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Cover of Where We Meet

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König

Where We Meet

Melike Kara

€28.00

This first publication of the artist Melike Kara, emphasises her work of the last two years and thus on a specific body of work that represents a shift in the artist’s methodology.

Her paintings have undergone a change, as they are less figurative and more abstract (although Kara’s abstractions reveal forms here and there).

Some of these forms are reminiscent of limbs, hybrids between bodies and dissolution. Her focus has also changed in terms of subject matter.

It is now less a matter of consciousness, and more about identity and questions of origin. She thus complements, or rather expands, the presentation of these paintings in exhibitions with site-specific installations.

Published after the exhibition, ‘Melike Kara: Where We Meet’ at Jan Kaps, Cologne (4 June – 22 August 2020).

With contributions from Jana Baumann, AnneClaire Schmitz & Fabian Schöneich.

Language: English

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Cover of Cologne art fair 1977

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König

Cologne art fair 1977

Michael Krebber, Jack Smith

Jack Smith presented his performance Irrational Landlordism of Bagdad as part of the Cologne Art Fair fringe in the summer of 1977. Many other events were documented photographically and can now be found in the Cologne Art Fair archives - not so Smith's performance.

This book shows him in his fair stall and during his performance for the first time. The pictures are perfect documents of a completely eccentric transaction by this pioneering director and performance artist.

Cover of Unlawful Assembly

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König

Unlawful Assembly

Lucy McKenzie, Alan Michael

A collection of interrelated short stories by Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael. First published in private limited edition, it was intended as a cheap holiday read to titillate and entertain summer visitors to the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, and as a piece of site-specific work; the location of the action and the place in which it is read being the same.

The visual art subsequently generated by Unlawful Assembly includes work by Josephine Pryde, with whom the artists collaborated to produce this second edition’s cover image.

Cover of Ian Burn: Collected Writings 1966–1993

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König

Ian Burn: Collected Writings 1966–1993

Ian Burn

Anthology €40.00

Ian Burn has been described as many things: an activist, a trade-unionist, a journalist, an art critic, a curator and an art historian—or, as he once described himself in a moment of self-deprecating alienation, ‘an ex-conceptual artist’. Born in Geelong in 1939, Burn studied painting in Melbourne and went on to live and work in London and New York. Burn moved back to Australia in 1977 and passed away in 1993 at the age of 53. Burn sought to grapple with how art history intersects and engages with contemporary art and political debate, arguing for a decentred view of the world. 

His legacy is international and can be seen in retrospective exhibitions as recent as 2022, and his work remains a key touchstone in art history. Edited by Burn’s friend, frequent collaborator and eminent art historian, Dr Ann Stephen, this volume brings together 49 pieces of Burn’s own agile and expansive writings alongside a vast collection of his artworks. The collection concludes with reflections on Burn’s life and work from prominent figures and past collaborators in the form of memorial lectures.

Ian Burn: COLLECTED WRITINGS 1966–1993 is edited by Ann Stephen and designed by Robert Milne, with contributions by Art & Language, Adrian Piper, Paul Wood, Allan Sekula, and Mel Ramsden.

Cover of Treatise of a Coat

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König

Treatise of a Coat

Helen Marten

Painting €45.00

Featuring coloured pencil, watercolour, ink, airbrush, acrylic and graphite, alongside other more unusual media like sand, silicone or olive oil, this book is a sumptuous, visual document of Marten's drawing and painting practice on paper. Designed as an unruly "artist's book", Treatise of a Coat has multiple physical and linguistic folds. The title is a forcing of the homonymic similarities of coat: the literal jacket that is unfurled to expose the naked and unruly shame of human forms; the fur or hair of an animal; the verb-function of to coat, with its intentional building up of visual desire - the acts of lacquering, spreading, enclosing, flooding, directing, or husking that line and colour expedite when creating an image. The constituent materiality of this book is designed with the physicality of making a work on paper in mind.

Cover of Movement Notation

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König

Movement Notation

Noa Eshkol, Abraham Wachmann

Eshkol and Wachmann focused dance on its basic element: the movement of the human body. They treated the different parts of the body as separate instruments, similar to the musical instruments of an orchestra–each with its own rules for the movements to be performed. This new edition of the 1958 publication is supplemented by contributions from Eshkol’s companions and further archive material, which contextualizes and supplements the history of the 'EWMN’s‘ origins and embeds it in contemporary discourses on dance and movement. 

