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Cover of Remembering a Dance – Part of Some Sextets 1965/2019

Lenz Press

Remembering a Dance – Part of Some Sextets 1965/2019

Yvonne Rainer

€30.00

A re-examination of Yvonne Rainer's Parts of Some Sextets, a radical performance and pivotal piece in the American choreographer's career, which led her to theorize her conception of dance in the 1960s, before being revived in 2019.

Parts of Some Sextets, Yvonne Rainer's 1965 performance for ten people and twelve mattresses, represents a turning point in the American choreographer's oeuvre. "My mattress monster," as Rainer calls it, was built in her formative years with the experimental downtown New York group Judson Dance Theater. In this work, she asserted her exploration of "ordinary" actions as well as her disregard for narrative constructions to create an intricate choreography that unfolded with a new scene every thirty seconds.

More than half a century after its premiere, Rainer, in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Emily Coates, directed the 2019 revival of the piece for the Performa 19 Biennial in New York, grappling with the changing contexts of a new presentation of her radical performance. Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 delves into every aspect of this dance, from its original manifestation to its reconstitution.

This book, designed by visual artist Nick Mauss, includes previously unpublished archival images and documents from the 1965 stagings at the Judson Memorial Church in New York and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Texts by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman, and Soyoung Yoon, as well as a new interview with Rainer, pose questions about the trajectories of artworks, performers, and audiences, all while tracing the life—and afterlife—of a dance.

Edited by Emily Coates. 
Texts and contributions by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman and Soyoung Yoon; conversation between Yvonne Rainer, Emily Coates and Nick Mauss.

Language: English

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Cover of Metal Works

Lenz Press

Metal Works

Sidsel Meineche Hansen

A complete survey of the cast, forged, and fabricated metal sculptures made by Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen since 2017.

The artist's practice addresses the industrial complex of virtual and robotic bodies and their relationship to labor in tech, pornography and gaming. While some sculptures were conceived as individual pieces, others were created with digital counterparts within installations that typically include CGI animation, documentary video, drawing and prints.

By presenting the metal works as stand-alone pieces, this book adheres to Meineche Hansen's concern with the material means of production, highlighting their concrete yet elusive nature. Several pieces in the publication are accompanied by poems written by artist Diego Marcon in response to the works. As an artist's project and an archival document, the publication echoes the tradition of documentary photography devoted to sculpture.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen (born 1981 in Denmark, lives and works in London) is a Danish artist. She produces exhibitions, interdisciplinary seminars and publications that foreground the body and its industrial complex, in what she refers to as a "techno-somatic variant of institutional critique". Meineche Hansen questions the body in the field of industrial representations: robotic or virtual bodies, and their relationship with the working world of industries of gaming, pornography, and new technologies. Her research-led practice has taken the form of woodcut prints, sculptures and CGI animations, often made by combining her own low-tech manual craft with outsourced, skilled digital labour.

Edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.
Poems by Diego Marcon.

Cover of Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins

Lenz Press

Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins

Basma al-Sharif

Essays €35.00

Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins offers an in-depth look at nearly two decades of artistic output by the Palestinian artist and filmmaker Basma al-Sharif. Retracing her practice from recent works back to her earliest experiments, the book provides an original overview of how her visual language and conceptual concerns have evolved over time.

Basma al-Sharif's films and installations navigate the unstable terrains of displacement, colonialism, and representation—often shaped by the ongoing reality of the occupation of Palestine. Through a rich selection of images and curatorial essays, the monograph highlights the layered political and cinematic frameworks within which her works are embedded.

Also included are two newly commissioned literary contributions: a fictional piece by Karim Kattan that resonates with the themes of place and estrangement, and a conversation between al-Sharif and the artist Diego Marcon, in which they reflect on shared affinities, artistic processes, and their long-standing dialogue. Blurring the personal and the political, the real and the imagined, Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins captures the complexity and urgency of al-Sharif's artistic journey.

Texts by Basma al-Sharif, Karim Kattan, Diego Marcon, et al.

