenings of nature documentaries at the Field House of the Atlantic Centre for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach – Florida, a visit to NASA – Kennedy Space Center and some beach explorations at Canaveral National Seashore as part of a residency program at Atlantic Centre for the Arts.

€35.00

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Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Six African Artists

Bringing together artists from different parts of the continent, this group exhibition strives to define and articulate notions of feminism and sexuality in the work of women artists whose body (their own or that of others) serves as a tool, a representation or a field of investigation. The critical resonance of a specifically African – and black – feminism, together with the spread of artistic practices to international networks, have given shape to the development of a black feminist art. Stemming from the continent and the Diaspora, this black feminist art depicts bodies that continue a tradition of activism and freedom of speech.

Artists:
Zoulikha Bouadellah, Marcia Kure, Miriam Syowia Kyambi, Valerie Oka, Tracey Rose, Billie Zangewa

Authors:
Sarah Adams, Eva Barois De Caeval, Ken Bugul, Frieda Ekotto, D.E. Fault, Koyo Kouoh, Alya Sebti

Publishers:
RAW Material Company, WIELS, Lunds konsthall, 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine & Motto Books

€25.00

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Distributed on the occasion of the exhibition ‘The Museum of Mistakes: Contemporary Art and Class Struggle’, conceived by Pierre Leguillon and bringing together works he has created over the last fifteen years from reproduced images, this folding brochure/poster continues in this spirit by mimicking the economy of means and autonomy of images Leguillon deploys in his work. It proposes an exhibition model that attempts to foil or declassify the hierarchies of art, as each work is informed by a principle of movement, or even reversibility, and reflects a perpetual process of emitting and receiving information, spurring us to rethink the conditions of the reception of art.

15€

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For her first solo exhibition in Belgium, acclaimed Italian artist Rossella Biscotti draws a trajectory across spaces that evoke important historical processes and links them to the sciences of the mind. This book, published in conjunction with the exhibition, follows this example by interweaving narratives in relation to the concrete and discrete architecture of memory, dreams, and ideas. While revisiting sites of punishment, the gathering of works embodies the ability of the human mind to resist oppression, tracing individual destinies or collective endeavours through a combination of materials, language, and scientific techniques. With a text by Adam Kleinman. Design: Louis Lüthi.

25€

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 Lessons in Posing Subjects. Robert Heinecken. WIELS. Triangles Books.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same title, this book presents the series Lessons in Posing Subjects which Robert Heinecken created in 1981-1982 and reproduced here in its entirety for the first time.
Playing with the reality effect inherent to instant photographs, Heinecken re-contextualizes in this series images found in mail order catalogues, which he juxtaposes with ironic texts.
At once seductive and full of humour, his ‘lessons’ are no less provocative, bearing witness to the commitment of this controversial artist, who considered his approach a form of ‘guerrilla’ artistic practice.

56 pages
34 x 25 cm

€ 35.00
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