The publication is published in the context of the performance 'Pause: The Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group‘ at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (August 2023), as well as the exhibition 'Noa Eshkol: No Time to Dance‘ at the Georg Kolbe Museum (15 March–25 August 2024). The new edition was developed together with the 'Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation‘.

Cover of Profusione

Les Presses du Reel

Profusione

Isabella Ducrot

Monograph €40.00

A comprehensive overview of the unique work of the Italian artist born in 1931 and "discovered" late on the international scene, with numerous texts and an interview.

Published after the eponymous exhibition at Consortium Museum, Dijon, April 26th – September 8th 2024.

Born in Naples, Italy, in 1931, Isabella Ducrot is a young artist with a young career. Like many women of her generation, she moved into art after raising her children. Her formative years were marked by continuous travels with her late husband, during which they amassed hundreds of Persian miniatures and rare antique textiles of many kinds.

Contributions by Franck Gautherot & Seungduk Kim, Verena Lueken, Tobias Pils, Tschabalala Self, Andrea Viliani, Miranda Fengyuan Zhang.

Cover of Adagio For Color Fields

Goswell Road

Adagio For Color Fields

Chris Korda

Monograph €35.00

Chris Korda (b.1962) is an American antinatalist activist, techno musician, software developer, multimedia artist and founder of the Church of Euthanasia. For the past 30 years, her work has spanned avant-garde performance, happenings, culture- jamming, photography, video, audio and so much more - though her work as an engineer, coder and software developer remains less known to the general public.

This book posits that her software and coding work are linked to her more well-known activist and music work, informing and reforming each other for over 30 years, inhabiting up until now parallel timelines that have been closening over the decades, honing in on a common creative goal: to reveal her as she should be revered, as an Inventor-Artist.

“Any outcome is inevitably shaped by the tools used to achieve it. In industrial civilization, most people use the same standardized tools and therefore achieve similarly standardized outcomes. But imagine discovering a tool for making tools. The outcomes are now limited only by toolmaking skills. This is how computer programming changed my life.”

She refers to her generative artworks, audio and visual, as kinetic sculptures. Working in collaboration with her algorithms, she does not use the machine as a ‘servant’ but rather:

“I invite them into the creative space as equals. They have abilities that I don’t have, and I also have abilities that they don’t have, so we complement each other. They supply speed and precision, I supply desire and intuition, and what emerges is greater than the sum of the parts.”

Thus, on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name, we dedicate this book to Korda’s generative audio-visual synesthetic work 'Adagio For Color Fields' (2023) - a piece that breaks the silence - using it as a lens to bring into focus Korda’s work as an innovative Inventor-Artist.

Cover of Andrea Geyer: Dance in a Future with All Present

Dancing Foxes Press

Andrea Geyer: Dance in a Future with All Present

Andrea Geyer

Performance €30.00

This most substantive monograph yet published on the work of German-born, New York–based multimedia artist Andrea Geyer focuses on her recent explorations of the marginalized yet pivotal role that women have played in the formulation of American modernism, tracing and honoring the ephemeral acts, initiatives, and stories that shaped it. Featuring full-color images of Geyer’s artworks and research materials, including documents, found photographs, and previously unpublished photographs by the artist, Dance in a Future with All Present offers insight into Geyer’s art and the multiple histories of modernism.

Includes texts by Matthew Jeffrey Abrams, Andrianna Campbell, Juli Carson, Barbara Clausen, Lynne Cooke, Dean Daderko, Saisha Grayson, Sharon Hayes, Megan Heuer, Danielle A. Jackson, Alhena Katsof, Kristan Kennedy, Thomas J. Lax, Ralph Lemon, André Lepecki, Renate Lorenz, Josiah McElheny, Fred Moten, Kristin Poor, Yvonne Rainer, Gabriela Rangel, Jeannine Tang, and Soyoung Yoon.

Copublished with Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in 2019.
Edited by Alhena Katsof, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schroeder. 
Design by Dante Carlos.