"A Lecture on Stagnation"

Riffing off the title, this volume includes an interview with Carolyn Lazard – an artist whose conceptual and often spare videos, sculptures, installations, and performances explore the full amplitude of relation – by Catherine Damman, plus a feature on New York-based contemporary artist Tishan Hsu, whose practice examines the “embodiment of technology”, and contributions by time-based media artist Silvia Kolbowski, for whom political resistance, the unconscious, and structures of spectatorship are a central concern of all her projects; choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer; and science fiction author Octavia Butler.

Retroactively compiled from the curators*’ footnotes to the exhibition handout of the 2021 exhibition Zeros and Ones, at KW Berlin.

Dedicated to the Sadie Plant book of the same name (Zeros + ones: digital women + the new techno culture, 1997), the issue embodies a (cybernetic) reading & writing machine, as it co-authors artists’ work.

* Edited with Kathrin Benthele, Anna Gritz, and Ghislaine Leung - the edition has 180 pages, 4 colour plates, two bookmarks, an otherwise unavailable postcard donated by the Stanley Brouwn estate, and… SIXTEEN possible covers, reproducing a work by Lutz Bacher.

F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises.

This issue, "Spin Cycle", is concerned with captioning, commentary and description. Edited with Mike Sperlinger.

Homophone Dictionary was originally a file that is compiled by the now 96-year-old former schoolteacher Susan Nixon. She has build up many collections throughout her life, almost all of them exist out of objects, except one: after her retirement she compiled a word document that by now exist out of almost 1000 homophones; two, or more words that you pronounce similar but have a different meaning, often the spelling is also different.

The document is structured as a dictionary and the homophones are illustrated with examples that are based on autobiographical information. The structure of Homophone Dictionary also refers to speech therapy exercises and concrete poetry.

“As a student nurse learning medical terminology, I became fascinated with understanding the roots of words. When I had a young family, words were a principal source of entertainment: it was not unusual for one of the children to slip from their chair at the dinner table and fetch a dictionary in order to settle a dispute or satisfy someone’s curiosity. Then I became a teacher and brought this love of words into the classroom. My habit of word collecting became the children’s habit – my pupils became ‘word-lovers’ and ‘list-makers.’

I casually collected homophones for years. When introducing homophones into the classroom, the kids found definitions dull; the typical reaction was, ‘Yes, but give me a sentence using the word!’ and this idea emerged: a book of sentences demonstrating the meanings of homophone pairs or sets.”

Offset print
20,4 × 12,4 cm
edition of 500

A Hypothesis of Resistance contains five essays on Asynchronicity, Rehearsal, Undetectability, The Present Tense, and Duration. Each attempts to resist the doctrine of "performance," the symptom of a society, stratified by how we perform—economically, socially, digitally. As we become ripe for consumption, caught in an economy of perpetual readiness, basic needs remain unmet and it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead.

Cally Spooner (born 1983 in Ascot, UK, lives and works in London and Turin) is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings.

Exhibiting performances that unfold across media—on film, in texts, as objects, though sounds, and as illustrated in drawings—Cally Spooner addresses the manners in which specific technological and financial conditions shape and organize life. With artworks that feature olive oil soap, WhatsApp messages, the voice of a business, the sound of a head cold, eroding support structures, a child development theorist, a poisoning, and an oversize graph, Spooner's work crystallizes an absurd contemporary ecosystem in which entities run the risk of managing themselves and one another to death.

Across objects, writing, sound and choreography, British artist Cally Spooner addresses the manners in which specific technological and financial conditions shape and organize life. This volume surveys her artistic output of the last five years.

Sweat Shame Etc. includes a lecture by Spooner along newly commissioned essays by Laura McLean Ferris, Pierre Bal-Blanc, and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti. A 2018 series of drawings on paper, from which the monograph takes its name, features hastily sketched figures that take care of their bodies while shedding clothes, socks, limbs, and torsos. Though their heads are scratched out, they remain unexpectedly determined and unperturbed.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at the Swiss Institute, New York, in 2018-2019.

Cally Spooner (born 1983 in Ascot, UK, lives and works in London and Turin) is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings.

Edited by Alison Coplan and Laura McLean-Ferris.
Texts by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, Laura McLean-Ferris, Cally Spooner.

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but didn't talk about, the difficulty of loving her girlfriend, C., her fear of what she would do when her mother did die. Among these imperfectly perfect fragments of writing about her life, she placed stills from her films. My Mother Laughs is both the distillation of the themes Akerman pursued throughout her creative life, and a version of the simplest and most complicated love story of all: that between a mother and a daughter.

Translated by Daniella Shreir with an introduction by Eileen Myles and afterword by Frances Morgan.

About her collaboration with Robert Glück, Kathleen Fraser writes:

"In Commemoration of the Visit of Foreign Commercial Representatives to Japan, 1947 is a small picture book assembled as a memento of Japan’s finest tourist sites, to be given to their new allies (and recent adversaries). I discovered the book when my friend Bob Glück sent me to an Asian antique store, where he thought I might find 'little things' for Christmas gifts. Seeing this book in the $1 box, I bought a copy and began to write a poem sequence based on each of the photos and their captions, not knowing that Bob had also bought this book and was writing his own version from the same collection of pictures."

Featuring color reproductions of the entire postcard book, In Commemoration of the Visit is an accidental collaboration–and we couldn’t be happier for the accident.

The publication is the first institutional monograph on the multimedia practice of artist and director Ali Cherri. It aims to highlight the constellation of ideas, themes, and formal concerns running through his most recent, highly significant projects.

Edited by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, with Bianca Stoppani, this book provides an overview of the artist's output over the past three years, teasing out both new strands for interpretation and formal links between his films, videos, sculptures, drawings, and installations.

Texts by: Cecilia Alemani, Erika Balsom, Étienne Bernard, Leonardo Bigazzi, Ali Cherri, Lorenzo Giusti, Stefanie Hessler, Priyesh Mistry, Alessandro Rabottini, Stefan Tarnowski.

Video and visual artist Ali Cherri (born 1976 in Beirut, lives and works in Paris and Beirut) received a BA in graphic design from the American University in Beirut in 2000, and an MA in performing arts from DasArts, Amsterdam, in 2005. His current project looks at the place of the archaeological object in the construction of historical narratives.