Art

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Unbidden Tongues #5: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Between the Teeth at Manifold Books, Amsterdam, November 28, 2021 – January 22, 2022.

​Drawing on artist, poet and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s extensive and largely unexhibited archive of ‘work on paper’, Unbidden Tongues #5: Between the Teeth is a publication-turned-exhibition and the fifth title in the series. From never-realised film scripts to concrete poetry and artists statements written intimately in the first person, the collection of material selected for this occasion presents the varying ways with which Cha drew on her personal and familial experience as an immigrant to conceptually grapple with language and its mediation and suppression, particularly, in this case, in its written form.

The current crisis of museums and the future of Institutional Critique.

Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critique has responded to the social embeddedness of art institutions by looking at the inner workings of such organizations. In After Institutions, Karen Archey expands the definition of Institutional Critique to develop a broader understanding of contemporary art's sociopolitical entanglements, looking beyond what cultural institutions were to what they are and what they might become.

Karen Archey is curator of contemporary art at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She is a 2015 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient for short-form writing. Since joining the Stedelijk Museum in April 2017, Archey has organized solo exhibitions by artists Rineke Dijkstra, Stefan Tcherepnin, Catherine Christer Hennix, Steffani Jemison, Metahaven, Jeff Preiss, Charlie Prodger, and Hito Steyerl. She has written numerous catalogue essays and is a contributor to several art publications, including Artforum and Frieze.

The Struwwelpeter and other creatures cavort in a sunlit and happy garden. They all give in to their craving to dig their fingers father inside an adventure reminiscent of both Warhol’s ‘In the Bottom of My Garden’ and Bruegel’s ‘Children’s Games’. Graphic designer and illustrator Olga Prader’s whimsical colouring book makes sure we all know that strict virtue is a hoax. C’est bien!

The ninety-six objects in this inventory are sourced from earwitness interviews Lawrence Abu Hamdan conducted as well as from trial transcripts across the globe. After SFX explores the ways we remember sound and the ways in which cinematic sound effects have created a collective acoustic unconscious. What is revealed is our difficulty in describing these memories when precision is vital. The objects listed here stand in for a missing sonic vocabulary, a language we do not yet speak. [publisher's note]

Tense is a never-realised publication, written and composed by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in 1984, that only now has been released in a very limited run on our imprint. The book accompanied the exhibition Top Stories, which took a closer look at the 29 issues of the prose periodical with the same title, founded in the late 1970s by Anne Turyn.

Top Stories was dedicated to fiction by emerging women artists and writers from that time. Tense was originally intended to become part of the series as well, but never made it to print. It was only recently – during the making of the exhibition at Amsterdam’s Kunstverein – that the original mock-up was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer.

More than 130 artists and authors from different generations participated in 2021 in an open call to mark the 50th anniversary of Linda Nochlin's essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? This resulted in four digital fanzines that we now turned into a fierce publication in the tradition of the first feminist print work. Chloé D'hauwe took care of the no fuzz design.

Editors: Els Roelandt and Jessica Gysel
Texts: Olave Nduwanje and Delphine Bedel (ao)
Translations: Irene de Craen en Euphemia Ophelders
Design: Chloé D’hauwe
Cover: Christine Clinckx, Penelope, video still 2004
Print: Antilope de Bie Printing, Duffel
Riso: Risiko Press, Borgerhout
Year: 2022
Amount of pages: 228
Dimensions: 28 x 21 cm
Edition: 600 copies

A collection of photographs from the archives of the icon of underground and alternative Parisian nights Dora Diamant.

A self-taught photographer, Dora Diamant has left thousands of photos. The Dora Diamant Association, custodian of this archive, and Éditions L'Amazone have joined forces to bring them to life by devoting a series of publications to them. Each volume of the Dora Diamant Archive was created by a different person and is the result of a subjective selection and arrangement specific to its author.

