Catalog
This artist’s book accompanies Ari Marcopoulos’s exhibition at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. To create the book, Marcopoulos re-photographed prints of his photographs that he had produced at home using a pigment printer. This process was in many ways a continuation of the period of pandemic isolation in which most of the images were photographed. Closely aligned with his own copious output, the selection is both haphazard and intuitive, leaving room for spontaneity and even mistakes. A portion of the book also focuses on the 2021 video installation ‘Alone Together’, featuring a saxophone performance by jazz legend Joe McPhee, which forms a central part of the exhibition.
In 1992, Dana Lixenberg travelled to South Central Los Angeles for a magazine story on the riots that erupted following the verdict in the Rodney King trial. What she encountered inspired her to revisit the area, and led her to the community of the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts. Returning countless times over the following twenty-two years, Lixenberg gradually created a collaborative portrait of the changing face of this community. Over the years, some in the community were killed, while others disappeared or went to jail, and others, once children in early photographs, grew up and had children of their own. In this way, Imperial Courts constitutes a complex and evocative record of the passage of time in an underserved community.
This book of photographs is the sequel to ‘A NOT B’ (2010), wherein quotidian items are again staged and captured through the camera’s unblinking eye. Yet the images are no longer set in the innocent atmosphere of the preschool years, when the world is read through analogies, but catapulted into a darker space of representation at the cusp of adolescence, against the backdrop of a hyper-commercialised world. The compositions create a distinctive play with logic, language, and meaning. Objects transform from their humble selves into abstract shapes discharged of meaning, or alternately into advertisements for themselves, charged with desire or bad omens of an ominous future.
This is a book about a single word: skiapod. What began as a task to select a single word from among all existing words, and to expand upon and alter the meaning and mythology of that word, soon became a fascinating journey through our human history and the strange workings of our minds. Discover how a concept can appear through different periods, crystallise in different makers’ minds, and become recorded in various media: from cave drawings to a fax, and from Malevich to Guston. Arranged as a step-by-step process, the book raises questions as well. Why do we need to create images and meaning? What do we try to grasp by creating an image of a mythical figure?
From the 1960s, Croatian artist Julije Knifer (1924–2004) painted stark, snaking, geometric lines that he called meanders. The monotony and absurdity of this practice, and journaling about his non-progress every day, was for Knifer “a very specific form of freedom”. Each painting was not a whole, but part of a larger stream. This edition of ‘The Serving Library Annual’ explores this theme, where the meander offers both the promise of continuity and the mixed blessing of recurrence. Its freely wandering contents include contributions by Julije Knifer, Anuja Dhir and Ab Rogers, Anthony Huberman, Yuji Agematsu, Tauba Auerbach, Emilie M. Reed, Lauren Elkin, and others.
The thirteenth volume of Irene Kopelman’s Notes on Representation series is connected to the exhibition ‘Una cuestión de encuadre’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Panama. It presents three series of works developed in collaboration with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama in 2024. Featuring contributions by the artist and scientists, it offers a model for interdisciplinary practice rooted in long-term exchange. It also marks the occasion of Kopelman’s appointment as the first non-scientist to be named Research Associate at STRI – a formal recognition of her enduring engagement with the institute’s work and the Panamanian landscape.
This book is an exhibition. The pages can be arranged in sequence on a wall, creating a site-specific installation of 340 individual images over 21 square meters. Distributed in a limited edition of 750 copies, Martens invites participation in the transformation of the book as an object and the movement of the exhibition through time and space. You can use this book as your own statement. Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Karel Martens: Re-Production at IS A GALLERY in Shanghai, curated by Zhongkai Li. Design: Karel & Aagje Martens.
Four years after 'Statement and Counter-Statement' (2015), Experimental Jetset returns with their second paperback for Roma Publications. Whereas the previous publication had a more overall monographic scope, 'Full Scale False Scale' focuses on a single project: the large, site-specific installation that the studio recently created for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, commissioned to coincide with the museum’s reopening in October 2019. Part reader, part collage, the book forms a subjective archive of research material, just as constructed as the installation itself – an investigation that took them from esoteric colour theories to dark political alliances, and from modernist diagonals to postmodern arches.
