Böcker utgivna av Sternberg Press

A comprehensive look at the unique artistic work of Annette Kelm, with rich color illustrations of emblematic pieces from her oeuvre.Tomato Target takes a comprehensive look at the unique artistic work of Annette Kelm and the visual idiom she has developed over the course of her career. The book contextualizes Kelm's practice, which deftly probes the medium of photography and uses heterogeneous subjects decisively, to signifiy and act as telling abstractions within her visually opulent object worlds. Kelm's work is at once intellectually astute, concise and enigmatic. Her photographs quote the genres of still life, studio, or architectural photography without fully complying with the conventions that govern them. Tomato Target offers essays, installation views from the artist's solo Tomato Target exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, and rich color illustrations of emblematic pieces from her oeuvre. The texts unravel the puzzles in Kelm's work, touching on the history of photography, design, and display as well as scientific elements that continue to reappear within Kelm's work. ContributorsVanessa Joan Müller, Anna Voswinckel; conversation between Nicolaus Schafhausen and Brigitte Kölle

Blending memoir and social critique, elegantly written essays explore a world that feels different, from Brexit and Trump to #MeToo and the death of parents.This book merges memoir and social critique in an original fashion. By combining personal observations with a general systemic analysis, it seeks to propose a new genre of writing. Isabelle Graw manages to capture radical political, social, and cultural changes that have occurred since 2014 in elegantly written observations, also analyzing how these macro-shifts reach into her own life. Addressing topics that range from Brexit, Trump, and a general rightward turn to #MeToo, men with beards, and Balenciaga, Gaw registers the symptoms of a world that clearly feels different. Meditating on irretrievable personal losses, she describes how we find ourselves literally "in another world" after the death of our parents. With a theme of mourning running throughout, her book is an attempt at exposing and analyzing painful emotions.

Writings by exhibition maker and writer Jens Hoffmann, charting a highly unique curatorial trajectory.This volume brings together a wide selection of writings by exhibition maker and writer Jens Hoffmann that outline his deep understanding of the interconnections among art, curating, theater, film, and literature. The nearly fifty texts include essays on artists, exhibitions, and curating; reviews of large-scale international group exhibitions; catalogue texts from exhibitions Hoffmann curated; and interviews and conversations with artists and other cultural practitioners. Collectively, these texts map the development of Hoffman's thoughts and agenda, articulating a highly unique curatorial trajectory.

Since the 1960s, artists in Hungary have displayed a penchant for abstraction when it comes to complex social conditions and efforts to enact political change.The abstracted visual language of Hungarian artists is the focus in the Künstlerhaus exhibition "Ábstract Hungary" curated by Ákos Ezer, a painter who in this catalog hastranslated the present-day reality in his home country through the framework of "abstraction." This theme is, in fact, a revival, as the Künstlerhaus has previously presented the group exhibition "Abstract Hungary" in 2017. With a sweeping selection of twenty-four Hungarian artists, including Imre Bak, Tamás Kaszás, Dóra Maurer, and Zsolt Tibor, the show was devoted to methods of abstraction of varying dialogical nature. The exhibition represented a broader narrative blueprint of the hotly debated term "abstraction" and showed both established and aspiring artistic positions, some of which were exhibited there in Austria for the first time.This exhibition catalogue seeks to expand these two eponymous projects, and consolidate the abstracted view of Hungary.ContributorsDávid Fehér, Áron Fenyvesi, Michael Wimmer, Mónika ZsiklaPublished by Sternberg Press and Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz AT

An investigation of digital archiving as an integral technology of warfare and how artists respond to these changes. Digital and data technologies are actively transforming the archives of contemporary warfare. Bringing together a range of scholarly perspectives and artistic practices, (W)ARCHIVES investigates digital archiving as an integral technology of warfare and how artists respond to these changes. Throughout the book, the (w)archive emerges as a term to grasp the extended materiality of war today, wherein digital archiving intersects with images, bodies, senses, infrastructures, environments, memories, and emotions. The essays explore how this new digital materiality of war reconfigures the archival impulses that have shaped artistic practices over the last decades, and how archives can be mobilized to articulate political demands, conjure new forms of evidence, and make palpable the experience of living with war.

