Art

The M-Budget book is a publication released on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Tisch Table Tavolo’ by Sophie Nys at Archiv in Zurich.

First published in 1759, Laurence Sterne’s ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’ is widely considered a revolutionary novel, and its style is marked by digression, double entendre, and graphic devices.

In ‘Alas, artist Sophie Nys obsesses about one of these devices, the so-called black page, famously paired with the line, “Alas, poor Yorick!” She compiles a remarkable collection of black pages, all gathered from more than 100 different editions of Sterne’s book.

Included is a text by Peter de Voogd, the collector and owner of the library from which all the images in this publication originate, on the technical challenges that printing a black page presented for these early editions.

First monograph of artist Sharon Van Overmeiren, published by Damien & The Love Guru (2021).

Sharon Van Overmeiren (°1985, Antwerp, Belgium) recently completed the Residency Programme in Jan Van Eyck Academie, a multiform institute for fine art, design and reflection in Maastricht. Her research focuses on the significance and the common lineage of objects displayed in various compositions, in particular the relationship and intersection between objects and their natural, metaphysical expression.

Book design by Hagen Verleger.
With a guiding soundtrack / usb card by Elko Blijweertd.

We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.

With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.

100+more is het resultaat van een beelden dialoog tussen Jelle Martens en Tim Bruggeman in het voorjaar van 2021. Beide verzamelden ze de voorbije jaren een uitgebreid digitaal archief met beelden van het internet, film stills, schermafbeeldingen, reproducties van kunstwerken en zelfgemaakte beelden. Deze publicatie brengt een selectie van 302 zwart-wit beelden samen vanuit een weloverwogen willekeurigheid.

100+more is the result of a visual dialogue between Jelle Martens and Tim Bruggeman in the spring of 2021. In recent years, both have collected an extensive digital archive with images from the internet, film stills, screenshots, reproductions of artworks and images they created themselves. This publication brings together a selection of 302 black-and-white images from a chosen randomness.

Offset
304 pages
Edition of 250
14 x 20 cm

kunststof (20x) kunststof kunststof kunststof
kunststof kunststof kunststof kunststof
kunststof kunststof kunststof kunststof
kunststof kunststof kunststof kunststof
Kunststof

Digital print
104 pages
Edition of 50
21 x 29,7 cm

More images at https://infinitif.org/SUCCES

I'm Not Sad, The World Is Sad is an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. Invested in queer theory and institutional critique, she sets out to perform the artist 'differently' through a process of negation and passivity, inadvertently causing her relationship with the insitution's curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Louwerens dresses her protagonist in the different professional guises of artistic labour. Het experiences as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begin to overlap and blend under the name of 'performance'.

I'm Not Sad, The World Is Sad is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability.

Where Do You Draw The Line Between Art and Politics? consists of a series of interviews with individuals who have been active in various capacities at the intersection of art and politics. Between historical documentation, political memory, dialogic reflections and motivational support, the publication focuses on the experiences, commitments, and feelings that animate and inform aesthetic priorities in social spaces both within and outside of art institutions; a repository designed to inspire and enourage the politicization of aesthetics, as opposed to the aestheticization of politics. 

Davide Tidoni is an artist and researcher working with sound and listening. With a particular focus on direct experience, observation, and action, he creates works of different formats that include live performance, intervention, walk, video, audio recording, and text scores. He is interested in the use of sound and music in counter-culture and political struggles and has published a sound based field research on the northern italian ultras group Brescia 1911 (The Sound of Normalisation, 2018).

The work of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) is considered today an invaluable testimony on the deportation and the holocaust of the Romani people during the Second World War. For the very first time, this publication considers equal to her graphic work the notes she wrote on the back of her drawings and paintings. Stojka's particular use of language, phonetically adapted from her knowledge of German, is here transcribed and translated into English, while giving access to both sides of her works.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Malmö Konsthall in 2021.

Ceija Stojka was born in 1933 in Austria to a family of Romani horse traders, the Lovaras. She was still a child when the nazi racial laws drove her into the hell of the concentration camps for 24 months. As a survivor, she covered up this trauma with a heavy silence for almost 40 years. In the 1980s, facing other tragic circumstances in her life, the denial of the Romani holocaust and the resurgence of extreme right-wing racist ideas in Austria, she felt an urgent need to testify. She wrote at first, then started to draw and eventually found her way by blending the two as a self-taught artist. She calls upon us, through her visions of childhood, to never turn a blind eye on what happened, and to remain vigilant as to what may emerge again. Ceija Stojka died in 2013 in Vienna.

