A Seed Under Our Tongue

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.

A special edition issue curated, designed and published by AVARIE, Paris and Labor Neunzehn, Berlin. It accompanies KAMERA SERIES, while it is an independent and valuable object to collect. The central idea that informs and directs the booklets’ montage is the interplay between the concepts of addition and subtraction. This is achieved by unveiling a missing image in the screening or an unreleased second from an artist's film, expanded to 24 pages. Additionally, each booklet contains a piece directly removed from the show.

The editing establishes a dialogue between film frames and performed writings derived from texts, scripts, storyboards, and notes. The KAMERA exhibition is consequently extended into a physical space—the book—allowing for its widespread dissemination, complementing and contrasting with its potential online occurrence.

KAMERA SERIES is a screening program of experimental films, video art works and printed matter taking place in a former GDR building in Berlin. Each event showcases a retrospective of selected films by an artist and a small exhibition of his/her publications or works on paper over a span of 4 days.

KAMERA centers on fostering a critical dialogue between different film formats and artists’ books. Through its regular occurrence, it aspires to create a space for community exchanges about contemporary image-making. KAMERA is a series conceived and curated by Labor Neunzehn and AVARIE.

Fascinated by the intersection of visual art and cinema, Helga Fanderl’s short poetic films evoke intense and sensitive experiences of the real world. Using a small hand-held super 8 camera, she creates filmic responses to her perceptions, weaving together imagery and emotions in dense, rhythmic patterns solely through in-camera editing. She presents silent films in the form of ‘compositions’, crafting unique programs for site-specific personal projections and transforming spaces into temporary cinemas.

Noise in Xiao Wu is not a negative presence. It reinforces the thereness of Zhangke’s Fenyang, the inner and outer lives of his characters. Noise is articulate, just as it is in the cacophonous zones of cities around the world. Who knows if it was modernity en masse that constituted the vulgar soundscape for RM Schafer when he was predicting sonic doom in 1977… But if modernity is vulgar, what then is refined? The absence of sound, one might guess: a library, a Buddhist temple, a suburb, death. Aesthetic value judgements and speculations aside silence is, well, silent. Noise on the other hand, is filled with information. Noise speaks, and in the Fenyang of Xiao Wu it never shuts up. Well then, let’s listen to what it is saying. 
— Morgan Quaintance

In the context of The Skin of the World program at Courtisane festival 2024, Morgan Quaintance was invited to reflect on the use of sound in Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu (Pickpocket).

2nd publication in the Echoes of Dissent series, devoted to the politics of the soundtrack. 

Conceived as a visual résumé, Installation Views provides both a comprehensive overview of Charlotte Posenenske's solo exhibitions and a record of her numerous group shows.

In her Manifesto, Charlotte Posenenske stated: "I find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that art can contribute nothing to the solution of pressing social problems."
Developing her artistic practice throughout the 1960s, Posenenske produced a body of work that uniquely combined several strands of the art of the period: conceptualism, minimalism, and socially engaged participatory art. Her Manifesto, published in Art International in May 1968, lays out the social demands on art as well as the impossibility of fulfilling those demands. Shortly after its publication, Posenenske left the art world behind to pursue her studies in sociology, undertaking a new career in that field.

Conceived as a visual résumé, Installation Views provides both a comprehensive overview of Charlotte Posenenske's solo exhibitions and a record of her numerous group shows. The book features an essay written by curator Erlend Hammer on the role of documentary photographs in the circulation of works of art. 

The book was published in conjunction with the eponymous show at the Haugar Art Museum in Tønsberg, Norway—the first full-scale presentation of the artist's oeuvre in Scandinavia. The exhibition showcased works from all the artist's major series of modular sculpture. Consisting of works made over the course of less than 12 months, between 1967 and 1968, preceding the abrupt end to Posenenske's career as an artist, the exhibition had the character of a snapshot. We are left wondering whether her withdrawal from the art world was a logical or necessary consequence of the development of the series. What are we to do with Posenenske's assertion that art is powerless to effectively change society for the better?

Book: 11.7 × 18 cm
Book and Glove: 13.5 × 31.5 cm

Presented in a monster glove

Three broken halves of one god walk a city that wants them dead
Their bodies speak in static hunger and rust
Something follows breathing through their mouths
Read it Bleed from it

In A Psalm for the Third Wind, a film script written from 3 perspectives, Damien Troadec is aiming to address in parallel narrative the struggle of having multiples inner voices and the danger of following their distinct desires. One question is raised without any light at the end of the tunnel, confronting the reader to a conflict : THE COMFORT OF MISERY OR THE PAIN OF CHANGE ?

A publication, durational artwork, and moving-image experience, Schtinter’s debut collection, Last Movies, is an alternative account of the first century of cinema according to the films watched by  a constellation of its most notable stars shortly  before (or at the time of) their deaths.

An extensive and exhaustive research project—a holy book of celluloid spiritualism and old canards—Schtinter questions and reconfigures common knowledge to recast the historic column inches of cinema’s mythological hearsay into a thousand-yard stare. 

Via a series of interlinked vignettes, here we’ve a book in which Manhattan Melodrama, directed by W.S. Van Dyke and George Cukor, is seen by American gangster John Dillinger, only for him to be gunned down by federal agents upon leaving the cinema. In which George Cukor watches The Graduate and dies thereafter. In which Bette Davis—given her break by Cukor—watches herself in Waterloo Bridge (the 1940 remake Cukor had been meant to direct), before travelling to France and failing to make it back to Hollywood. In which Rainer Werner Fassbinder watches Bette Davis in Michael Curtiz’s 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, and suffers the stroke that kills him. In which John F. Kennedy watches From Russia with Love at a private ‘casa-blanca’ screening prior to the presidential motorcade reaching Dealey Plaza; in which Burt Topper’s War is Hell exists only in a fifteen-minute cut, considering this is as much as Lee Harvey Oswald would have seen at the Texas Theatre in the wake of JFK’s killing.