Alia Syed: Imprints, Documents, Fictions

Compiled on the occasion of a Sandra Lahire retrospective at Courtisane festival 2021. This cahier was developed in collaboration with Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian). Edited by María Palacios Cruz and Charlotte Procter.

Living on air: the films and words of Sandra Lahire is the first monograph dedicated to the work of Sandra Lahire and brings together new and existing texts on Lahire as well as writing by herself, with contributions by Gill Addison, Jo Comino, Pam Cook, Laura Guy, Maud Jacquin, Julia Knight, Michael Mazière, Sarah Pucill, Irene Revell & Kerstin Schroedinger, Lis Rhodes, Selina Robertson & Ricardo Matos Cabo (with So Mayer), Vicky Smith, Sarah Turner and Ana Vaz.

Published on the occasion of the program Soft Notes on A Sharp Scale — The Rambling Figures of Mani Kaul, produced as part of the Courtisane festival 2018, as well as the associated Mani Kaul programme organized by the Essay Film Festival 2018, in collaboration with the Otolith Group.

The fifth issue of Rab-Rab: Journal of Political and Formal Inquiries in Art includes stories about nation traitors, fierce masses, socialist women struggles, love-forms, psychedelic counter-revolutionaries, workers unions, Brecht fiddlers, jazz surrealism, Soviet trains, and anti-fascism.

Among the contributors to the fifth issue are Anna Thew, Yehuda Safran, Peter Gidal, Cana Bilir-Meier, David Black, Marjo Liukkonen, Alejandro Pedregal, Peter Hallward, Minna Henriksson, and Jyrki Siukonen.

It has also two extensive dossiers. One dedicated to Franklin Rosemont is presented by Joe Feinberg and is introducing some unpublished and difficult to find texts parallel with writings of T-Bone Slim and Joe Hill. The other dossier on Robert Linhart is presented by Tevfik Rada, and it includes a translation of a chapter from Linhart's book on productivism, an article against Western bourgeois dissidents, and an interview with him.

I Want reviews the eponymous duo's double-projection film installation examining issues of gender, sexuality and performativity—and inspired by the words of punk poetess Kathy Acker and convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. This publication documents the major film installation I Want (2015) by collaborative artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, which was presented at their 2015 solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich and Nottingham Contemporary.

The double-projection film installation is based on a script that borrows texts from American punk-poet Kathy Acker (1947-1997), as well as chats and materials by convicted whistle-blower Chelsea Manning that speak of her reasons for revealing nearly one million secret military and diplomatic documents through WikiLeaks, at the same time exposing her transgender identity to her superiors.

Through poetic gestures of appropriation and recombination, Boudry and Lorenz examine issues around gender, sexuality, the performance of identity, and the nature of collaboration. Alongside generous color documentation, written contributions by Gregg Bordowitz, Laura Guy, Dean Spade, and Craig Willse unpack and reflect upon both the historical context and contemporary significance of this multivalent work.

Nº 49 / October 2022

In her work, Lisa Vlaemminck explores the boundaries of painting, creating an exciting, vibrating and disorienting universe. In her images, she questions very classical phenomena in painting, such as the landscape and the still life, by freezing them behind semi-transparent layers of paint. We catch a glimpse that feels familiar, but soon find that nothing is what it seems. Vlaemminck’s work oscillates between the microscopic and the interstellar, as well as the amorphous spaces in between. Image, material, shape, texture and form mutate into compositional playgrounds floating in a newly created universe where different laws and rules apply.

The book “Screensaver Error” is conceived as a symmetrical, folded stack of sheets with images of Lisa’s paintings and collages.
At the heart of the book is the sixty-metre long, worm-shaped textile sculpture, which runs like a stream through the book for many pages.
Dominique De Groen wrote an electrically charged shimmering poem tailored to the work. The introductory text was written by Simon Delobel.

In KIOSK, Lisa Vlaemminck presents a series of new paintings and a sixty-metre long textile sculpture that will occupy the various exhibition spaces. For the design of the fabric, Lisa worked patterns that form a long colour gradient.

At the end of the exhibition, the sculpture, Meat A Morph Hose, will be cut into 35 separate, new sculptures that will be offered as artworks at € 350 each. Each work is a part of the colour gradient and has a unique print. The proceeds will finance the book. Details: Printed cotton, latex spaghetti filling, the ends are closed with climbing rope
40 cm diameter x 130cmA signed copy of the book will also be delivered together with the work.
The sculptures can be collected from KIOSK at the book-launch: Sat. 26 November

The artist is reprented by gallery rodolphe janssen

Published in collaboration with Harun Farocki Institut, this book unpacks About Narration [Erzählen], a 1975 essay film directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert, this book focuses on About Narration [Erzählen] directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.
It includes the film's script alongside the historical documents related to its making and Farocki's previously unpublished theoretical and programmatic essay on the film. The publication also includes a retrospective essay by Ingemo Engström on the film's political and artistic background.

Volker Pantenburg's detailed elaboration of the conditions of its making, alongside Boynik and Holert's concluding remarks, further contextualizes the film. The interview with Cathy Porter on Larisa Reisner, a heroine of About Narration, gives an overview of the life of a militant writer who inspired Engström and Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert.

Poet, philosopher, speculative architect and transdisciplinary artist, Madeline Gins is well known for her collaborations with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on the experimental architectural project Reversible Destiny, in which they sought to arrest mortality by transforming the built environment. Yet, her own writings — in the form of poetry, essays, experimental prose and philosophical inquiries — represent her most visionary and transformative work. Like Gertrude Stein before her, Gins transfigures grammar and liberates words. Like her contemporaries in conceptual art, her writing is attuned to the energized, collaborative space between reader and page.

The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader is a revelatory anthology, edited and with an introduction by the writer and critic Lucy Ives. It brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins' 1969 masterpiece, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G, R, E, T, A, G, A, R, B, O, It Says), along with substantial excerpts from her two later books What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Long out of print or unpublished, Gins' poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics at the close of the 20th century.

Edited by Lucy Ives.