Edited by François Piron.
Texts by Ceija Stojka, Noëlig Le Roux, Irka Cederberg.
Graphic design: Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé.

Sisters of the Wind is the fruit of artistic research on witches, ecofeminism, and science-fiction carried out between 2018 and 2021 by Juliette Lizotte aka jujulove. It is a story that weaves through seven videos and can be experienced in different ways: an interactive audiovisual performance, an online world-building workshop and role play session, and this publication!

The publication concludes the three world-building workshops and role play sessions part of the project which took place online in February 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, though they were originally intended to unfold in the form of live action role play (larp). This new constraint led us to perform the worldbuilding and role play exercises in an etherpad, an open source digital tool for co-writing text in real-time. The outcome of these sessions was archived and used as material for the publication. 

This "choose-your-own adventure" story consists of three parallel worlds that were co-created during three sessions, each lasting three hours. The core of the story was similar, but the direction the sessions took were quite unique. As the story unfolds, you are asked to make decisions to travel from one world to another: creating your own version of the story by following your instinct or challenging your impulses!

Sisters.°·
The wind is returning, as it always does. Sometimes it blows so hard that it carries artifacts away from the cities it tore apart, seeds from far away places, trees that didn’t have enough time to grow stronger... That’s why you always seek a protected area to settle in, relocating as the wind comes and goes in waves. You are witches. You pay attention to the world and try to make sense of this life together through the phases of the moon from maiden to mother to crone. In your community, the feminine spirit dominates, and all gender expressions are celebrated. When your precarious life is threatened by an unsettling prophecy announcing a deadly wind that will prepare the earth for a new cycle, will you go on a journey to find the source of this wind? What will you discover on the way? How will this transform you, your sisters, and the earth forever?

Edition of 100 published by Office of Metaphors, printed in Riso in May 2021 in Amsterdam.

In April 2019, Sophie Nys presented the solo exhibition Family Nexus at KIOSK. In psychology, a family nexus stands for a vision that is shared by the majority of family members, often unconsciously and for several generations long, and is upheld in the context of events both within the family and in its relationship to the world. Among other, the monumental, stretched out net in the dome space was a symbol of this family dynamic. 

Two years later, the theme is still working its way through the above mentioned heads. The shared interest of Nys, Gourdon, Aerts and Peacock leads to a collaboration in the form of a book that, just like the exhibition, can be read as a net of (un)coherent intrigues and knots in which no position can be neutral. They set up a network of characters. Together they represent all kinds of (human) connections. Family Nexus is a story about everyone and no one in particular. Who in this book is playing the role of the Nobody, the household’s so-called 'identified patient', or scapegoat, and which pots and pans has slipped through this character’s fingers?

Co-production: KIOSK and BOEKS.

This artist's book presents a set of photographs made by Belgian artist Sophie Nys during her stay in Zurich. It features each of the modernist fountains produced by designer Alfred Aebersold in the 1970s and scattered throughout the Swiss city. The images are associated with amusing and clever captions written by Leila Peacock, a Scottish artist living in Zurich.

In 1973, Alfred Aebersold won the competition organized by the Water Supply Department of Zurich for the design of a fountain. It was to be the visible part of a vast, autonomous and secured water supply system of 89 identical fountains distributed throughout the territory of the city. The context was that of the cold war. The threat, invisible but permanent, was the contamination of the public water supply network by an external agent. Aebersold—trained as an interior designer and founder, together with Jörg Hamburger and Herbert Merz, of studio Gruppe 3 in 1961—was representative of a Swiss design that followed the formal vocabulary of Max Bill. Bill contributed from the 1940s onward to the dissemination of ways of living and Western values to question those of Soviet ideology. Designed in the 1970s but recalling through its formal vocabulary a modernist, stable, and reassuring sculptural language expressed in the organicity and solidity of its forms, this fountain presents itself as a historical paradox of sorts. But it also presents itself as a visual symptom, set within the public space, of a necessity for a continued, ahistorical defense. The context changes, but the threat remains. And the fountain, masking its purpose in the functionality of its bowels—according to a Duchampian modus operandi, in which the sense one could assign to forms is obscured and diverted—, tirelessly spurts the purity of its liquid.

Evol/Love is a project in three parts: a billboard series, installation and publication connecting 160 subtitled movie stills that all contain the word Love.

A collage of voices and definitions arranged in alphabetical order, from ‘Love is where you find it’ (A: A Date with Judy, US 1948, 00:22:37) to ‘But even if it’s a little late, love has a way of coming back to you’(Y: Yeonae/Love is a Crazy Thing, KR 2005, 01:38:02), but read backwards to sound like its antonym: evil.