In October elite snowboarders from all over the world come to Saas Fee, Switzerland, to start their winter season at a high altitude snow park with big jumps and a large halfpipe. While Marcopoulos was there to make a video with American Olympian Lucas Foster, he met and photographed other riders like Japanese Olympic gold medallist Ayumu Hirano, his brother Kaishu, famed for performing the highest air ever in competition, and the Korean Chaeun Lee, who later in the season became world champion halfpipe at age 16. The video and this book are both titled Butter; a word the riders use when a trick is performed smoothly with a lot of personal style.
When the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris asked Ari Marcopoulos to curate an exhibition around their acquisition ‘Brown Bag’, a short film on skateboarders in New York that he made in 1993, he was given access to the museum’s collection of over 15,000 works. He looked for themes related to the body, injuries, and architecture, along with what he perceived as challenging and puzzling works. Some of the artists were already familiar, while others were new to him. The process was not so different from his process as a filmmaker and photographer: so much of his work is about finding things. This book is a new look at photographs from around the time Marcopoulos shot ‘Brown Bag’.
Two years ago, Dutch visual artist Bart Lodewijks received a curious phone call from someone wanting to know if he would be interested in making his signature chalk drawings in Belgium’s newest prison. He arrived to find it is nothing but a construction site, so the first drawings appeared along the street where the prison would be located. He got acquainted with the locals – a landlord, the parcel delivery guy, an orange tomcat – and spoke with residents about the imminent changes in their neighbourhood. More than a year later, the first inmates arrived and Lodewijks ventured inside the prison with them. This book documents the project in its strange and wonderful entirety.
The practice of Alexandra Bachzetsis unfolds at the intersection of dance, performance, the visual arts and theatre, generating a conflation of the spaces in which the body, as an artistic and critical apparatus, can manifest. On the pages of her first comprehensive monograph, the Greek-Swiss performer, choreographer, and artist stages over two decades of work. The volume contains a wealth of images and includes new essays and contributions by Michel Auder, Julia Born, Hendrik Folkerts, Amelia Jones & Tawny Andersen, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Paul B. Preciado, Joke Robaard, Dorota Sajewska, Safiya Sinclair, Adam Szymczyk, and Arnisa Zeqo, among others.
This eye-catching booklet is published with an exhibition of hybrid wooden objects by Walid Raad. The Lebanese-American artist’s practice spans almost every discipline, from photographs, videos, and lectures, to performances, sculptures, collages, and drawings. Raad’s approach is based on the assumption that artworks are not constants, but rather mutable quantities that change meaning and thus also their form during cultural or physical transfer. For instance, in dealing with the Lebanese wars, he uses the format of a seemingly authentic archive to confront the Western viewer with a society that has lost a unifying narrative.
A red rectangular frame, part of an installation by Hans Demeulenaere at the 2021 exhibition ‘One way or another, 10 years of Posture Editions’ at S.M.A.K. – the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent – remains behind in the museum due to the artist’s forgetfulness. This forms the starting point for ‘Unfolding Structures of Exchange’. What happens when three artists (Hans Demeulenaere, Nikolaas Demoen, and Marc Nagtzaam) exchange this red nomadic frame among themselves and shape it to their sculptural, drawing, and choreographic hand? The limited edition book’s accordion-style pages are accompanied by a text insert by Simon Delobel.
“I came around the bend of the unpaved road that opened up onto a bay and a view out to the ocean as far as the eye could see. I knew this view very well, even though it was my first time there.” This is the scene Ari Marcopoulos describes when he and Kara Walker went to visit Robert Frank and his wife, June Leaf, at their summer house in Nova Scotia. It felt like a pilgrimage. Robert would pass away a year later, shortly after their second visit. Presented here are the intimate photographs Ari captured during these two encounters among dear friends. “Ainsi soit-il” is the phrase Robert taught Ari. “So be it”. Limited edition with a signed Risograph print and other inserts.