More then eighty works by nearly sixty artists from the Pearl River Delta region of China, accompanied by essays by critics and curators.This book is the catalogue for the namesake inaugural exhibition of Times Art Center Berlin, founded in November 2018. Through four essays by critics and curators, as well as texts and images of the works on exhibit--more than eighty works by nearly sixty artists--the book aims to present a vital component of the Chinese art world that is underrepresented on the global art scene: the contemporary art production from the Pearl River Delta (PRD). A region of China with distinct cultural characteristics and traditions, the PRD has become a creative hub for international exchange and art activities. Influenced by Hong Kong's popular culture and by international new media art, PRD artists' video practices represent the most groundbreaking and powerful visions of contemporary art and culture in the region. Their experimentation with video art reflects their search for freedom and forms of resistance against dominant ideology and powers as they turn ordinary gestures into artistic strategies to construct diverse "personal utopias."

Essays, conversations, and documentation map the work of the artist Janek Simon.Artist Janek Simon tends to say he is interested in many, even too many, things: from globalization and political geography to artificial intelligence and financial speculation, from DIY strategies to postcolonial theories within Eastern Europe. This reader decodes fifteen years of his work. It opens with the world of synthetic folklore, a speculative visual language between particularism and universalism, created with the help of AI and composed of mosaics generated by algorithms combining motifs from India, Africa, South America, Europe, and Poland. Simon's work asks if AI can protect us from the traps of homogenization, xenophobia, and essentialism, and what a new universalism would look like in the era of the identity politics. Essays, conversations, and documentation map Simon's footsteps, extensively presenting for the first time his work and life, which has been from time to time supported by art institutions such as the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, where he held his survey show in Spring 2019.ContributorsInke Arns, Max Cegielski, Ekaterina Degot, Lukasz Gorczyca, Nav Haq, Virginija Januskevičiūte and Monika Lipsic, Nina Katchadourian, Joanna Kordiak, Lev Manovich, Daniel Muzyczuk, Sina Najafi, Lech Nowicki, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Aleksandra Przegalińska, Mohammad Salemy, Sumesh Sharma, Jan Sowa, Joanna Warsza and others.

A novel reading of the work of one of the most influential designers of the twentieth century.In this provocative intellectual biography, architectural historian Mark Wigley makes the surprising claim that the thinking behind modernist architect Konrad Wachsmann's legendary projects was dominated by the idea of television. Investigating the archives of one of the most influential designers of the twentieth century, Wigley scrutinizes Wachsmann's design, research, and teaching, closely reading a succession of unseen drawings, models, photographs, correspondence, publications, syllabi, reports, and manuscripts to argue that Wachsmann is an anti-architect--a student of some of the most influential designers of the 1920s who dedicated thirty-five post-Second World War years to the disappearance of architecture. Wachsmann turned architecture against itself. His hypnotic projects for a new kind of space were organized around the thought that television enables a different way of living together. While architecture is typically embarrassed by television, preferring to act as if it never happened, Wachsmann fully embraced it. He dissolved buildings into pulsating mirages that influenced the experimental avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s; but Wigley demonstrates that this work was even more extreme than the experiments it inspired. Wigley's forensic analysis of a career shows that Wachsmann developed one of the most compelling manifestos of what architecture would need to become in the age of ubiquitous electronics.

Essays that forge a path to a truly radical "bad" modernism in art and literature.What, exactly, constitutes the "bad"? Can one consciously produce in the name of "badness," or is badness a value judgment that comes after the fact, from an Other? How does one begin to assign aesthetic value to an object? If one is to accept the "bad" as "good," or to find aesthetic value in badness, then when does the bad succeed and when does it fail? If, pace Beckett, we are to embrace failure as an inevitable goal, then isn't it necessary to invent a new mode of criticism that accommodates this aesthetic reality? Travis Jeppesen's Bad Writing offers a series of interconnected essays, many of which appear in print for the first time, forging a pathway for a truly radical "bad" modernism in art and literature. He explores the terrain of failure, assessing the situation of the twenty-first century literary avant-garde; considers the work of perennial outsiders; and offers "ficto-criticisms," including his controversial, no-holds-barred takedown of the 2015 Venice Biennale, originally published in Art in America. Erudite, irreverent, witty, and occasionally controversial, Bad Writing reinvigorates the too-often staid medium of art criticism as an iconoclastic and inventive literary art form.