Photos: Dora Diamant
Sélection: Sonia DeVille
Dessin: Marilou Chabert
Edité par Archive Dora Diamant, Paris & Editions l'Amazone, Bruxelles, 2022
1ère édition - 300 exemplaires
Format 18 x 26 cm - 30 pages
Papier Magno Gloss 150g - couverture 300g

A collection of photographs from the archives of the icon of underground and alternative Parisian nights Dora Diamant.

A self-taught photographer, Dora Diamant has left thousands of photos. The Dora Diamant Association, custodian of this archive, and Éditions L'Amazone have joined forces to bring them to life by devoting a series of publications to them. Each volume of the Dora Diamant Archive was created by a different person and is the result of a subjective selection and arrangement specific to its author.

Photos: Dora Diamant
Sélection & dessin: Apollo Thomas
Edité par Archive Dora Diamant, Paris & Editions l'Amazone, Bruxelles, 2022
1ère édition - 300 exemplaires
Format 18 x 26 cm - 60 pages
Papier Magno Gloss 150g - couverture 300g

A collection of photographs from the archives of the icon of underground and alternative Parisian nights Dora Diamant.

A self-taught photographer, Dora Diamant has left thousands of photos. The Dora Diamant Association, custodian of this archive, and Éditions L'Amazone have joined forces to bring them to life by devoting a series of publications to them. Each volume of the Dora Diamant Archive was created by a different person and is the result of a subjective selection and arrangement specific to its author.

Photos: Dora Diamant
Sélection: Carlotta & Valentine Bailly-Borg
Dessins: Carlotta Bailly-Borg
Edité par Archive Dora Diamant, Paris & Editions l'Amazone, Bruxelles, 2022
1ère édition - 300 exemplaires
Format 18 x 26 cm - 64 pages
Papier Magno Gloss 150g - couverture 300g

A collection of photographs from the archives of the icon of underground and alternative Parisian nights Dora Diamant.

A self-taught photographer, Dora Diamant has left thousands of photos. The Dora Diamant Association, custodian of this archive, and Éditions L'Amazone have joined forces to bring them to life by devoting a series of publications to them. Each volume of the Dora Diamant Archive was created by a different person and is the result of a subjective selection and arrangement specific to its author.

Photos: Dora Diamant
Sélection: Antoine Trapp
Texte: Clara Pacotte
Edité par Archive Dora Diamant, Paris & Editions l'Amazone, Bruxelles, 2022
1ère édition - 300 exemplaires
Format 18 x 26 cm - 64 pages
Papier Magno Gloss 150g - couverture 300g

The experimental practices of a group of artists in the former East Germany upends assumptions underpinning Western art's postwar histories.

In Paper Revolutions, Sarah James offers a radical rethinking of experimental art in the former East Germany (the GDR). Countering conventional accounts that claim artistic practices in the GDR were isolated and conservative, James introduces a new narrative of neo-avantgarde practice in the Eastern Bloc that subverts many of the assumptions underpinning Western art's postwar histories. She grounds her argument in the practice of four artists who, uniquely positioned outside academies, museums, and the art market, as these functioned in the West, created art in the blind spots of state censorship. They championed ephemeral practices often marginalized by art history: postcards and letters, maquettes and models, portfolios and artist's books. Through their “lived modernism,” they produced bodies of work animated by the radical legacies of the interwar avant-garde.

James examines the work and daily practices of the constructivist graphic artist, painter, and sculptor Hermann Glöckner; the experimental graphic artist and concrete and sound poet Carlfriedrich Claus; the mail artist, concrete poet, and conceptual artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt; and the mail artist, “visual poet,” and installation artist Karla Sachse. She shows that all of these artists rejected the idea of art as a commodity or a rarefied object, and instead believed in the potential of art to create collectivized experiences and change the world. James argues that these artists, entirely neglected by Western art history, produced some of the most significant experimental art to emerge from Germany during the Cold War.

Edition of drawings, paintings and scans by Sophia Hamdouch, wrapped in a vinyl sleeve.

The long-awaited compendium of Wegman's hilarious, ingenious writings and language-centric art, from the early 1970s to the present.

