A history of images / Une histoire d'images

First monograph of the Franco-Iranian artist.

This monographic catalogue looks back over the first 15 years of work by Iranian artist Elika Hedayat through more than 110 reproductions. Two of these are on a 1:1 scale, and a detailed set offers a comparison of the dimensions of the works in relation to each other.

Françoise Docquiert introduces the issues at stake in her practice with an essay, complemented by an interview with Joana P.R. Neves.

"Elika is a Parisian-Iranian artist. This cultural blend  is  slightly  ironic  though  very  significant, as it nourishes her artistic work and practice. Inspired by her childhood, her life, and the violence in her native country, she makes films, videos, and drawings always filled with beauty, scathing humour and cruelty." - Annette Messager

Born 1979 in Tehran, Elika Hedayat lives and works between Paris and Tehran. Arriving in France in 2004, she was admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in Annette Messager's studio, from wich she graduated with the Jury's congratulations in 2008.

For her works, Elika Hedyat often uses testimonies and experimental documentaries stage in a dreamlike and imaginary universe. Her stories are contemporary and her characters are real. All of her works revisits historical references, transferring them to the field of personnal experience, mainly using the various possibilities of her repertoire as a narrative document and memory retrieval tool. Reality, memory and imagination come together in a personal story under different forms : drawing, video, documentary, painting and performance. 

Text by Françoise Docquiert.
Interview with Elika Hedayat by Joana P. R. Neves.

A veritable panorama of Art Brut at an international level, through 180 works selected from Bruno Decharme's collection.

Art brut has never ceased to shake up the history of art and nourish minds resistant to norms as it questions classic notions of art and creation as well as those relating to the normal and the pathological. But who are they, these artists of a special kind, witnesses to another world, strangers to stylistic trends and influences? They stay—or are kept—away from the culture of fine art as well as the codes and places that constitute it such as schools, academies, museums, art fairs, etc.

Featuring A.C.M., Noviadi Angkasapura, Anselme Boix-Vives, Marie Bodson, Giovanni Bosco, Gustavo Enrique Buongermini, Aloïse Corbaz, Fleury-Joseph Crépin, Egidio Cuniberti, Henry Darger, Fernand Desmoulin, Janko Domsic, Dong-Hyun Kim, Jaime Fernandes, Eugen Gabritschevsky, Pietro Ghizzardi, Madge Gill, Paul Goesch, Jorge Alberto Hernández Cadi, Paul Humphrey, Zdeněk Košek, Joseph Lambert, Gustave Pierre Marie Le Goarant de Tromelin, Augustin Lesage, Pascal Leyder, Alexander Pavlovitch Lobanov, Ramon Losa, Dwight Mackintosh, Lázaro Antonio Martínez Durán, Mettraux, Edmund Monsiel, John Bunion Murray, Iwona Mysera, Koji Nishioka, Masao Obata, Jean Perdrizet, M. Pierron, Photographies Spirites, Miloslava Ratzingerová, Marco Raugel, Achilles G. Rizzoli, Leopold Strobl, Harald Stoffers, Mose Tolliver, Melvin Way, Scottie Wilson, Adolf Wölfli, Anna Zemánková, Carlo Zinelli, Unica Zürn.

The work of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) is considered today an invaluable testimony on the deportation and the holocaust of the Romani people during the Second World War. For the very first time, this publication considers equal to her graphic work the notes she wrote on the back of her drawings and paintings. Stojka's particular use of language, phonetically adapted from her knowledge of German, is here transcribed and translated into English, while giving access to both sides of her works.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Malmö Konsthall in 2021.

Ceija Stojka was born in 1933 in Austria to a family of Romani horse traders, the Lovaras. She was still a child when the nazi racial laws drove her into the hell of the concentration camps for 24 months. As a survivor, she covered up this trauma with a heavy silence for almost 40 years. In the 1980s, facing other tragic circumstances in her life, the denial of the Romani holocaust and the resurgence of extreme right-wing racist ideas in Austria, she felt an urgent need to testify. She wrote at first, then started to draw and eventually found her way by blending the two as a self-taught artist. She calls upon us, through her visions of childhood, to never turn a blind eye on what happened, and to remain vigilant as to what may emerge again. Ceija Stojka died in 2013 in Vienna.

Edited by François Piron.
Texts by Ceija Stojka, Noëlig Le Roux, Irka Cederberg.
Graphic design: Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé.

Stay away from nothing shines a spotlight on the deep relationship between Paul Thek and Peter Hujar through the artists’ letters and photographs. Beginning in 1956 and spanning two decades, the publication opens a window into their intimate, complex, and beautiful lives, starting with a sequence of images by Hujar that showcases the two of them in innocent moments of pensive and haunting play in Coral Gables and beyond.

These early portraits of their budding relationship are followed by several playful postcards from Thek in 1960 and his first letter to Hujar in 1962, written while the artist is in the Philadelphia harbor aboard a containership bound for Europe. In the letter, Thek is brimming with joy and new discoveries and exclaims that the world “seems bigger and more gloriously strange than ever before in my entire life.” The two eventually meet in Rome, where they both begin to evolve into the icons we know them as today, and the remaining letters trace Thek’s travels and adventures, romantic dalliances, work, and financial ups and downs through 1975. More than fifty letters and postcards, along with drawings and other ephemera, are reproduced in Stay away from nothing and their poetic, quotidian, and melancholic tone provide a rare glimpse into Thek and Hujar’s relationship as it wavers with seduction, glamor, tumult, and mischievousness.