Basma al-Sharif (born 1983 in Koweit) is a Palestinian artist working in cinema and installation. She developed her practice nomadically between the Middle East, Europe, and North America and is currently based in Berlin. Her practice looks at cyclical political conflicts and confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.

Cover of Dreams of a Dreamless Night

Lenz Press

Dreams of a Dreamless Night

Ali Cherri

The publication is the first institutional monograph on the multimedia practice of artist and director Ali Cherri. It aims to highlight the constellation of ideas, themes, and formal concerns running through his most recent, highly significant projects.

Edited by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, with Bianca Stoppani, this book provides an overview of the artist's output over the past three years, teasing out both new strands for interpretation and formal links between his films, videos, sculptures, drawings, and installations.

Texts by: Cecilia Alemani, Erika Balsom, Étienne Bernard, Leonardo Bigazzi, Ali Cherri, Lorenzo Giusti, Stefanie Hessler, Priyesh Mistry, Alessandro Rabottini, Stefan Tarnowski.

Video and visual artist Ali Cherri (born 1976 in Beirut, lives and works in Paris and Beirut) received a BA in graphic design from the American University in Beirut in 2000, and an MA in performing arts from DasArts, Amsterdam, in 2005. His current project looks at the place of the archaeological object in the construction of historical narratives.

Cover of Curatorial Design – A Place Between

Lenz Press

Curatorial Design – A Place Between

Wilfried Kuehn, Dubravka Sekulić

Design €35.00

The future of architecture lies in the curatorial approach. This is the thesis put forward by architect Wilfried Kuehn and theorist Dubravka Sekulić in their book Curatorial Design: A Place Between, which brings together contributions from more than 30 authors working in the fields of architecture, art, and curatorial knowledge and practice.

Architectural design and the curatorial share a non-disciplinary background, and aim to assemble diverse forms of knowledge rather than specializing. Inherently transdisciplinary, then, they are at odds with the increasing division of labor in all fields of knowledge and practice. In the face of professionalization, which limits our capacity to intervene comprehensively, design and the curatorial challenge specialization and produce relational knowledge. They intend to create an in-between place, as together they form a novel practice that—in combining heterogenous forms of knowledge—takes center stage rather than serving as a moderator or mediator of sorts. What unites them is the assertion of a relational form, the autonomy of which consists precisely in teasing out relations between different elements. What happens to architectural design when it consciously enters a relationship with the curatorial?
The book is aimed at practitioners and educators in the field of architecture and design, as well as curators and exhibition makers. It contains three photo series by Armin Linke that accompany the three sections of the book: "Public School for Architecture", "Total Reconstruction," and "Designing for Co-Habitation."

Contributions by Martina Abri, Ross Exo Adams, Thomas Auer, Giovana Borasi, Susana Caló, Brendon Carlin, Peggy Deamer, Clémentine Deliss, FICTILIS, Francesco Garutti, Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, Joyce Hwang, Anousheh Kehar, Bettina Köhler, Elke Krasny, Wilfried Kuehn, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Maxim Larrivée, Matthew Leander Kalil, Mark Lee, Steve Lyons for Not An Alternative, Armin Linke, Mona Mahall, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Dejan Marković, Ana Miljački, Erica Petrillo, Christian Raabe, Albert Refiti, Damon Rich, Christiane Salge, Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, Anna Schäffler, Bernd Scherer, Laila Seewang, Dubravka Sekulić, Asli Serbest, Stuart Smith, Laurent Stalder, Milica Tomić.

Cover of Sweat Shame Etc.

Lenz Press

Sweat Shame Etc.

Cally Spooner

Monograph €40.00

Across objects, writing, sound and choreography, British artist Cally Spooner addresses the manners in which specific technological and financial conditions shape and organize life. This volume surveys her artistic output of the last five years.

Sweat Shame Etc. includes a lecture by Spooner along newly commissioned essays by Laura McLean Ferris, Pierre Bal-Blanc, and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti. A 2018 series of drawings on paper, from which the monograph takes its name, features hastily sketched figures that take care of their bodies while shedding clothes, socks, limbs, and torsos. Though their heads are scratched out, they remain unexpectedly determined and unperturbed.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at the Swiss Institute, New York, in 2018-2019.

