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Cover of Material Marion von Osten 1 – MoneyNations

Wirklichkeit Books

Material Marion von Osten 1 – MoneyNations

Marion von Osten

€14.00

The first volume in a series devoted to Marion von Osten's archives, around the MoneyNations project, transversing between art, theory, and activism.

MoneyNations was an exhibition, a webzine, a radio, a conference, a video archive, a printed publication, an infrastructure, a counterpublic, an ongoing discussion, a transnational network of friends. Initiated by Marion von Osten as curator at the Shedhalle Zurich, the project evolved from an urgency to act against the hegemonic forces of "the West" within the radically changing condition of post-Cold War Europe. MoneyNations addressed—and intervened in—the interrelatedness between racist border policies and media representations, exploitative economic relations, and identity-forming processes. The applied methods of critique and organizing, transversing between art, theory, and activism, are made accessible in this volume through images, correspondences, and other ephemera, revealing their political potential for the present. It is contextualized by a conversation between Sezgin Boynik (Rab-Rab Press), Ferdiansyah Thajib (KUNCI Study Forum & Collective), Eleanor Ivory Weber, Camila Willis (Divided Press) and the editors.

The Material Marion von Osten series periodically publishes selected archival documents from von Osten's projects and contextualizes them with new contributions. Correspondences, drafts, scripts, photographs, videos and printed matter serve as the starting point for the publication series which maps the complexity of Marion von Osten's transversal cultural production in its details and specifics.

The artist, curator, researcher, and educator Marion von Osten (1963-2020) lived in Berlin since the early 1990s. Her always collaborative approach manifested in exhibitions, conferences, installations, as well as films, discussions, texts, teachings, or self-published journals. Her projects were all intertwined and carried by her specific way of working: through artistic research and feminist organizing, transnational and committed to the project of decolonization. Amongst her works are the international exhibition series bauhaus imaginista (2018-2020), Viet Nam Discourse (2016-2018) at Tensta Konsthall, Project Migration (2002-2006) in Cologne, and Sex & Space (1996) at Shedhalle Zurich. As collective infrastructures, her collaborations included Labor k3000, kleines postfordistisches Drama (Minor Postfordist Drama, kpD) and the CPKC Center for Postcolonial Knowledge and Culture.

Edited by Lucie Kolb, Jonas von Lenthe, Max Stocklosa.

Conversation between Sezgin Boynik, Ferdiansyah Thajib, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Camila Willis and the editors.

Published in 2024 ┊ 112 pages ┊ Language: English

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Cover of Rejected. Designs for the European Flag

Wirklichkeit Books

Rejected. Designs for the European Flag

Jonas von Lenthe

€16.00

The flag bearing twelve yellow stars on a blue background has become Europe’s most recognisable symbol. Since its introduction by the Council of Europe in 1955, it has stood for the unification of Europe’s nation states. It was precisely this yellow circle of stars that prevailed over more than 150 flag ideas sent to the Council of Europe by a host of diverse private individuals. These colourful designs are being now published in Rejected for the first time. They document the continent’s zeitgeist at a decisive period in the development of European unity. Alongside the flag proposals, the trilingual book (English, German, French) features a written contribution by the German-French poet and writer Marie Rotkopf, who tackles the EU’s neoliberal political cynicism and Germany’s expansion of power with biting irony.

Cover of Side Magazine #01 – The Professor

Wirklichkeit Books

Side Magazine #01 – The Professor

Saâdane Afif

The first issue of the editorial discursive space for the Bergen Assembly triennial, conceived by Saâdane Afif, explores the identity, role and position of the Professor.

Side Magazine is conceived as a site of research for the fourth edition of Bergen Assembly convened by Saâdane Afif. Yasmine d'O., who has been invited as curator of the upcoming edition, will be the executive editor. 
Side Magazine is dedicated to the seven characters in The Heptahedron, a play written by the French poet, essayist, and scholar Thomas Clerc in 2016. In order of apparition these characters are the Professor, the Moped Rider, the Bonimenteur, the Fortune Teller, an Acrobats, the Coalman, and the Tourist.