How do you tell the story of a friendship? How do you trace the roots of one of the most significant cross-disciplinary unions in fashion today? Artist Sterling Ruby and fashion designer Raf Simons did just that when they sat on stage with curator Jessica Morgan at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Offering complimentary perspectives on a bond that has matured over the span of a decade, and a body of work that transcends boundaries, Ruby and Simons spoke with mutual respect, trust, and a deep investment in the future. This is a story, and an exchange, that is beyond collaboration.The Incidents is a book series based on uncommon events at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design from 1936 to tomorrow.Edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman-SalkinContribution by Jessica MorganCopublished with the Harvard University Graduate School of Design

How an art school can be a pedagogic nexus dedicated to the transmission of knowledge as well as a locus for civic and critical debate.The artist as entrepreneur has become a common topic of discussion. This book, however, puts forward the notions of "self" and "system." First, every artistic practice is self-reflexive and self-contextualizing. Second, each system an artist builds allows for innovation. Let us construct a space where we inevitably find ourselves together with others, even if we feel lonely, like a witch lost in a library of artists' books. Let us invent our right to do so. Let us enter the world of smell and write about a megalomaniac art school while documenting a generation of art students and their studios with analogue photography. This book arises from the 2018 activities of the Masters of Fine Arts program at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). It reflects the conviction that an arts school can be a pedagogic nexus dedicated to the transmission of knowledge, experimentation, and research, as much as a locus for civic and critical debate and exhibition, involved in its community, locally and globally.ContributorsJeremy Ayer, Velibor Barisic, Donatella Bernardi, Amos Bollag, Katharina Brandl, Clifford E. Bruckmann, Gioia Dal Molin, Philip Frowein, Désirée Myriam Gnaba, Noëlle Guidon, Adrian Hanselmann, Vanessà Heer, Dijan Kahrimanovic, Maya Lama, Matthias Liechti, Romain Mader, Marisa Meier, Javor Milanov, Fidel Morf, Angi Nend, Dominic Neuwirth, Leila Peacock, Elodie Pong, Dorothee Richter, Nils Röller, Evan Ruetsch, Antonio Scarponi, Christoph Schifferli, Claudia Stöckli, Aurélie Strumans, Raphael Stucky, Jan Vorisek

Photographs, essays, fiction, poetry, and an interview document an immersive installation by Marseille-based artist Wilfrid Almendra.Light Boiled like Liquid Soap is an immersive installation by Marseille-based artist Wilfrid Almendra featuring radio transmissions and a series of sculptural elements made of copper, plaster, and silicone in various states of dematerialization. Combining found and repurposed materials, the works attest to notions of desire, circulation, and flux, from protective spaces of retreat to global economies of exchange.The seventh volume in the Fogo Island Arts publication series accompanies the eponymous exhibition curated by Alexandra McIntosh and Nicolaus Schafhausen and presented at the Fogo Island Art Gallery in 2016. Richly illustrated with color photographs of Almendra's installation, the book features a critical essay by Anne Faucheret, a work of speculative fiction by Nicolas Idier, poetry by Jorge Armando Sousa, and a conversation between Wilfrid Almendra, Alexandra McIntosh, and Nicolaus Schafhausen.Copublished with Fogo Island ArtsContributorsWilfrid Almendra, Anne Faucheret, Nicolas Idier, Alexandra McIntosh, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Jorge Armando Sousa

Writings, Conversations, Scripts is the first survey of text works by Ane Hjort Guttu. Written between 2003 and 2018, the texts range from public statements, poetic short prose, and film scripts to reflections on the role of the artist and essays on art for children. With a special focus on the significance of "image-text constellations," this anthology, edited by Rike Frank and designed by HIT, suggests connections between artistic writing and curatorial publishing.The publication was conceived in connection with the solo exhibition "Films" by Ane Hjort Guttu at Tromsø Kunstforening in 2018, co-curated by Rike Frank and Leif Magne Tangen, and was generously supported by Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norsk Kulturråd, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, and Fritt Ord.Copublished with Torpedo Press, Kunsthøgskolen, Oslo