While he's famous the world over for his instantly recognizable images of Weimaraner dogs, William Wegman has long been one of Conceptual art's true innovators. Filled with previously unknown and wildly entertaining texts, drawings and early photos, Writing by Artist is the first collection to focus on Wegman's longstanding and deeply funny relationship to language.

This career-spanning edition presents a thematically organized selection of rediscovered writings dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, alongside landmark early photographs and hilarious drawings from throughout his career. All of the works brilliantly incorporate words in one form or another, altering logic and pushing the boundaries of what artist writing can be. Writing by Artist serves as a genuine epiphany for those only familiar with his later work, and a welcome reminder of his madcap inventiveness for the already enlightened. What you do or don't know about William Wegman now conveniently fits into this strangely beguiling book.

William Wegman was born in 1943, in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He received a BFA in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, in 1965 and an MFA in painting from the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana, in 1967. By the early '70s, Wegman's work was being exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. In addition to solo shows with Sonnabend Gallery in Paris and New York, Situation Gallery in London and Konrad Fisher Gallery in Düsseldorf, his work was included in such seminal exhibitions as When Attitudes Become Form and Documenta V, and was regularly featured in Interfunktionen, Artforum and Avalanche magazines. Wegman has created film and video works for Saturday Night Live and Nickelodeon, and his video segments for Sesame Street have appeared regularly since 1989. In 1995, Wegman's film The Hardly Boys was screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Wegman has appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and with Jay Leno, The David Letterman Show and The Colbert Report.

At midday, March 17th, 2020, Macron’s government decided to place France in suspended animation. Total confinement. The first in a series of strict debilitating lockdowns to combat the spiralling Covid-19 pandemic. This first confinement lasted 55 days. It ended on 11th May 2020. The first part of a dramatic trilogy.

One month in, in April 2020, David West picked up a box of pastels that used to belong to his mother. He had had them for many years but never used them. New to the medium, locked in his Paris studio, he sets himself to the task. Naturally, violence ensues. Folk horror. Animals are disembowelled. Faceless sexualised female bodies perform. Screaming faces educate. Covered figures stand motionless. Shadows. Hooded beings populate. Stabbing, scratching, fading, softening, sforzando. Crescendo. Schadenfreude.

Occasional respite comes when West ventures outside - andante - but the externalised screaming pushes him back in. Hagazussa. Ghosts from West’s past, real and unreal, appear and disappear, figures and shapes, compositional arcs, a slimy snaking emerald hand parts the waves for colour to gush forth a new language verde fosforescente, worm purple, rosa shocking, vermillion, cobalt, ultra-black.

This book reproduces a small selection of some 300 works, in chronological order, in an attempt to document time, evolution, revolt, epiphany and joy. Joy in colour, horror, form, symphony, and finally, West’s visions of a new utopia. Marcato. Decrescendo.

Softcover (21cm x 29.7cm)
100 Pages
50 copies
Signed and numbered by David West

The book Taalbarrière brings together reproductions of a drawing's series linked to an audio creation about the border and the language barrier in Belgium through the eyes of secondary school pupils who are learning the language of the other community, French or Dutch.

A hybrid monograph/artist book of Nathalie Du Pasquier's work.

Published on the occasion of Nathalie Du Pasquier's solo show at MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, this book navigates the space between an exhibition catalogue and the artist book with juxtapositions of photographs of Nathalie Du Pasquier' works, installation views of the show at MACRO, and extracts from texts by various writers and figures fundamental for her practice. These come together to create an extension of the exhibition itself, in a form that channels the spirit of the show: the pages become exhibition spaces embracing associations and combinations allowing for a deeper understanding and exploration of Du Pasquier's work, and her imagination at large. It is a glimpse into the possibilities offered by her oeuvre, which can be approached, interpreted, and experienced from countless perspectives. It is the very vastness and variety of her work, and her inspirations, that make the exploration of her work—and as a result this publication—non-exhaustive. This publication is part of an ongoing study of her work and documents her exhibition at MACRO, "Campo di Marte," Du Pasquier's biggest show to date which brought together over one-hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and cabins, from the early 1980s to present day.