The first issue of Side Magazine is dedicated to the figure of the Professor. It features seven articles, each of which explores the identity, role, and position of the Professor. Contributors include Uli Aigner, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Jörg Heiser, Christian Nyampeta, Marjorie Senechal, and Vivian Slee. 
Seven issues of Side Magazine will be released in the run up to the opening of Bergen Assembly 2022, opening September 8. A special eighth issue will be published after the opening days. This, combined with the existing seven issues as a collection, constitute the exhibition catalogue and guide.

Saâdane Afif (born 1970 in Vendôme, France) creates installations made up of unexpected encounters between objects. These creations, of uncertain status, oscillate between function and symbol, between art and design, and provoke shifts of meaning that engage a reflection on today's industrial society.

Cover of Archives on Show – Revoicing, Shapeshifting, Displacing – A Curatorial Glossary

Archive Books

Archives on Show – Revoicing, Shapeshifting, Displacing – A Curatorial Glossary

Beatrice von Bismarck

Archives on Show brings the potential of reformulating the social and political relevance of archives by curatorial means into focus.

Based on the specific properties, faculties and methods of curation, the volume highlights those techniques and strategies that deal with archives not only to make their genesis and history apparent but also to open them up for the future. The 22 different ways of dealing with archives testify to the curatorial participation in (re)shaping the archival logic, structures and conditions. As process-oriented, collective and relational modes of producing meaning, these curatorial practices allow for the alteration, reconfiguration and mobilization of the laws, norms and narratives that the archive preserves as preconditions of its power.

The contributions to this volume by artists, curators and theorists demonstrate approaches that curatorially insist on building other relations between human and non-human archival participants. Each is using the book to create a curatorial constellation that generates and forms new connections between different times and spaces, narratives, disciplines and discourses. Configured as a glossary, the positions assembled in this volume exemplify curatorial methods with which to treat the archive as site and tool of collective, ongoing negotiations over its potential societal role and function.

Contributions by Heba Y. Amin, Talal Afifi, Eiman Hussein, Tamer El Said, Stefanie Schulte, Strathaus, Haytham El Wardany, Julie Ault, Kader Attia, Roger M. Buergel, Sophia Prinz, Yael Bartana, Rosi Braidotti, Kirsten Cooke, Ann Harezlak, Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, Octavian Esanu, Megan Hoetger, Carlos Kong, Iman Issa, Kayfa ta, Kapwani Kiwanga, Doreen Mende, Stefan Nowotny, Marion von Osten, pad.ma, Abdias Nascimento, Eran Schaerf, Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, Françoise Vergès.

Cover of About Narration – Materials, Comments, Interventions

Rab-Rab Press

About Narration – Materials, Comments, Interventions

Ingemo Engström, Harun Farocki

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.

Cover of Biting the Hand – Traces of Resistance in the Art & Language diaspora

Rab-Rab Press

Biting the Hand – Traces of Resistance in the Art & Language diaspora

Paul Wood

€30.00

Extensive survey of the politically outward-looking Conceptualism emerging from Art & Language in the UK. Especially considering its critique of the norms of Modernist art practices in contemporary art, particularly practices of art education.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood, Biting the Hand: Traces of Resistance in the Art & Language diaspora is about a dissident formation of artists active in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.

The book tells the story of artists engaging with a critique of then-contemporary modernist art education, who have embarked on a series of theoretical investigations which became increasingly politicised under the pressures of an evolving social crisis. Increased racism, unemployment and attacks on the organised working class all raised questions about how a critical art might respond.

