SEEPAGE/RITUAL

The Abraaj Group Art Prize 2017

Omar Berrada (Ed.)

Providing an important platform for new and ambitious work from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, the ninth installment of the Abraaj Group Art Prize this year features seepage/ritual, an exhibition of the work of winner UK-based artist Rana Begum (b. 1977) and three short-listed artists: Saudi filmmaker and video artist Sarah Abu Abdallah (b. 1990), Egyptian artist Doa Aly (b. 1976) and Brooklyn-based Iranian artist Raha Raissnia (b. 1968). Organized by guest curator Omar Berrada, the exhibition featured at Art Dubai 2017 explores a reconfiguration of our geometries of attention through a playful engagement with literal geometry. As a companion, the the fully illustrated softcover publication is conceived as a parallel exhibition in book form, and contains original interventions by and in collaboration with the artists. Contributions by Omar Berrada, Rana Begum, Sarah Abu Abdallah, Doa Aly, Raha Raissnia and Milton Cruz.

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PAUL SEGERS

The scene changes

Mark Dery, Ine Gevers, Sebastian Olma & Jonathan Brewer (Eds.)

In the words of Dutch visual artist Paul Segers (b. 1976), “I’m trying to comprehend or react to current issues of the 21st century. A century characterized by acceleration, polarization and technological overload that seems to blur lines between reality and fiction with each passing day.” What makes Seger’s nontraditional monograph so interesting is the visual journey he creates within four chapters, each including descriptions, extensive visuals and texts: “The Method”—full of collage-like drawing of ominous military armaments like swarms of drones; “The Infiltrator”—images of performance works; “The Machine Head”—Segers’s collection of mechanical inventions serving no purpose other than as metaphors for technological paradoxes; and “Daily Practice”— the artist’s imagined reenactments of postmodern workforce businesses and practices. Included are essays by Sebastian Olma reflecting on the artist in the here and now, Ine Gevers on the role of Segers as performance artist and Mark Dery ruminating on what we can learn from this humor-filled artist.

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SEMINA NO. 3: MARK WAUGH

Bubble Entendre

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SEMINA NO. 2: MAXI KIM

One Break, A Thousand Blows!

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SEMINA NO. 1: BRIDGET PENNEY

Index

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Semina No. 5: Katrina Palmer

The Dark Object

This volume of interrelated yet self-contained short stories is set in an art school in which a paranoid, conceptual ideology has prohibited the making of objects. One student remains: isolated and battling with institutional directives and solitary confinement, Addison Cole writes stories. These narrate a series of explicit encounters with texts, objects and artists, reducing characters to their pornographic effect. Imagine Slavojzizek as an impotent sexual metaphor or Hegel as a skeletal specter. London-based author Katrina Palmer explores the tension between the restraint of narrative form and the explosion of ontic instability. The aim is not to subsume fantasy into the everyday, but rather demonstrate that everything is real and the everyday is fantastical.

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Semina No. 6: Jarett Kobek

HOE #999 Decennial Appreciation and Celebratory Analysis

High on teenage rebellion and Thunderbird wine, the Hogs of Entropy (HOE) released over 1,000 text files – an electronic version of paper zines – and inadvertently proved that the brain capacity of the average American teenager is on par with Neanderthal man. To a soundtrack of Guns ‘n’ Roses, Wu Tang Clan and The Misfits, prime conspirator Jarett Kobek practiced a shamanistic exorcism of American culture. In this book, Kobek attempts a tripped-out transformation of his adolescent texts. Outsourcing all critical meditation to an Asian essay farm and interweaving this work-for-hire meta-text alongside editorial dialogue and excerpts from the original, he reloads and jacks up his anti-authorial intent for a newer, even stupider millennium.

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Semina No. 7: Stewart Home

Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie

Using pornographic spam emails, and replacing the generic ‘he’ and ‘she’ with the names of leading feminist artists, this sort-of-novel reveals the un-nameable desires of the art world, projected through the aspirant culture of London’s curatorial elite. With walk-on parts by Martha Rosler, Sam Taylor Wood and Tracey Emin, sensational lost Belle de Jour transcripts, and missives from the underbelly of the blogosphere, artist/filmmaker Stewart Home’s work reads like the SCUM manifesto remixed by The Bomb Squad. When the publisher rushed this to Malcolm McLaren for a deathbed blurb, legend has it his final croak was, “Feminism with balls.” Home’s writings include 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess, Tainted Love, and Memphis Underground. From 2007-10, he was the commissioning editor of Semina, a series of acclaimed experimental novels.

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Q.S. SERAFIJN

Notes 3

Jasper Henderson (Ed.)

Q.S. Serafijn is a visual artist, writer, and publicist. In his work disciplines are closely interrelated; for example when Serafijn works on an assignment for the public space, he accompanies the image with a story that reflects on the genesis of the picture and, casually, analyzes the public space and the job situation. For the first time in Notes  3, a wide selection of his visual work, blog entries, mini-essays and short stories have been gathered and published. Six writers reflect on Serafijn’s career, including Dirk van Weelden exploring Serafijn’s idiosyncratic relationship with art and reality, Anna Tilroe on the concept of commitment, Harry Starren about modern patronage, Ragna Siguroardottir on relationships between text and image, Ruud Kaulingfreks his hybrid discipline and Siebe Thissen on the relationship of citizens to art in public spaces.

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SERIAL FORMATIONS 1967/2017

Re-staging of the First German Exhibition of International Tendencies in Minimalism

Renate Wiehager (Ed.)

In 1967, Peter Roehr and Paul Maenz curated the first German Minimalist exhibition, Serial Formation, at the University of Frankfurt’s studio gallery. A total of 48 artists from both America and Germany presented serial-based works ranging from the German Zero movement to American Minimal and Conceptual, Nouveau Réalisme, and Op and Pop art. Celebrating the exhibition’s 50th anniversary and in the context of its ongoing Minimalism in Germany exhibition series, Daimler Contemporary, Berlin, restages this historically significant exhibition while expanding on its theme in the exhibition and catalog Serial Formations 1967/2017. The voluminous and well-illustrated publication features a complete facsimile of the long-out-of-print 1967 exhibition catalog, as well as the new and expanded exhibition. Included are 1960 artists from Donald Judd and Agnes Martin to Heinz Mack, artist’s statements, and essays from the original two curators, along with contributions from Siegfried Bartels, Nadine Henrich, Daniel Lippitsch, Meredith North, Michaela Filla-Raquin, and Frederik Schikowski and the new show curator, Renate Wiehager.

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