Cally Spooner (born 1983 in Ascot, UK, lives and works in London and Turin) is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings.

Edited by Alison Coplan and Laura McLean-Ferris.
Texts by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, Laura McLean-Ferris, Cally Spooner.

Cover of The Essential Jill Johnston Reader

Duke University Press

The Essential Jill Johnston Reader

Jill Johnston, Clare Croft

Performance €28.00

Jill Johnston began the 1960s as an influential dance columnist for the Village Voice and by the start of the next decade she was known as a keen observer of postmodern art and lesbian feminist life who challenged how dance, art, and women can and should be seen. The Essential Jill Johnston Reader collects dozens of pieces of her writing from across her career. These writings—many of which appeared in the Village Voice and the New York Times—survey the breadth of her work, braiding together her thinking, writing, and activism.

From personal essays, travel writing, and artist profiles to dance and visual art reviews as well as her infamous series of columns for the Voice in which she came out as a lesbian, these pieces demonstrate the evolution of her philosophies and writing style. Illustrating how Johnston drew on lessons from dance to reconsider what it means to be a woman, this collection brings a fascinating and brilliant voice of American arts criticism, radical feminism, and gay liberation back to contemporary audiences.

Cover of Dispersed Events. Selected Writings

After 8 Books

Dispersed Events. Selected Writings

Nick Mauss

Dispersed Events brings together for the first time Nick Mauss’ essays from the last fifteen years. Shimmering with the urgency of a new generation of queer thinkers, Mauss’ writing refracts contemporary art through histories of decorative art, film, theater, and dance.

An artist renowned for critically and poetically reconfiguring inherited genealogies and hierarchies of visual culture and art history, Mauss engages writing as a space for relentlessly activating counter-histories, repositioning the voice of the artist and the readers along the way. Whether he considers the practice of artist Lorraine O’Grady, the radical fashion of Susan Cianciolo, the anarcho-vaudevillian theater of Reza Abdoh, or the potential for textiles to disclose a different way of thinking, Mauss insists on the intense power of forms and feelings in their actual rather than enforced prehistories. Reevaluating experiments in fashion, dance, and the decorative arts on the same plane as painting, sculpture and cinema, he locates art as taking shape in the middle of conversations—“between art history and any afternoon.”

“Among what might initially appear, following Mauss, ‘a wildly inscrutable web of lineages,’ the reader quickly perceives unexpected, unheralded, conjunctions: affiliations, alignments, and affinities. . . . It generates a conviction that, in the best sense, is partisan. Singular, independent, illuminating.” — from the foreword by Lynne Cooke

Cover of F.R. David - Zeros And Ones

uh books

F.R. David - Zeros And Ones

G. Leung, W. Holder and 2 more

Periodicals €10.00

Riffing off the title, this volume includes an interview with Carolyn Lazard – an artist whose conceptual and often spare videos, sculptures, installations, and performances explore the full amplitude of relation – by Catherine Damman, plus a feature on New York-based contemporary artist Tishan Hsu, whose practice examines the “embodiment of technology”, and contributions by time-based media artist Silvia Kolbowski, for whom political resistance, the unconscious, and structures of spectatorship are a central concern of all her projects; choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer; and science fiction author Octavia Butler.

Retroactively compiled from the curators*’ footnotes to the exhibition handout of the 2021 exhibition Zeros and Ones, at KW Berlin.

Dedicated to the Sadie Plant book of the same name (Zeros + ones: digital women + the new techno culture, 1997), the issue embodies a (cybernetic) reading & writing machine, as it co-authors artists’ work.

* Edited with Kathrin Benthele, Anna Gritz, and Ghislaine Leung - the edition has 180 pages, 4 colour plates, two bookmarks, an otherwise unavailable postcard donated by the Stanley Brouwn estate, and… SIXTEEN possible covers, reproducing a work by Lutz Bacher.