24 European Ethnographic Museums

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

This special, limited-edition issue of Plaster celebrates Akomfrah’s commission for the British Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. The linen presentation box contains: an essay by Akomfrah’s long-time friend and collaborator, the BAFTA-winning film curator June Givanni; an interview with Akomfrah by Harriet Lloyd-Smith; original portraits by photographer Siam Coy and a fold-out poster featuring an exclusive still from Akomfrah’s film installation, Listening All Night To The Rain, now screening in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

With creative direction by Constantine // Spence and design by Emma Ralph.

Stemming from a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, this monographic catalogue offers a range of perspectives on urgent issues around gender, sexuality and labour in the digital age.

This book orbits “Second Sex War”, a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen addressing political and ethical questions arising from the use of digital bodies in contemporary visual culture and the means of production and distribution for these commodities. Realising that the same avatars are used across the pornographic, gaming and cultural industries, she investigates the working conditions and relationships that structure these fields. Through numerous essays and conversations, Second Sex War, the book, emphasises her collaborations with various practitioners (animators, musicians, writers) and the way they have inflected her practice. Media theorist Helen Hester (author of the Xenofeminist manifesto) reflects on the limitations of the porn industry and the use of female avatars. Artists collective Radclyffe Hall talks to photographer Phyllis Christopher about early lesbian erotica magazine in the 1980s. Linda Stupart compiles quotes by Sara Ahmed, Kathy Acker and Ursula K. Le Guin to consider what is radical sex today.  Artist Hannah Black's contribution, which opens the publication, reads like a manifesto for artists being crushed under the weight of current political circumstances. 

Edited by Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Robert Leckie.

Texts by Robert Leckie, Hannah Black, Helen Hester, Phyllis Christopher & Radclyffe Hall, Linda Stupart, Josefine Wikström. Entretiens with Helena Vilalta, James B Stringer, Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) by Sidsel Meineche Hansen.

A veritable panorama of Art Brut at an international level, through 180 works selected from Bruno Decharme's collection.

Art brut has never ceased to shake up the history of art and nourish minds resistant to norms as it questions classic notions of art and creation as well as those relating to the normal and the pathological. But who are they, these artists of a special kind, witnesses to another world, strangers to stylistic trends and influences? They stay—or are kept—away from the culture of fine art as well as the codes and places that constitute it such as schools, academies, museums, art fairs, etc.

Featuring A.C.M., Noviadi Angkasapura, Anselme Boix-Vives, Marie Bodson, Giovanni Bosco, Gustavo Enrique Buongermini, Aloïse Corbaz, Fleury-Joseph Crépin, Egidio Cuniberti, Henry Darger, Fernand Desmoulin, Janko Domsic, Dong-Hyun Kim, Jaime Fernandes, Eugen Gabritschevsky, Pietro Ghizzardi, Madge Gill, Paul Goesch, Jorge Alberto Hernández Cadi, Paul Humphrey, Zdeněk Košek, Joseph Lambert, Gustave Pierre Marie Le Goarant de Tromelin, Augustin Lesage, Pascal Leyder, Alexander Pavlovitch Lobanov, Ramon Losa, Dwight Mackintosh, Lázaro Antonio Martínez Durán, Mettraux, Edmund Monsiel, John Bunion Murray, Iwona Mysera, Koji Nishioka, Masao Obata, Jean Perdrizet, M. Pierron, Photographies Spirites, Miloslava Ratzingerová, Marco Raugel, Achilles G. Rizzoli, Leopold Strobl, Harald Stoffers, Mose Tolliver, Melvin Way, Scottie Wilson, Adolf Wölfli, Anna Zemánková, Carlo Zinelli, Unica Zürn.

Presented in a flip-book style, Man Unraveling consists of twenty-eight painted-on photographic images by Creative Growth artist Alice Wong. Wong's colorful palette adorns a group of photographs of the Italian fashion designer Valentino as he works at his desk. Identified only by the book's title, Valentino's image gradually evolves into greater abstraction with the paintings' general sequence. With colored edges and a textured softcover with flaps, this interactive book is a vivid journey into Alice Wong's imaginative world. 

Creative Growth Art Center is the oldest and largest nonprofit art studio for artists with developmental disabilities in the United States. Since 1974, Creative Growth has played a significant role in increasing public interest in the artistic capabilities and achievements of people with disabilities, providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition and representation.

FAQ is an accordion-fold art publication edited by Maurizio Cattelan and Myriam Ben Salah and commissioned by Le Dictateur. Coinciding with the 10th anniversary edition of Le Dictateur, the first volume will expand into a yearly series.

FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions, referencing an attempt to synthesize a recurrent flow, a tenor, an ideal visual representation of a given and very subjective “now”. 
Born out of an accute image eating disorder, FAQ reflects the mental assimilation of a relentless roving within physical and virtual art spaces: from galleries to tumblr accounts, museums, or artists studios; it can be seen as a portable exhibition, a show on paper, a project of restitution, a hybrid object that you can leaf and scroll through. Far from being a rational enterprise because of its lack of rules, hierarchy, order—or concept for that matter—it is expressly and brazenly as personal and biased as possible and reflects the obsessive mannerism of its authors.

Works by Korakrit Arunanondchai, Thomas Bayrle, Neil Beloufa, Judith Bernstein, David Douard, Carroll Dunham, Dan Finsel, Llyn Foulkes, Kathy Grannan, Camille Henrot, Charles Irvin, Elad Lassry, Jon Rafman, Steven Shaerer, Emily Mae Smith, Peter Sutherland, Slavs and Tatars, Andra Ursuta, Aleksandra Waliszewska, Charlie White, Jakub Julian Ziolkowski...