Throughout this period, Hujar was photographing Thek in his now-iconic style, capturing him in Italy, in various studios, and on the beaches of Fire Island. Included are the artist’s classic images of Thek in the catacombs in Palermo, as well as his studio portraits of the artist creating The Tomb. Among these well-known works are dozens of other photographs, many unpublished until now, including candid portraits of Thek, as well as images of the two artists goofing around or posing for passport photos. Collectively, these images demonstrate not only the complex emotional interiority of Thek but the tender, dark, and hopeful connection between the two artists, lovers, and friends.

An afterword is provided by Andrew Durbin, author of The Wonderful World That Almost Was, a biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek. Edited by Francis Schichtel.

Paul Thek is among the most legendary and elusive artists of the post-1960s generation. He burst onto the New York scene with his Technological Reliquaries series, then known as “meat pieces,” which challenged Pop and Minimalism with an idiosyncratic approach that merged earnest posthuman embodiment and a critique of contemporary art trends. In Europe in the 1970s, he created new modes of exhibition-making that involved the creation of elaborate, ephemeral installations composed of sand, candles, newspaper, chicken-wire, Polaroids, and discarded furniture. Upon returning to New York in the later years of his career, he produced his deliberately “bad paintings” while continuing his longest-running series of paintings executed on newspaper, works that poignantly underscore his sustained engagement with themes of ephemerality and the passage of time. Thek died of AIDS in 1988.

Peter Hujar died of AIDS in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. Hujar was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 80s, and he was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards work and life. He was a consummate technician, and his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and-white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way. His extraordinary first book, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was published in 1976, but his “difficult” personality and refusal to pander to the marketplace ensured that it was one of the last publications during his lifetime.

The third issue of Le Chauffage is an inquiry into the relationship between the practices of artists/ writers and their day jobs. This subject stems from a question fundamental to the existing mandate of Le Chauffage: 'how do you keep warm?' and subsequently, 'how do you pay the bills?' As these perennial concerns occupy our everyday lives, we ask artists/writers to consider the influence that their day jobs, side hustles, creative or non- creative forms of employment have on their respective practices.

This issue tries to account for the significant ways in which complex economic realities come to shape the art we produce, look at, and discuss. How do we deal with limited time and resources? How do we reclaim and steal time back? How do our day jobs shape and influence what we make? How do we subvert the means of production of the workplace? Can the constraint of a day job also be a way to alleviate the pressure of professionalising?

With contributions by Daniel Bozhkov, Nathan Crompton Pippa Garner, Chauncey Hare Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes, Garrett Lockhart, Jannis Marwitz Reba Maybury, Tiziana La Melia, Dan Miller, Ragen Moss, Jean Luc Moulène, Jean Katambayi Mukendi Paul Niedermayer, Sophie Nys, Megan Plunkett, Chris Reinecke, Jacquelyn Zong Li Ross On Gabrielle L Hirondelle Hill Margaux Schwarz, Eleanor Ivory Weber James Welling, Werker, The Wig.

TIME by Spencer Longo is a collection of printed work depicting government raids, religious visions, environmental catastrophe, and extremist fundamentalism tangled together in a narrative web of salvation, annihilation, and transcendence. Using pen plotter graphics directly on uncollated pages of Time magazine, Longo explores the conspiratorial trope that messages are secretly embedded in mass media, coaxing our millenarian anxieties out through an additive printing process using graphics from survivalist publications, end-times evangelical cartoons, and marginalia from the borders of underground occult material, all sprinkled with ecstatic bursts of star-spangled clipart. A must-have for your fallout shelter's library.

PRESCRIPTIONS is a transcription of a handwritten manuscript, dated to approximately 1650, containing a wide range of medicinal and magical remedies. Currently housed in the Cornell University Witchcraft Collection, it is assumed this practical handbook was a reference for healing, midwifery, and other medical/magical advice. Recipes and instruction cover various methods of purging, ointments for swellings, fevers, and pain reduction, lotions for venereal disease, advice for childbirth, and dilemmas such as “worms in the ear.” Accompanying these medicinal prescriptions are a series of magical prescriptions: charms, rituals, and spells recorded to fortify the ailing body, induce amorous desire, or seek revenge.

With its mix of Latin words, Early Modern English parlance, colloquial plant names, apothecary weights, and archaic medical terms, the recipes can at first appear opaque, but with sustained engagement one can begin to decipher the logics and structures within the writer(s)' shorthand. The original manuscript, in having its own detailed glossary, index, and citations, exhibits a meticulous cataloging of knowledge and resources, and reveals an earnest desire to hold onto the integrity and sanctity of the body in the face of 'many evils.'

The transcription is accompanied by a glossary of terms, an explanation of the various apothecary measurements used, and expanded citations of the medicinal/magical treatises that were abbreviated within the original text.

Jack Smith presented his performance Irrational Landlordism of Bagdad as part of the Cologne Art Fair fringe in the summer of 1977. Many other events were documented photographically and can now be found in the Cologne Art Fair archives - not so Smith's performance.

This book shows him in his fair stall and during his performance for the first time. The pictures are perfect documents of a completely eccentric transaction by this pioneering director and performance artist.