ZARINA BHIMJI

Landscapes and buildings haunted by their layered histories are the protagonists in British artist Zarina Bhimji’s photographs and large-scale film installations, with India and East Africa the repeat locations for her forays into the archaeology of place. This catalog of a major survey exhibition spanning 25 years presents the first overview of Bhimji’s work. Sound and picture combine to transform image into metaphor, politics into poetry. Spans early installation pieces from She Loved to Breathe: Pure Silence (1987), to her critically acclaimed film Out of Blue (2002), first shown at documenta XI, and her much-anticipated latest work, Yellow Patch (2011). Includes an in-depth conversation between the artist and the exhibition’s curators, Achim Borchardt-Hume and Kathleen Bühler plus an essay by art historian and writer TJ Demos in which he analyses what he calls Bhimji’s ‘Cinema of Affect’.

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BIGMINIS

Fetishes of Crisis

Alexis Vaillant

A compact catalog – mini, in fact – is the perfect accompaniment for the cheeky exhibition BigMinis at Bordeaux’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Bringing together works by more than 40 artists, the show considers important questions for our time, especially the nature of the scaled-down object in a time of recession. The compact object is nowadays regarded as simultaneously cute (meaning minority and superfluous) and disquieting (subversive and hard to see). Is the mini a herald of the current economic crisis, or a reflection of it? Is it actually a smart adaptation to the times? Riveting texts in English and French by an all-star roster of critics enhance an equally stellar list of featured artists, including everyone from Pablo Picasso, Carl Andre and Yoko Ono to Jason Meadows, Cathy Opie and Laurie Simmons.

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BIOMORPH!

Hans Arp in a Dialogue with Current Artist Positions

Hans Arp, considered one of the pivotal artists of the early 20th century, is still influencing artists today. This inventive, complex exhibition catalog from Germany’s Hans Arp Museum focuses on Arp as a pioneer in organic abstraction – using the shapes and processes of nature, growth and change in his work – and shows his work in tandem with a plethora of contemporary works that reverberate with his influence. Terrific photos and a thoughtful, absorbing text compare and contrasts Arp’s work with works by Gerhard Mantz, Tony Cragg, Louise Bourgeois, Ernesto Neto, Birgitta Weimer and many others. As Arp said in the 1930s, “We were looking for an elemental form of art which would cure mankind of the madness of our times.” Apparently as a culture and as artists, we’re still looking.

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BENI BISCHOF

#wtf. Playful Subversion.
A collection of 474 web pics

The artist book / exhibition catalog Playful Subversion from Swiss artist Beni Bischof is a wild journey through 945 black-and-white images taken from every available web portal in a crash of cultures, identity, humor and political comment— a riotous paranoia about the world we live in and the billion of images that assault our senses every single day. It reads like an oversized flipbook except you will need one hell of a pocket to tuck this fat little monster into your coat pocket. Produced for his first Austrian solo exhibition at Fotohof Salzburg, it does exactly as the title suggests. A highly entertaining vade mecum, it blends together the great icons of the culture industry in a high-contrast panorama of our postmodern media culture. The contrast of black-and-white reproductions not only deconstructs and profanes the odd hero or two but also generates a subversive maelstrom, the pull of which is difficult to escape.

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BLACK SUN

Alchemy, Diaspora and Heterotopia

Shezad Dawood

The multiple notions embedded within the black sun—relating to eclipse, transfiguration and alchemy—are explored in this beautifully conceived artist book by Shezad Dawood. Black Sun, the title of the British artist’s third book, is a term with myriad meanings; it represents the darkening of daylight, but is also a symbol of esoteric, mystical or occult significance used in various belief systems. Accompanying a traveling exhibition conceived of and curated by the artist, the catalog’s extensive essays examine structures that, much like the black sun itself, deconstruct our everyday modes of seeing. Featured are works by Ayisha Abraham, Tino Sehgal, Wolfgang Tillmans and others, along with extensive texts by Dawood, Arnolfini director Tom Trevor and Megha Ralapati of Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center.

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BLACK DIAMOND DUST

Jesse Birch & Will Holder (Eds.)

Black Diamond Dust expands on the 2014 multi-site contemporary art exhibition that took place in Nanaimo, British Columbia, a small city on the eastern edge of Vancouver Island. The title refers to coal mining, an industry which, while fueling the modern world, has formed and fragmented communities through economic development, racial segregation and labor inequity. This handsomely designed hardcover book, edited by curator Jesse Birch with Scottish artist Will Holder, gathers art projects and writings by an international gathering of filmmakers, artists, photographers, writers and curators, addressing forgotten or under-acknowledged histories surrounding the practices of international coal mining. Contemporary artworks, poetry, essays, literature, folk songs and archival images are brought together to extract meaning from this fossilized black carbon that continues to power our cities. This is the first of three projects to engage the resource industries of Vancouver Island (coal mining, forestry, and fisheries) through contemporary art. Excerpts from Franz Kafka and George Orwell. Texts by Lynne Bowen, Peter Culley, Antonio Graydon, Sarah Ogan Gunning, Michael Taussig. Artworks by Stephanie Aitken, Raymond Boisjoly, Edward Burtynsky and others.

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JEAN-LUC BLANC

Opera Rock

This is the first comprehensive monograph on the French artist Jean- Luc Blanc’s enigmatic “glam” oeuvre. It documents his retrospective exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (2009), where Blanc’s works have been juxtaposed with those of 45 historic and contemporary artists, as well as with numerous artifacts, antiques, jewels, crystals, curios, and naturalia. In Alex Farqhuarson’s perceptive essay, he comments, “Jean-Luc Blanc mostly paints portraits … Like phantoms, the people he paints have no corporeality, much less a developed identity; and like actors, his subjects appear ‘in character’, void of self, projecting the lives of others.” Additional writings by Thierry Jousse, Melvin Moti and interview by Alexis Vaillant.

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Ina Blom

On the Style Site
Art, Sociality, and Media Culture

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MEL BOCHNER

If The Colour Changes

Achim Borchardt-Hume & Doro Globus (Eds.)

Mel Bochner (born 1940) is part of a generation of New York artists who emerged in the 1960s, at a time when painting was increasingly dismissed as outmoded. Bochnerleft his discipline and become a pioneer in introducing language into the visual field. In 1966, Harvard University art historian Benjamin Buchloh described Bochner’s “Working Drawings” installation as “probably the first truly conceptual exhibition.” In an overview of Bochner’s career this exhibition catalog from Whitechapel Gallery, London, highlights his rich and thought provoking approaches to photograpy, installation and painting over 45 years. Also included are the most recent series of ‘thesaurus” paintings which achieve a symbiosis of language and color as intellectually complex as it is visually stimulating. Texts by Achim Borchardt-Hume, João Fernandes, Ulrich Wilmes and Briony Fer.

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Bodycheck

Catalog of the 10th Fellback Triennial of Contemporary Sculpture

Matthias Winzen

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