Documenting a project that turned a suburb of Stockholm into a museum that produced concrete images of a Sweden where divides are intensifying.This book documents and discusses Tensta konsthall's experimental multiyear project "Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden" that ran from 2013-18 in the Stockholm suburb of Tensta and beyond. Tensta is dominated by a late modernist housing estate, built on old farmland with traces from both the Iron Age and the Viking era, where today nearly 20,000 people live, a majority with a trans-local backgrounds. More than fifty artists, architects, performers, sociologists, cultural geographers, philosophers, and others contributed artworks, research projects, seminars, guided walks, workshops and much more, reporting on the past and present of Tensta, creating a "museum." The project produced concrete images of what can be described as the New Sweden--a place with people of vastly different backgrounds, where economic and social divides are intensifying. Tensta Museum also engaged with the concept of cultural heritage and the complicated matter of how it is used in Sweden and elsewhere.ContributorsAction Archive, Adam Tensta, Ahmet Ögut, Babi Badalov, Carl Larsson, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Emily Fahlén, Erik Stenberg, Irene Molina, the Kurdish Association, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Mekonen Tekeste, Meron Mangasha, Petra Bauer, Ricardo-Osvaldo Alvarado, Spånga Local Heritage Association, Tarek Atoui, the Tensta Hjulsta Women's Center, Tensta Library, Beatrice von Bismarck, Boris Buden, Christina ZetterlundCopublished with Tensta konsthall

Documenting Florian Hecker's multichannel psychoacoustic installation with essays, images, and data.This book documents an exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien that took place from November 2017 to January 2018. In Hecker's multichannel installation Resynthese FAVN, the auditory stimuli produced from the objects within the exhibition space and the synthetic sounds he composed were designed to subliminally override the mechanical processes of human sense. The result was an intervention into the psychoacoustics of the audience, dramatizing their subjective experience through auditory hallucinations.The catalogue collects essays by curators, researchers, theorists, and art historians on Hecker's work and its relation to topics ranging from musique concrète, Mallarmé's poem "The Afternoon of a Faun," and computer music. The psychoacoustic phenomenon of Resynthese FAVN is illustrated with a series of tensor acoustic measurements resembling the colorized impressions of thermal imaging, which is followed by 270 pages of densely sprawling data tables abstracting sound and its textures into text.ContributorsMatthew Fuller, Vincent Lostanlen, Vanessa Joan Müller, Michael Newman, Axel Röbel, Magnus Schaefer

The script for, and conversations around, artist Jesse Ash's multi-dimensional project built around a play about a bitter argument between two ex-lovers. Avoidance--Avoidance is a multi-dimensional project built around a play about a bitter argument between two ex-lovers. The project incorporates artworks which act as props, set pieces, and stage, and as individual artworks in their own right. Brought together through an evolving script, the narrative unfolds to reveal a multiplicity of secrets through an ongoing, interrogative dialogue. The individual artworks act both as backdrops to, and reflections on this repetitive exercise in extracting and concealing information. The culmination of which shines a light on public and private forms of disclosure within a contemporary context of state and commercial surveillance. Bringing together material from each iteration of the project, spanning multiple continents and languages--including annotated and translated scripts, rehearsal and performance stills, studio sketches and intricate newspaper collages--the book explores the theme of transparency in emotional, material and political terms. The project is introduced through a text by curator Elsa Coustou. Conversations with actor Ansu Kabia, writer Peter Pomerantsev, and artist Daniel Sinsel consider issues such as "performed" intimacy, troll farms, and trompe l'oeil through the lens of the Avoidance--Avoidance project.

