Side Magazine #02 – The Moped Rider

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.

Morceaux choisis is the first seminal overview of Saâdane Afif's artistic practices. The publication features 48 exhibitions or performances organized in 28 separate sections, covering a period of 14 years.
Starting with Melancholic Beat at Museum Folkwang, Essen in 2004 and leading up to the recent exhibition Musiques pour tuyauterie, at mor charpentier, Paris in 2018, the monograph considers the format of the exhibition as Saâdane Afif's medium, through which his work takes form and can be read. 

Each one of the figuring exhibitions form an individual booklet: the pages with full color reproductions of the individual works and installation views are inserted within four additional pages providing the exhibition's title, description, details and captions. 
These 28 booklets form the body of the publication. The exhibition texts have been written by Lily Matras and Yasmine d'O. They are accompanied by an interview of Saâdane Afif by Lili Reynaud-Dewar, two critical texts by Zoë Gray and Jörn Schafaff, an index of the exhibited works and an index of Afif 's released books and records.

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.

KILOBASE BUCHAREST A-Z is a publication which is describing Bucharest through a sort of experimental alphabet book: for each letter of the English alphabet, artists, writers, architects and researchers were invited to choose a key term and develop a contribution representing a sliver of the Romanian capital city, capturing a polyphonic set of perspectives on the infinite facets of a city whose identity is notoriously difficult to define.

Contributions by: Irina Bujor, Serioja Bocsok, studioBASAR, Iuliana Dumitru, Ștefan Ghenciulescu, Kilobase Bucharest, Apparatus 22, Mihnea Mihalache-Fiastru, Ștefan Constantinescu, Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Gruia Bădescu, Ioana Ulmeanu, Decebal Scriba, Sillyconductor, Prosper Center, Geir Haraldseth, Jimmy Robert, Karol Radziszewski, Lea Rasovszky, Ștefan Botez, Simina Neagu, Bogdan Iancu, Andrei Mihail, Mihai Lukács, Mihai Mihalcea, Cosima Opârtan, Juergen Teller, Hans Leonard Krupp.

The publication also includes a republished insert by late artist Ioana Nemeș, and three reprinted contributions previously published in Kilobase Bucharest A-H (Mousse Publishing, 2011) produced on the occasion of "Image to be projected until it vanishes" exhibition at Museion Bolzano.

Conceived as a catalogue and an artist's book, the publication offers a deeper insight into the eponymous 2022 exhibition staged at Indipendenza Roma, and explores tensions that can be generated between artworks and their surrounding architectural context, raising questions of taste, value, function and decoration.

Through the harsh noise of reality, a signal appears. At first faint, but slowly, as we approach, it grows louder, more defined. Aerial photographs depict odd structures and garbled sounds, blurred images of decaying media, alien architecture. It calls out your name.

Psalmist Kaput lures the reader into a misama of fragmented speech, disembodied voices, deteriortating thresholds, and lo-res nightmares. Fusing text and image, it is a work undefinable and wholly its own.

Enter the exclusion zone, witness its monuments, and if you're able, find your way back out again. "Soon we will all be submerged."

Schismatics consists of 10 short stories, in a fictitious way dealing with forgotten historical personas. Among them, artist Goda Palekaitė includes Mary Anning –– an amateur discoverer of dinosaurs, Emanuel Swedenborg –– a mystic who empirically explored the architecture of heaven, and Essad Bey –– a Jewish-Muslim writer and orientalist. Here their lives are revived and balance between the lines of history and story.

The book fuses elements of fiction, academic writing, and artistic research, and intertwines with rumors, forgeries, and inventions. Previously, its characters and narratives have already appeared in Palekaitė’s performances and installations, which are presented in the middle of this bilingual edition. In the introductory essay, Valerio Del Baglivo analyses the author’s exploration of facts and fiction, the mechanisms of knowledge production, and the trans-chronological perception of time. At the end of the book, Monika Lipšic ‘Riddle’ reflects on a ‘schismatic poetics’. 

Goda Palekaitė is a contemporary artist and researcher whose work combines visual, literary, performative, and anthropological practices. Exploring the politics of historical narratives, the agency of dreams and collective imagination, and social conditions of creativity, her work evolves around long-term projects that manifest as performances, scenographies, installations, and texts. Her performances, solo and group shows are being presented internationally. In 2019 Goda Palekaitė received The Golden Stage Cross and the Young Artist’s Prize for her artistic contributions across disciplines.

Published September 2020

Nel Aerts (b. 1987) moves in a freely, intuitive way between different media as painting, drawing, collage, performance and sculpture. Since a few years she focuses more often on the portrait-genre, which she visualises on paper or on wooden panels, with careful attention to the different qualities of each material. As such, she is creating a large collection (family almost) of posing subjects caught between abstract patterns and hard-edged figuration. The figures she portraits refer to both popular culture and her direct, everyday surroundings.

The self-portraits are tragicomic in the sense of the contrasts they evoke. Alternately they are desperate or funny, extra- or introverted, thought- or playful carved from wood or originated as a collage, but they are always introspective and self-relativistic.

In Hundred Zundert, “Nel Aerts evokes a visual rendezvous with Vincent van Gogh and sets the tone for the near one hundred drawings that would be made during her three-month residency at the Van Gogh House in Zundert. Rather than ‘following in the footsteps of Van Gogh’, Aerts is interested in examining the mud and earth around them by (literally) placing herself in the environment of Van Gogh’s youth. The resulting work is characterised by a deceptive interplay between formal simplicity and playfulness which belies a substantial complexity. (…) Nel Aerts’s working process is uncomplicated and free of any pretension: black ball pen (dozens), sheets of white A4 paper (hundreds) and spontaneous, almost naive line work (in seemingly infinite supply) are the building blocks of a story that is nevertheless rich in visual and intimate detail, a story that teeters between seriousness and playfulness, at once both comical and deeply emotive.” From: ‘Portrait of the Artist’, Grete Simkuté, in: Hundred Zundert.