Self-published: Stichting Mei, Amstelveen, NL 2020
19,6 x 19,6 x 2,3 cm
200 pages, 160 images
Japanese bound, buckram cover with flaps
Offset on pink paper (interior), screenprinted buckram (cover)

Graphic Design Vilmantas Žumbys, Vilnius

Edition of 666 copies

Electric Brine is a volume of poetry and critical essays by women voices from diverse fields such as literature, geography, media studies, history of life sciences, sociology, and poetics of science and fiction, each of them central to the independent curatorial research entity The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO, 2014-ongoing) and its associated online study group Matter in Flux.

Conceived as an anthology and a register, it serves as a testimony to the initiative's long-standing work of creative adaptation and ecological inquiry through a quest to situate a vision of material politics through the lens of six punctuated pieces on flow and fluids. The literary and scientific fabulations found in these pages speak of the conjunction of lived embodiment, the materialized quality of language, and the ability to trigger political imagination through reading, writing and witnessing. Each of these strands polyperform under TWWWO, for they can be traced, retroactively, to the themes present in the live event series, to Matter in Flux's private study sessions, to the initiative's collective writing work presented in public venues and publications. Also included in this volume is an appendix documenting the years of invitation and study, intricately linked to the ideological praxis of these overlaps.

Co-founded in 2014 by Jennifer Teets and Margarida Mendes, The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO) is an independent curatorial research-based entity that collaborates with artists, scientists, science historians, philosophers, anthropologists, activists and more as it explores themes concerned with artistic inquiry, philosophy of science, and ecology. TWWWO began as a live talk-event series over the telephone and has thus expanded to other formats involving experiments with educational actions, discursive talks, and events via diverse methodologies.

Introduction by Jennifer Teets and Margarida Mendes.
Texts and contributions by Dionne Brand, Barbara Orland, Sophie Lewis, Esther Leslie, Hannah Landecker, Lisa Robertson. 

Graphic design: Sophie Keij & Atelier Brenda.

Everything Passes Except the Past takes an artistic and discursive approach to coming to grips with a colonial past that remains present in ethnographic museums, public space, and image archives.

The contributions in this book propose visionary theoretical, practical, and ethical foundations for future museums based on artistic and curatorial remediation of ethnographic collections. They also cover the role of colonial films in our collective and national memory, as well as the challenges and perspectives of tearing down or replacing monuments and renaming streets.

Contributions by Yaa Addæ Nantwi, Lotte Arndt, Andrés Antebi Arnó, Bianca Baldi, Daniel Blaufuks, Filipa César, Didi Cheeka, Clémentine Deliss, Karfa Diallo, Sally Fenaux Barleycorn, Alessandra Ferrini, Fradique, Pablo Gonzáles Morandi, Guido Gryseels, Jana J. Haeckel, Didier Houénoudé, Duane Jethro, Christian Kopp, Yann LeGall, Alberto López Bargados, Eloy Martín Corrales, Grace Ndiritu, Inês Ponte, Linda Porn, Tamer El Said, Bénédicte Savoy, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Mnyaka Sururu Mboro.

Graphic design: Caroline Wolewinski.

A prescient document of art-industry and museum critique from Black artists and writers.

A collection of essays edited by artist and organizer Tom Lloyd and first published in 1971, Black Art Notes was a critical response to the Contemporary Black Artists in America exhibition at the Whitney Museum, but grew into a "concrete affirmation of Black Art philosophy as interpreted by eight Black artists," as Lloyd notes in the introduction.

This facsimile edition features writings by Lloyd, Amiri Baraka, Melvin Dixon, Jeff Donaldson, Ray Elkins, Babatunde Folayemi, and Francis & Val Gray Ward. These artists position the Black Arts Movement outside of white, Western frameworks and articulate the movement as one created by and existing for Black people. Their essays outline the racism of the art world, condemning the attempts of museums and other white cultural institutions to tokenize, whitewash and neutralize Black art, and offer solutions through self-determination and immediate political reform. While the publication was created to respond to a particular moment, the systemic problems that it addresses remain pervasive, making these critiques both timely and urgent.

A long-awaited facsimile of Michael Snow's legendary artist's book, a classic of conceptualism

For years an out-of-print rarity, Canadian artist, filmmaker and musician Michael Snow's (born 1928) classic 1975 artist's book Cover to Cover is available once again, in this facsimile edition. Unconstrained by discipline, Snow famously remarked that his sculptures were made by a musician, his films by a painter. Flipping through Cover to Cover, which is composed entirely of photographs in narrative sequence, one might describe it as a book made by a filmmaker. Each individual page features a distinct moment, seen from one perspective on the front, and from a diametrically opposed angle on the back, occasionally pivoting between interior and exterior spaces. Midway through the book, the images are inverted such that the volume must be turned upside-down to be looked at right-side up. The result is an elegant, disorienting study in simultaneity. With this work, wrote Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Michael Snow has challenged the reader's/viewer's notion of a book, indeed one's very notion of perception."

