HUBS AND FICTIONS

On Current Art and Imported Remoteness

Sophia Y. Hao & Edgar Schmitz (Eds.)

Hubs and Fictions, originally a touring forum, invited international curators, writers and producers to probe how fiction plays out in a globally distributed art-world ecology and to discuss how infrastructures are invented against its background. Staged sequentially in 2012 at Cooper Gallery – University of Dundee, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Goldsmiths London, the forum operated as a satellite event to Edgar Schmitz’s exhibition Surplus Cameo Décor at Cooper Gallery. The book functions as a deliberately discontinuous reader, juxtaposing documents, negotiations and reflections from and on the conversations. It also includes a preface by Andrea Phillips, a new image sequence by Schmitz and a suite of reflexive annotations exchanged between Hao and Schmitz. With contributions by Tobias Berger, Guy Brett, Simon Groom, Sophia Hao, Lisa Le Feuvre, Ma Lin, Markus Miessen and Federica Bueti, Tom Morton, Vanessa Joan Müller, Wang Nanming, Paul O’Neill, Edgar Schmitz and Gemma Sharpe.

Add to your order

THE HUMAN SNAPSHOT

Thomas Keenan & Tirdad Zolghadr (Eds.)

The 1955 MoMA exhibition “The Family of Man” used a panorama of 503 photographs from 68 countries to construct an optimistic percept of the common human experience. Eventually travelling the world as an agent of U.S. cultural diplomacy, the exhibition has been criticized in the years since for its totalizing use of photography—particularly from developing nations—to draw a falsely universal and humanistic narrative. This handsome hardbound reader (drawn from an eponymous conference organized by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and the LUMA Foundation and held in Arles, France in 2011) looks to “The Family of Man” as a starting point to examine the contemporary relationship between curatorial practice and human rights as they manifest in art and photography. Original contributions from cultural theorists, photo historians, curators, and artists wrestle with potential contemporary applications of the exhibition’s themes. With contributions by Ariella Azoulay, Bassam El Baroni, Roger M. Buergel, George Didi-Huberman, Michel Feher, Hal Foster, Anselm Franke, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, Maja Hoffmann, Denis Hollier, Thomas Keenan, Alex Klein, Suhail Malik, Marion von Osten, Katya Sander, Hito Steyerl, Eyal Weizman, Tirdad Zolghadr.

Add to your order

HYSTERICIZING GERMANY

Fassbinder, Alexanderplatz

Manfred Hermes

In this excursive analysis of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s pivotal work, the 14-part Berlin Alexanderplatz miniseries broadcast on German television in 1980, German historian and theoretician Manfred Hermes explores the potential of narration in the paradoxes of cinematic representation. In the miniseries, Fassbinder took as his subject the 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin, a sub-proletarian apocalypse set in the Weimar Republic. In the process Hermes argues that Fassbinder historicized the avant-garde of the 1920s and redetermined the relationship between utopianism and popular culture. While Döblin created his protagonist to be an hysteric, Fassbinder chose to hystericize the viewer. In this work, along with others from the same period, Fassbinder established a Jewish-German mirror rotating on the axis of the Holocaust.

Add to your order

I CAN’T WORK LIKE THIS

A Reader on Recent Boycotts and Contemporary Art

Joanna Warsza (Ed.)

In recent years, artists and curators have been confronted with the political dilemma of engagement or disengagement. The ideological, economic or ethically objectionable circumstances of certain biennials and art exhibitions have raised the question of whether to continue and, if so, under what circumstances, with what consequences and to what ends? This dense illustrated reader edited by curator Joanna Warsza is the result of her 2015 course at the Salzburg International Academy of Fine Arts and examines mostly through interviews the issues surrounding recent boycotts of biennials in Istanbul, St. Petersburg, Sydney and São Paulo (2013–2015). Their political, ideological and economic contexts, timelines, statements and conversations with parties involved demonstrate how and why curating and art production must engage politically to stay relevant. With over 40 participating international artists, curators, writers and researchers including Ahmet Ogut, Joanna Warsza, Angela Mitropoulos, Libia Castro and Olafur Olafsson, Andrea Phillips, Hito Steyerl, Tirdad Zolghadr and many more.