A famous designer and co-founder of the Memphis group in Milan in 1981, Nathalie Du Pasquier (born 1957 in Bordeaux, France, lives in Milan, Italy) accompanied the (post)modern adventure around designer Ettore Sottsass, with the creation of objects, fabrics, carpets, and furniture.

Edited by Luca Lo Pinto.

Richly illustrated, this book provides for the first time a visual overview of Lawrence Abu Hamdan's works of more than a decade, and elaborates on a formal vocabulary characterized by the aesthetics of sound and language.

On the occasion of Lawrence Abu Hamdan's exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm in 2021, a group of authors have been invited to engage with individual works and their underlying concepts. Abu Hamdan recognizes the space for art as a site where attention can be drawn to real socio-political conditions in order to challenge the structures behind them. The artist can therefore push at the boundaries of what constitutes testimony. The title "Dirty Evidence" comes from Abu Hamdan's definition of evidence in which a truth value is derived from its very inadmissibility before the law. It is precisely the evidence's figurative dirt and dirtiness that works toward the production of truth.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan (born 1985 in Amman, Jordan, lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon) is an artist and “private ear” whose projects have taken the form of audiovisual installations, performances, graphic works, photography, Islamic sermons, cassette tape compositions, potato chip packets, essays, and lectures. Abu Hamdan's interest with sound and its intersection with politics originate from his background in DIY music.

Edited by Fabian Schöneich.
Graphic design: David Bennewith. 

Texts by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Natasha Ginwala, Ruba Katrib, Andrea Lissoni, Ramona Naddaff, Fabian Schöneich, Yasmine Seale, Theodor Ringborg, Eyal Weizman.

Usb version of The Annotated Reader, a publication-as-exhibition and exhibition-as-publication featuring 281 creative personalities responses and remarks on a chosen piece of writing.

Ryan Gander and Jonathan P. Watts invited a range of people, encompassing contemporary artists, designers, writers, institutional founders, musicians and so on – to imagine they’ve missed the last train.

“Is there one piece of writing that you would want with you for company in the small hours?” With this in mind, we asked people to submit a text with personal annotations and notes made directly onto it.

With over 281 contributions collected over the last few months, we have gathered a selection of contributors including Marina Abramović, Art & Language, Paul Clinton, Tom Godfrey, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sarah Lucas, Alistair Hudson and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The annotation adds a further layer, making each piece unique and a historic record of our current times.

First published in 1973, two months after the military coup in Chile, Cecilia Vicuña's SABORAMI is a document of the times and the way in which history can change art. It is filled with the urgent hope that art, too, can change history. Put together when Vicuña was just twenty-five years old, the poems, paintings, and objects of SABORAMI enact a complex and multidimensional conversation. The meanings of the works (which were created over a seven year period) shifted radically after the events of September 11, 1973. Their meanings continue to shift and resonate in light of political events today. This recreation of the original SABORAMI is published with a new afterword Vicuña wrote especially for this edition.

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, visual artist, and filmmaker born in Santiago de Chile. The author of twenty books of poetry, she exhibits and performs widely in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Her multidimensional works begin as a poem, an image or a line that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture or a collective performance.

Produced on the occasion of Leslie Thornton's major solo exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center as well as a recent solo exhibition at Kunstverein Nurnberg, this richly illustrated volume is the first monograph on this important artist and filmmaker, offering essential, foundational scholarship on Thornton's influential work in film and video.

Since the mid-1970s, American avant-garde filmmaker and artist Leslie Thornton (born 1951) has produced an influential body of work in film and video. Thornton's early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma vérité traditions fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general. Her work consistently interrogates modes of representation and the violence of looking, pushing beyond critiques of the gaze to consider biases in perception, or the way voice and sound can undermine an otherwise dominant visual narrative.

For the latest Spike – #71: Couples—we're seeing double. This one is dedicated to partnerships in life, love, law, and labour. Whether you're a serial monogamist, married to your job, or sublimating your crushy feelings into all that you create, it's tough to deny the role that romance—or its absence—plays in shaping our subjectivities. 

