MICHAEL TEDJA

Aquaholism

This artist’s book came about through Tedja’s inclusion in the recent Stedelijk exhibition How Far How Near exploring recent acquisitions of African-based artists along with domestic and international works already in the collection. Part exhibition catalog, artistic treatise, poetry collection, visual essay and artist’s book, Aquaholism is a polyphonic collage of text and image comprising over 17 years of Michael Tedja’s drawing, painting, sculpture and curatorial work. “Aquaholism” is the act of collecting these fragments, and the collector, the “Aquaholist,” scrutinizes discoveries in a transparent and closed aquarium—a space whose contents remain in motion. By presenting the artist as an active linguist who translates form and text from studio to exhibition to public spaces, Tedja opens up established systems of sociopolitics, identification and aesthetics and his works live beyond their initial conception. Contributions by Nav Haq, Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen and an artist interview by Robert van Altena.

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MATHILDE TER HEIJNE

Performing Change

Performing Change, a collection of interviews by Berlin-based Dutch artist Mathilde ter Heijne (b. 1969), explores the idea of open-ended, collaborative art processes and their transformative potential beyond the confines of art. Designed as an artist’s book and published in conjunction with her exhibition at the Museum für Freie Kunst, Freiburg, the book includes handwritten revisions, annotations and drawings from contributors including voodoo priest Togbé Hounon-Hounougbo Bahounsou and priestess Mamissi DaPovi, women from the Kartal Kadın Ürünleri Pazarı (Women’s Products Market) in Istanbul, shaman Ayahuasca and biologist Ulrich Meyerratken, ceremonial magic anthropologist Susan Greenwood and artists, curators and critics Sabeth Buchmann, Anselm Franke, Elke Bippus, Amy Patton, Mark Kremer, Janne Schäfer and Kristine Agergaard. Ter Heijne is recognized for her work in video, performance and installation and is a founding member of ƒƒ, an evolving and collaborative network of international feminist artists.

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Terminal 5

Andrew Lee Walker and Rachel K. Ward

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Teststrip

A History of An Artist-Run Space (1992 – 1997)

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Textiles

Open Letter

Rike Frank & Grant Watson (Eds.)

An essential characteristic of textiles is their richly intertextual nature. Textiles: Open Letter stems from an exhibition at Museum Abteiberg, Germany, plus an extensive research project (2010–14) examining the place of textiles in the history of art and culture, media, society and technology through various voices. Representing traditions found in both applied and fine arts, textiles hover between formalism and functionalism; as objects and techniques, they mediate between self and world, between affect-driven and knowledge-driven processes of appropriation. Functionally versatile, textiles are the fulcrum of an ensemble of activities, and illustrate relations between subject and object, material and immaterial, artistic and artisanal labor, and different cultures. The contributions in this book reflect on this complex interplay, the attendant conflicts and antagonisms of power and value, and the interaction of artistic processes within their contexts.

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Diana Thater

Between Science and Magic

Claude Levi-Strauss wrote that “…art lies half-way between scientific knowledge and mythical or magical thought.” Influential film and video artist Diana Thater took Levi-Strauss’s idea a few steps further in the installation piece documented in this exhibition catalog/artist book. The piece – created expressly for the Santa Monica Museum of Art – is based on an iconic illusion, a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Famed magician Greg Wilson performs the trick again and again; he was first filmed doing the illusion in a studio, then Thater screened the footage in the lavish, Art Deco Los Angeles Theater, and re-filmed the projection. In layer upon visual layer, using multiple points of view and multi-layered sound, Thater makes an absorbing film within a film within a film. Exciting work from an important artist.

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The Danish Pavilion

51st Venice Biennale

Jacob Fabricius

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The Populism Reader

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Related titles
The Populism Catalogue

THEATER OF EXHIBITIONS

Jens Hoffmann

Curator Jens Hoffman’s Theater of Exhibitions considers the plight of “art after the end of art” and asks whether inherited frameworks of making, theorizing and exhibiting art still apply to contemporary practice. Are exhibitions still an appropriate form of assembly and embodied ritual in our 21st-century global society? Drawing from his formation in theater and his own curatorial work, Hoffmann reflects on the current spaces of contemporary art—the gallery, the institution and the biennial. Ultimately he positions the discipline of curating in the context of a larger cultural sphere—one shaped by the political, social and economic conditions and demanding new attitudes and new thinking. The book also considers the commodification of the art industry and the distribution of images in the digital age and posits the exhibition as an anthropological endeavor, with curator as agent.

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THIS ROAD LEADS TO NOWHERE

Pierre Punk, Vol. 3

Josh Garrett-Davis (Ed.)

The third volume in the Center Pivot Series from Last Chance Press and M12, This Road Leads to Nowhere brings together archives and reflections from a punk music scene that flourished in Pierre, a small town in South Dakota, from the early 1990s through 2010. Merging the tradition of DIY punk publications and regional travel guides, the book sings an unsung hymn of American underground culture. This paperback includes writings and images from Pierre community members, musicians who traveled through and played in the town, and kindred spirits from similar scenes further afield. Through interdisciplinary approaches, this series explores and connects the changing realities of rural landscapes and communities around the world. Editor Josh Garrett-Davis is the author of Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains and an assistant curator at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.

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