Profit over Peace in Western Sahara examines the role of natural resources in the occupation of Africa's last colony. Not well known to the wider public, the territory of Western Sahara is considered by the United Nations to be awaiting decolonization. Its liberation from colonial rule has come to a standstill due to Morocco's continued military occupation of a part of the territory. The protracted conflict has dramatic consequences for the Sahrawi people of Western Sahara. This book details, among other things, a remarkable vote in the European Parliament in 2011 when EU offshore fisheries were rejected by the territory. The battle over the fisheries elegantly illustrates how the EU--for political reasons and financial self-interest--has ignored basic principles of international law. This publication is edited by Erik Hagen and the artist Mario Pfeifer, who has been researching the region since 2011 and provides visual material for the book. Erik Hagen has followed the issue of resources in Western Sahara since 2002, both as a journalist and as a campaigner for the organization Western Sahara Resource Watch. An essay by lawyer Jeffrey J. Smith examines the 2017 landmark judgment in South Africa concerning a bulk vessel carrying conflict minerals from the territory.English/Arabic, with a German insertContributorsErik Hagen, Mario Pfeifer, Jeffrey J. Smith

Documenting the artist Stephen Sutcliffe's remarkable and distinctive practice spanning more than twenty years.at Fifty is the first collection dedicated to Stephen Sutcliffe. Both a microcosm and macrocosm of the processes at play in his works, it is also something of an artist's book, one that, typical of the artist's critical practice, formally addresses questions about the value of the monologue, the archive, and the status of the artist.at Fifty documents how Sutcliffe's work has developed and how the means for channeling his deconstructive sensibility have been honed. It includes commissioned essays and an interview with the artist. Dan Fox's essay, "Be In My Broadcast, When This Is Over," looks at television, that one-time pillar of British culture that was as formative for him as it was for Sutcliffe. "Overlaid, Not Removed," by Ilsa Colsell, focuses on Sutcliffe's use of collage for the deft yet deliberately overt repurposing of signs and symbols. And an interview conducted by Michelle Cotton delves into Sutcliffe's assimilation of interruptions, creative blocks, and anxiety. Taken together with the artist's vision for this special publication, at Fifty brings to life, for the first time in book form, a remarkable and distinctive practice that now spans more than twenty years.

Revisiting a project that concatenated art, research, and urban activism into a visionary hybrid framework.For three weeks in October 1968, Stockholm's Moderna Museet was transformed into a sprawling adventure playground that was free to access for all of the city's children. It concatenated art, research, and urban activism into a visionary hybrid framework.Half a century later, through a series of seminars, exhibitions, and new artworks, The New Model revisits this utopian intervention, reviving discussions of public participation, children's agency, and shifting ideals of collective being. Curated by Lars Bang Larsen and Maria Lind, these inquiries took place from 2011 to 2015 at and around Tensta konsthall, in one of Stockholm's late-modernist suburbs. Through essays, exhibition documentation, and dialogues with the participating artists--among them Palle Nielsen, Magnus Bärtås, Hito Steyerl, Ane Hjort Guttu, and Dave Hullfish Bailey--this volume charts the evolution of two artistic, curatorial, and institutional experiments.Contributions by Dave Hullfish Bailey, Magnus Bärtås, Jessica Gogan, Ane Hjort Guttu, Lars Bang Larsen, Gunilla Lundahl, Palle Nielsen, and Hito Steyerl, with an artistic intervention from Metahaven

A bunch of residents cruising the seas of nine temporary realities.From the sun-drenchedness of the Dubaian atmosphere to a feathery encounter in a secret printing workshop, words and materials are discreetly--spectrally, outspokenly--put forward: a bunch of residents cruising the seas of nine temporary realities, the result of an ongoing swapping of facts and speculations from the earthly realm. At one end of the spectrum, players, voyagers, entering the machinery (cacophony) of thought processing. At the other, the anchoring point, The Last Resident, the one who opens a possible scene.ContributorsVerina Gfader, with Victoria Browne, Rebecca Carson, William Forsythe, Claire Hsu, William Kentridge, Mochu, Monica Narula, Pallavi Paul, Lea Porsager, Gerald Raunig, Sif, Lantian Xie