Might coupling be key to seeing beyond the self, opening us up to a more expansive, collaborative (co)existence? And do relationship breakdowns parallel wider social strife? Can the dusty old dyad be reconceived as radical? What happens when art-world couples blend business and pleasure?

Curl up with your soul mate—or settle into singledom—and grab a copy to read about the uses of love beyond love; the motivation posed by muses and rivals; psychoanalytic takes on partners' promises; along with artist-couples, curatorial duos, rom-com heroes, spectres, fembots, and beyond. 

With Chris Kraus, Asa Seresin, Whitney Mallett, Alenka Zupančič, Johanna Hedva, Sam Kriss, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Genesis & Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, Darian Leader & Jamieson Webster, Eva & Franco Mattes, Tea Hacic-Vlahovic, and many more.
 
Founded by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike (Spike Art Quarterly) is a quarterly magazine on contemporary art published in English which aims at sustaining a vigorous, independent, and meaningful art criticism. At the heart of each issue are feature essays by leading critics and curators on artists making work that plays a significant role in current debates. Situated between art theory and practice and ranging far beyond its editorial base in Vienna and Berlin, Spike is both rigorously academic and stylishly essayistic. Spike's renowned pool of contributing writers, artists, collectors and gallerists observe and reflect on contemporary art and analyse international developments in contemporary culture, offering its readers both intimacy and immediacy through an unusually open editorial approach that is not afraid of controversy and provocation.

Shirley Villavicencio Pizango (b. 1988, Lima) is a Ghent-based artist with Peruvian roots. The cross-fertilization between her childhood in the Amazon jungle and Lima on the one hand, and her life in Belgium on the other, fundamentally characterizes her work.

Her young oeuvre consists of still lifes with terracotta vases, fruits or plants and decorative, colourful backgrounds. She also paints scenes for which mostly friends or family sit as models. Though it may seem that Shirley’s scenes are anchored in reality, the scenes on canvas have never taken place as a whole and her models have been transformed into characters in a constructed setting, where they are quietly allowed to be vulnerable or simply who they are.

Even the clothes and patterns are usually imaginary. Colours sometimes run; some parts appear to be left unfinished or blank.

Posture Editions N° 47, ‘Dark Empathy’, is a multi-layered hardcover presenting a selection of paintings from the last three years, interspersed with powerful drawings on paper and photographs of the artist in her studio. Bart Cassiman collected quotes to accompany the work and added some well-chosen observations by himself. The text ‘Inspired imagination’ by Benedicte Goesaert is the result of a frank conversation between the author and the expressive, generous, self-confident, but at times also melancholy artist.

"White lips refer to my memories of those moments I could not communicate with anyone because I did not yet master the Dutch language. At that time, I made drawings in which the mouth was altogether absent. Later it regained its place. The lips are often serenely pressed together because I want to immortalize the characters. For me, laughter is linked to the ephemerality of a moment. I find it fascinating to have the characters wait quietly without clear indication of what they are waiting for."
— Shirley Villavicencio Pizango in: Benedicte Goesaert, ‘Inspired Imagination’.

Published on the occasion of her Aspen Art Museum exhibition, the artist's first solo presentation in an American museum, this catalogue focuses on Amelie von Wulffen's recent work, including paintings created during her time as the AAM's 2012 Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence. The artist deploys a host of painterly techniques that—while departing from the photographic collage practice for which she is best known—remain deeply referential, wryly revisiting and reprocessing tactics and tropes of modern painting from European Romanticism onward.

The lavishly illustrated publication features an essay by AAM CEO and Director, Chief Curator, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, as well as a foreword by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz.

Published 2013

Printed on thick cardboard, this book throws you right back into the child-like explorer mode we know from when we were young. It illustrates the mindful written words of Lisa Gutscher journey through the inner body based on a large archive from found images, screenshots and other image sources to unfold a whole new world in front of your eyes.