By the late 1970s, these radical artists, mostly in the orbit of the Art & Language group, were producing posters and leaflets for a wide range of left-wing causes, as well as analyses of the politics of art and design education and the role of cultural ideology in maintaining consensus. In the 1980s, as Thatcherism tightened its grip, those involved went their separate ways into areas as diverse as media work, trade unionism, health and education.

Biting the Hand has three parts: a retrospective introduction setting the formation in its historical context, and two annotated documentary sections presenting examples of the work as both text and image, written and edited by Paul Wood.

It also includes a foreword by Sezgin Boynik, publisher, and an afterword by Ann Stephen, curator and art historian, further expanding on the book's subject.

For many years Paul Wood worked for the Art History Department of the Open University. His publications from that period include Conceptual Art (2000), Western Art and the Wider World (2013), and the four-volume anthology Art in Theory (1990-2020), co-edited with Charles Harrison and others.

Edited, compiled and introduced by Paul Wood.
Foreword by Sezgin Boynik; afterword by Ann Stephen.

Cover of The Mollino Set

Rollo Press & Cabinet Books

The Mollino Set

Lytle Shaw

Photography €18.00

New York-based professor Lytle Shaw journeys to Italy in this adventurous exploration of the life and work of architect, designer, and photographer Carlo Mollino (1905–1973). In 1933 the young Mollino received a commission from Mussolini’s regime for his first building: an administrative centre in Piedmont. Later works include furniture and interior design, a book on photography, and an asymmetrical car that raced at Le Mans in 1955.

The book centres around Shaw’s realisation that this prolific talent’s conflicted legacy offers a unique window on the role that post-war Italian politics and culture played in the country’s reimagining of itself as a victim, rather than a proponent, of fascism.

Cover of Choquer le monde à mort – Elles sont de sortie – Pascal Doury – Bruno Richard

Editions L'Amazone

Choquer le monde à mort – Elles sont de sortie – Pascal Doury – Bruno Richard

Bruno Richard, Pascal Doury and 1 more

"Elles sont de sortie" is the title of a periodic publication launched in 1977 by Pascal Doury and Bruno Richard. The plural and feminine form of the enigmatic phrase "elles sont de sortie," chosen almost by chance, announces a protean work and often collective experience. From its origins to the most recent iterations, including Doury's more confidential individual trajectory after "Elles sont de sortie," Choquer le Monde à Mort traces five decades of a corpus of nearly three hundred publications. It addresses some of the most emblematic editorial works, as well as others that remain unpublished, alongside ambitious and sometimes scandalous exhibitions, few of which are documented.

This work is the result of several years of research, enriched by numerous firsthand interviews, and unfolds in three parts: a chronology and analysis of a singular and marginal artistic history, works and iconographic documents, and an anthology bibliography. Together, these elements reveal the complexity of an editorial object with porous boundaries, both in its forms and its contents, oscillating between graphzine, artist book, poetry collection, and personal journal. Its ramifications, status, and legacy retrospectively reveal the importance of a discreet yet seminal work.

Thus, "Elles Sont de Sortie" also serves as an opportunity to revisit the paths of two aesthetic and provocative artists, deeply devoted to their art and true free spirits in an art world often too narrow for them. It immerses us in a plethora of works that are intimate and raw, as well as subtle and refined, all in service of a project that, in Doury's words, aims to "shock the world to death."

Edited by Tiphanie Blanc, Jonas Delaborde, Anna Lejemmetel.
Contribution by Anna Lejemmetel.

Cover of Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings

The Everyday Press

Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings

Janelle Rebel

Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings delves into the imaginative realm of books and libraries and the interpretive structures of subject bibliographies.

It is the first monograph of its kind to historicize, theorize, and survey two decades of what the author refers to as contemporary visual bibliography or experimental subject bibliography—artistic and poetic projects that explore artifactual, intellectual, spatial, and design possibilities.

Ranging from artists’ books and web data-bases to stack interventions and reading room installations, Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings reviews over fifty compelling visio-bibliographic examples created by diverse, international cultural workers.