A portrait via interviews and essays of New York City at the end of the 1970s as the center of the African diaspora."Fichte did away with the opposition between objective and poetic writing--his heightened objectivity becomes poetic, his poetry journalistic. He wrote to fight against bigotry and provincialism, and developed approaches in the 1970s that are discussed today in queer studies and postcolonialism."--Diedrich DiederichsenThe Black City is a portrait of New York City written by Hubert Fichte between 1978 and 1980. One of Germany's most important postwar authors, Fichte researched the city as the center of the African diaspora, conducting interviews and composing essays about syncretism in culture and the arts, material living conditions in the city, and political and individual struggles based on race, class, and sexuality. His interview partners include Michael Chisolm, arts educator and coordinator of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition; German émigré and artist Lil Picard; photographer Richard Avedon; Léopold Joseph, publisher of the exile newspaper Haiti Observateur; and Teiji Ito, composer and Vodou initiate. The book opens with notes on an exhibition of Haitian art at the Brooklyn Museum, and closes with a self-reflective literary analysis of Herodotus, the first white European to write extensively of his travels and (desirous) encounters in Africa.Often compared to the work of Jean Genet and Kathy Acker, Fichte's novels and nonfiction are exuberant and erudite, contesting the stylistic and ethnographic norms of the time to locate a "utopic potential" for poetic and political revolution in the cultural heritage and contemporary life of the African diaspora. Fichte's writing in The Black City provocatively exposes the complexities of its author's subjectivity in a manner that underscores the singularity of his writing, while prompting questions about how notions of exploitation, authority, and authenticity manifest themselves in pseudo-ethnographic practices. Translated into English for the first time, The Black City is part of Fichte's multivolume experimental literary cycle, The History of Sensitivity, which was left unfinished due to his untimely death in 1986. Published in conjunction with the project "Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology," a collaboration between the Goethe-Institut and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, supported by S. Fischer Stiftung and S. Fischer Verlag.

A richly illustrated retrospective of interdisciplinary artist Joyce Campbell and her three decades of work in photography, film, and video. On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the Work of Joyce Campbell offers a number of portholes into the relations between photography, philosophy, ecology, material history, science fiction, and the care and reading of sacred and symbolic landscapes, as they have been engaged by artist Joyce Campbell over her near three-decade career. Richly illustrated with a full array of her various bodies of work in photography, film, and video, the publication complements and extends her major 2019 exhibition at Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Bringing together new and existing writings by Christina Barton, Geoffrey Batchen, Elizabeth Grosz, Richard Niania, Bernard Stiegler, Mark von Schlegell, and John C. Welchman with the embedded wisdom and inherited narratives of her Māori and Pākehā collaborators, Campbell demonstrates the interconnectedness of complex biological, spiritual, and representational systems, and the potential of photography to resist the global techno-capitalist hegemony that underpins the exponential collapse of biodiversity and the decline of spirit in our contemporary era. Raised in Aotearoa New Zealand's rural hinterland, before spending a decade in Southern California, Campbell's biography mirrors her practice, oscillating between New Zealand's verdant coasts and the smog-choked, climate-stressed systems of the Californian deserts. She has photographed in extreme conditions in North America, New Zealand, and Antarctica, using the full panoply of techniques from photography's two-hundred-year history. This publication is the outcome of a close collaboration with volume editor and contributor John C. Welchman (Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism, University of California, San Diego, and Chair, Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts). Copublished with Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi at Victoria University of Wellington Contributors Christina Barton, Geoffrey Batchen, Joyce Campbell, Elizabeth Grosz, Tungāne Kani, Apikara Niania, Richard Niania, Mark von Schlegell, George Smith, Sebastian Smith, Vicky Smith, Bernard Stiegler, John C. Welchman

A series of drawings by Irma Blank, reproduced in more than three hundred full-color images, with texts by art historians.Linguistic and visual representation intersect in Irma Blank's pastel-colored, script-like Eigenschriften (Self-Writings, 1968-73), a series of drawings considered the starting point of the artist's mature work. The cycle stems from Blank's experience moving to Italy in the 1960s from Germany, where she was born in 1934. No longer surrounded by her native language and unable to express herself through words, this form of writing became a type of escape for Blank. The slender lines of these works are reminiscent of writing, but one that is incomprehensible. Without any specific meaning, the work is pure sensation transmitted from the hand to the surface of the page, from the body to the work. Alongside more than three hundred full-color reproductions of the Eigenschriften works, this volume includes a text by Luca Lo Pinto examining the artistic and historical influences on Blank's cycle of drawings, considered "an exercise of subtraction to reach a basic form of writing," while Douglas Fogle's essay looks at Blank's work through the lens of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, in terms of a shared practice of repetition, as well as the work of the writers Robert Walser and W. G. Sebald.ContributorsDouglas Fogle, Luca Lo Pinto