What Bungalows Can Tell is the result of extensive artistic and architectural research on the village of Kaliurang (Yogyakarta region, Indonesia). This publication brings together different essays and a series of photographs that critically explore the spatial, transformative effects of globalisation and heritage formation on a local scale. It looks specifically at the colonial bungalows —what can they tell?—  and the stories around them, questioning how they were used in the past, what their function is in the present and what they can represent in the future. In doing so, this publication intends to take into account the colonial history of the village and, at the same time, bring to the fore the voices, stories and local wisdoms often eclipsed by more prominent forms of Western knowledge production.

‘Hotel Bellevue’ is a photo book and a vocabulary centered around border trees, Celtic historical facts and visual speculation. This book is a manifesto for love, anger, the non-human, a wish to connect, to suggest, and to study. Only things from the heart deliver.

Published 2021. 

Adrian Piper: Performing Objects I Have Been, 1972-2018, is a collection of documents from, or potentially relevant to Adrian Piper's performance Some Reflective Surfaces (1975-76) that has been edited by art historian and curator Rhea Anastas. This publication sits within If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution's Peformance in Residence Series, and its seventh artistic program, Social Movement (2017-18).

Adrian Piper, who lives in Berlin, at the age of seventy-two, is one of America's best-known artists. It so happens she is also one of America's best-known female artists. And yet, to use such a qualifier is to make the mistake of accepting limitations, coerced and containing, for artists and thier work— and, to quote Jacqueline Rose, "to dissolve the very possibility for women of any purchase on historical time." 

This publication focuses on an early performance called Some Reflective Surfaces (1975-76). In it, as Piper dances under spotlights, she stages multiple images and sounds. Over the work's duration, the audience follows the performer's images, physical performance, and sound. In "Artist's Statement" (1999), Piper descrvibes her 1960's work that led up to this one as "concered with duration, repetition, and meditative conciousness of the indexical present." Some Reflective Surfaces was produced in New York at the Fine Arts Building, New York University, in 1975, and then at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976. The performance has not been staged since. A collection of the documents of Some Reflective Surfaces is reissued in this publication for the first time, along with other writings spanning Piper's work from 1972-2018.

Published 2021. 

It is less a lecture, more like a cartography.
Parts may or may not sync up, we will see.

Ce qui suit est “Une conférence sur la stagnation”
Il s’agit moins d’une conférence que d’une 
cartographie. Ses parties peuvent ou non 
se synchroniser, nous verrons bien.

Dit is “Een lezing over stagnatie.”
Het is minder een lezing, dan een cartografie.
De onderdelen hiervan kunnen wel of niet
synchroon lopen, we zullen zien.

Trilingual (!) edition. Loose sheets in an envelope. On the same model as Resistance.

Sitzen ist das neue rauchen is a publication released on the occasion of the exhibition 'Sitzen ist das neue rauchen' by Sophie Nys.

The publication contains unspectacular and sometimes very similar views of Haim Steinbach’s solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich in 2014. The pictures don’t look like regular exhibition views but are taken from the seated position of the guard who shows the exanimated spaces.

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.

From December 11, 2015, until April 10, 2016, the German Library in Guangzhou, China, became The German Library Pyongyang, a reimagining of an initiative of the Goethe-Institut that originally operated in North Korea between 2004 and 2009. This temporary intervention by Sara van der Heide is an imaginary transformation of the current geography of the German Library in Guangzhou. Van der Heide’s project is a contemporary version of the Goethe-Institut’s original library initiative in North Korea, devised as a vessel to discuss national cultural policy in a post-Cold War and postcolonial era that looks critically toward the parallel histories of Germany and the two Koreas. The German Library Pyongyang offers a space for critical questions, but it also functions as a context for transcending thinking that is prescribed by the lines of the nation-state, language, and geography. The several artistic, linguistic, and graphic interventions in the library merge with the continuing activities of the German learning center in Guangzhou, and all institutional printed matter in Chinese is replaced by Korean.

This publication brings together the four original exhibition booklets in German, Korean, English, and Chinese. An additional reader is included with critical reflections as well as documentation of the exhibition and the organized seminar.

Design by Dongyoung Lee
English/German/Korean/Chinese