Add to your order

IDOLS OF THE MARKET

Modern Iconoclasm and The Fundamentalist Spectacle

Sven Lütticken

In this book-length essay, art critic and historian Sven Lütticken takes philosopher Theodor Adorno’s critique of popular arts and culture a step further. Adorno criticized the manipulation of taste in official cultures and the pretense of individualism; Lütticken looks at the tension between fundamentalism and individualism in the context of the current religious-political image wars. This book examines both the afterlife of religious elements in modern culture and possible responses to the current religious re-appropriation of Adorno’s critique of modern capitalist culture by both Christian fundamentalists and radical Islamists. Lütticken contributes regularly to Artforum, New Left Review, Afterimage, and Texte zur Kunst, among other publications.

Add to your order

THE IMAGINES

Ines Lechleitner

Part monograph and part artist book, The Imagines started with an invitation to its writers to respond to four recent art installations by Berlin-based artist Ines Lechleitner. Lechleitner furthers her artistic explorations in perception and language by utilizing the Greek notion of ekphrases (vivid textual descriptions of visual artworks). In the original Roman text, paintings (which may never have existed) are described in such a detailed and sensory manner that the reader can imagine standing in front of them. Employing this notion, Lechleitner collaborates with writer/curator Agnieszka Gratza, Béatrice Gross, Chantal Pontbriand and Allen S. Weiss to build up narratives within the space of the book utilizing a variety of visual and textual elements. The resulting collaborations invite the reader/ viewer to reflect upon the intertwining of verbal and nonverbal communication and the nature of dialogic exchange in contemporary art.

Add to your order

IN A MANNER OF READING DESIGN

The Blind Spot

Katja Gretzinger (Ed.)

Is it possible to find a new way of thinking about design that allow for and even encourages a recessive “blind spot?” This conceptual reader juxtaposes new and classic texts to turn a self-reflexive eye on contemporary practice. What we perceive as “true” is widely influenced by our knowledge—implicit conceptions of which we are not aware. Design, as a planned action, brings together thinking and everyday objects and ingrains itself in our everyday contexts. When not reflected upon, it simply affirms societal norms instead of questioning them. If design aims at taking a critical stance, it needs to change its acquaintance with knowledge. The metaphor of the “blind spot” proposes looking at what is implicit or goes unnoticed in our perception. Contributions by the Faculty of Invisibility, Claudia Mareis, and Doreen Mende, among others.

Add to your order

IN SEARCH OF EUROPE?

Art and Research in Collaboration. An Experiment.

Andrea Heister, Samuli Schielke & Daniela Swarowsky (Eds.)

Can we talk about Europe without being Eurocentric? How can we meet on equal footing in an unequal world? These were questions that emerged from a research project and an experiment involving researchers from the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, and artists from the participating countries working together toward a final exhibition. The participants set out on a journey to “Search for Europe.” With an eye on creativity, political ideologies and migration and with a range of locations from West Africa, the Middle East, and Western Europe to Southeast Africa and the Balkans, the participants endeavored to understand how people remember the past, strive for a better future, or think about alternatives in an entangled world. The final culmination is the publication, in which the researchers, artists and guest authors reflect on the process through essays, artwork and documentary imagery.

Add to your order

In the Poem about Love You Don’t Write the Word Love

Tanya Leighton

Add to your order

INSTITUTION BUILDING

Artists, Curators, Architects and The Struggle for Institutional Space

Nikolaus Hirsch, Philipp Misselwitz, Markus Miessen, and Matthias Görlich

This thought-provoking collection of writings looks at how the language of the architectural skin in which art is presented affects the way in which viewers, curators, and artists experience the works. Continuing Sternberg Press’s exploration of the concept and reality of the European Kunsthalle – a temporary art exhibit space – the editors and contributors offer a series of strategies that explore the intermixing of the disciplines of art itself, how art is exhibited, and architecture. How will that apply to the interaction between future exhibitions and their spaces? As time spans of exhibitions become shorter and programs become more differentiated, architecture in itself becomes the exhibition.

Add to your order