Workshop of the Film Form provides an in-depth overview of the achievements of Warsztat Formy Filmowej (WWF; Workshop of the Film Form), a group of avant-garde artists who were working at the Leon Schiller National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre in Lodz, Poland, between 1970 and 1977. WWF was founded by the students and graduates of the school, now known as the National Film School, and included: Wojciech Bruszewski, Pawel Kwiek, Andrzej Różycki, Józef Robakowski, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Kazimierz Bendkowski, Antoni Mikolajczyk, Janusz Polom, and Ryszard Waśko. As pioneers of video art in Poland and structural cinema in Central and Eastern Europe, the artists refused classical narrative and traditional film media, working instead somewhere between cinematography and contemporary art. This publication examines all aspects of WFF's activity, from their films, photographic experiments, video art, and performative actions to their teaching work, which includes previously unexplored pedagogical contributions to the National Film School. Drawing on the private archives and oral testimonies of the WWF, Workshop of the Film Form attempts to provide a full account of the group's history as well as a comprehensive survey of each member's practice. The writers who were invited to respond to the WWF for this book provide insightful new readings of the group's output and activities, contextualizing their work in the history of the prewar Polish avant-garde and the politics of experimental filmmaking in Poland under the rule of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR).Copublished with Fundacja Arton

A study of art's drive to blur art and life and to transform the latter, through the lens of modern biopower.Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry analyzes modern and contemporary art's drive to blur with life, and how this is connected to the democratic state's biologized control of life. Art's ambition to transform life intersects in striking ways with modern biopower's aim to normalize, purify, judge, and transform life--rendering it bare. In these intersecting yet different orientations toward life, this book finds the answer to the question: How did autonomous art become such an effective tool of the capitalist state? From today's "creative cities" to the birth of modern democracy and art in the French Revolution, Art and (Bare) Life explores how the Enlightenment's discovery of life itself is mirrored in politics and art. The galvanizing revelation that we are, in Michel Foucault's words, "a living species in a living world," free to alter our environment to produce specific effects, is compared here to the discovery that art is an autonomous system that can be piloted toward its own self-determined ends--art for art's sake. But when both art and the capitalist state seek to change life rather than reflect it, they find themselves set on a collision course.

Examining the theories and practices of radical leftist politics of the 1960s and 1970s and the relationship between politics and aesthetics.This is the final chapter of a long-term project curated by Edit Molnár, Lívia Páldi, and Marcel Schwierin that started with a group exhibition at Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg, in 2016. The show looked back on the epoch of Cold War radicalism and anticolonial revolution--an era characterized by a proliferation of ideas about how radical social change could permeate the globe. The book, like the exhibition itself, presents a variety of approaches that, through specific events and historical contexts, survey the theories and practices of radical leftist politics of the 1960s and 1970s and the relationship between politics and aesthetics. It also investigates the ways in which artists rethink the possibilities of new political subjects and how complex sociohistorical connections can be questioned and revisited in the realm of art.ContributorsStefanie Baumann, Felix Gmelin, Ho Tzu Nyen, Rajkamal Kahlon, Sarinah Masukor, Kirill Medvedev, Edit Molnár, Lívia Páldi, Rachel O'Reilly, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Marcel Schwierin, Catarina Simão, Suzanne Treister, Jan Verwoert

In the style of a catalogue raisonné, Reto Pulfer's comprehensive monograph, Zustandskatalog: Catalog of States and Conditions, follows the artist's work over the past fifteen years. Excerpts from the artist's novels as well as insightful texts by Anselm Franke and Benoît Maire are juxtaposed with 475 documentary photographs of Pulfer's technical drawings, one-off exhibitions, large-scale installations, and performances. Categories such as living ceramics, food advice, ghostology, synesthesia, and transformation are woven throughout the book, giving unique insight into the ideas and imagination that are part of the work itself.Published in collaboration with Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève; Musée régional d'art contemporain Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerrannée, Sérignan; Spike Island, Bristol; Centre international d'art et du paysage de l'île de Vassivière; Fórum Eugénio de Almeida, ÉvoraContributorsAnselm Franke, Benoît Maire, Reto Pulfer

The members of Communists Anonymous (COMA) share an extreme sense of empathy and justice, and therefore detest more or less any form of private property. COMA members restrain themselves from any effort to overcome capitalism before there is a new convincing model at hand of how to actually implement communism. The speculative self-help of COMA understands the historical incarnations of communism as substantially incomplete in thought and practice, and places communism where it originated--in the realm of fiction. Only as fiction can communism manifest itself again beyond doubt. Solution 275-294: Communists Anonymous is a document of some imageries of communism and a testament to the current predicament of our political imagination. Atomized, privatized, and deprived of any infrastructure for solidarity--without any internationalist project, with moralizations compensating for the disappearance of political organization, with micro-politics replacing macro-politics--communists can only be anonymous in this world of ours. Edited by writer Ingo Niermann and curator Joshua Simon, this collection of essays and stories--written from the fields of art, literature, law, philosophy, activism, design, and science--proposes resolutions to current social contradictions, covering topics such as bacteria, bliss, immortality, queerness, interculturality, poetry, transportation, childhood and motherhood, and all-encompassing sensual love.Solution Series edited by Ingo NiermannContributorsSantiago Alba Rico, Heather Anderson, Ann Cotten, Fiona Duncan, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Boris Groys, Elfriede Jelinek, Georgy Mamedov and Oksana Shatalova, Metahaven, Momus, Ingo Niermann, David Pearce, Frank Ruda, Georgia Sagri, Joshua Simon, Alexander Tarakhovsky, Timotheus Vermeulen

Essays that form a dynamic discussion among leading feminist thinkers on Zelimir Zilnik's film Early Works (1968). This collection of short essays brings together a dynamic discussion among feminist thinkers, on the filmic fate of Jugoslava, the leading character in Zelimir Zilnik's film Early Works (1968). The cinematic narrative follows Jugoslava as she leaves her lumpenproletariat family to lead a small group of vagabonds after the failed 1968 student movement in Socialist Yugoslavia. The group travels to the countryside to bring the teachings of young Marx and Engels to the peasants. Jugoslava passionately wants to emancipate local village women, delivering motivational lessons on contraception. However, the group's attempt to instigate a revolutionary program among the peasants fails miserably; instead, the villagers attack the young men and sexually assault Jugoslava. Her revolutionary passion burns fast and gloriously, and for this she is punished, through the film's own allegorical reflexivity. In the last scene, the male comrades chase the heroine through the barren, foggy, muddy fields of Pannonia, harassing her, only to finally shoot her and set her body on fire. Jugoslava dies in flames. Canonical within the Yugoslav New Film--a dissident cinema faction questioning the status quo of bureaucratic state socialism in the late 1960s and early 1970s--Early Works has received limited discussion in terms of its gendered representation of revolutionary action and the presence and absence of feminist critique addressing this historical period. The volume is a part of Antonia Majaca's ongoing collaborative investigation Feminist Takes which considers the relation between the Non-Western cinema and feminist theory and practice and is itself a material trace and redaction of a series of focused gatherings approaching the film to re-read its significance from multiple, indisciplined, feminist locations.

People have used honey, dates, and fruits to sweeten their dishes since time immemorial, but with the introduction of sugar--"white gold"--into cooking and baking, a whole array of delightful flavors and culinary possibilities was unearthed. Sugar was the building block for edible sculptures and model palaces made for festivals and celebrations thousands of years ago, and the main ingredient in lavish creations for Rococo and Baroque banquets. A life without cakes, pastries, tarts, soufflés, meringues, petits fours, or marzipan would be unimaginable! In Bon! Bon!, Charlotte Birnbaum uncovers the wonderful world of all things sugary through surprising anecdotes and historical accounts, each accompanied by delectable recipes that are sure to satisfy any sweet tooth.On the Table is a series of publications edited by Charlotte Birnbaum that explores the encounter between food and art.