'i THINK and I think i've THOUGHT a thought' collects the various components of Pyl's practice from 2014 to 2021 in one publication by making use of the frottage technique. Working with pencil and paper, Pyl has inscribed each page with elements taken from different works. From these fragments, when they are taken together, a new vocabulary can be assembled: a collection of semantic artifacts rendered in binary patterns of light and shadow, negative and positive, and in no gradated or hierarchical order. The images that can be composed from these fractured parts are revealed only gradually as they superimpose upon each other, conjuring new associations, new ways of reading, with each turn of the page.
Since 2003, Philippe Van Wolputte has explored urban landscapes and created site-specific interventions. He particularly focuses on abandoned, forgotten, but above all devalued urban sites waiting to be demolished once they no longer serve a function in the current economic or utilitarian hierarchy. This overview of works by the Belgian conceptual artist spans from ‘Indicated Locations’ (2003) to ‘Looking Back While Walking Forward’ (2012) and the more recent ‘Indicated Locations Revisited’ (2023).
‘Deep Sea’ is a collection of eerie underwater images from the Lampaul Canyon in the Bay of Biscay, France. Made at depths of up to nearly 2,000 metres, these seascapes of otherworldly geologies seem rather barren at first sight, until a lone creature appears, caught by the camera’s flash. The bay’s canyons were formed as the continents drifted apart 120 million years ago, opening up the Atlantic Ocean. These bathyal visions by Nicolas Floc’h are filled with rocky outcrops, cliffs, falls, and folds, where marine particulate “snow” merges with living things, the unseen denizens of the ocean depths. With a text by Michel Poivert.
Jeff Weber juxtaposes several bodies of work in ‘Serial Grey’. As part of his collaborative project Kunsthalle Leipzig (2012–2017), he investigated Coptic Christianity, and more specifically its gnostic component, with artist Snejanka Mihaylova in 2013. This idea of gnosis as a personal journey to knowledge resonates with his ongoing photographic project since 2009, ‘An Attempt at a Personal Epistemology’. Further, the large-format photograms ‘Untitled (Neural Networks)’ are a speculation on neuronal activity and its transposition into a digital circuit. These grid images are generated by a data processing software Weber developed to emulate the way neurons connect in the brain.
‘Træfængslet’ (The Wooden Prison) is a collection of photographs made by Nick Geboers in the prison cells of the historical buildings of Kunstmuseet Tønder, part of Museum Sønderjylland in Southern Jutland, Denmark. The close-ups reveal marks, traces, glyphs, pictograms, and messages scratched, etched, and carved into the wooden walls, a collective evidence left behind by years of imprisonment. Geboers is an image-seeker fascinated by the rich history of photography. He also presents his own images in carefully thought out constellations. Switching between the position of an archaeologist and a visual author, he moves in a free space between hard and soft sciences.
Lous Martens has five grandchildren – Jaap, Zeno, Anna, Julian, and Luca – and has begun making an animal scrapbook for each newcomer to the family. Although it is seventeen years since the first, Jaap, was born, none of the five books are finished yet. Consisting of loosely pasted pictures of animals that were clipped from newspapers and magazines about art, literature, and science, plus stamps and photographs from advertising brochures, the books are enjoyable for their small, ever-evolving changes as new material is added. Interestingly, the books were never intended to be published, but are now grouped into one big volume, an embodiment of familial love and dedication.
‘Meadow’ is part of the Occupy Mars project conducted by Pauline Julier and Clément Postec, which sees Mars as a mirror of Earth at the dawn of the new age of space exploration, extractivism, and colonialism. Through a series of films, publications, and public discussions, it bridges multiple alternative perspectives that question both past and future to bring new narratives to the fore and give insurgent voices a platform. A first exploration took place in the Atacama Desert in Chile, where the training sites for NASA's rovers are located next to one of the largest lithium mines in the world. Published on the occasion of Julier’s exhibition near the Mauvoisin Dam in Switzerland.
A room full of colours! Renowned for his inventiveness, and his playful and experimental approach, Karel Martens is also resourceful, able to accomplish a lot with very little. Selected from 216 variations, this hand-picked unique set of twelve A4 sheets can be composed as wallpaper. A special edition release, the sets are released on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Karel Martens – Unbound’ at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the first major retrospective of one of the most influential post-war graphic designers of the Netherlands.
Ari Marcopoulos presents a large-format kineograph of the young Japanese snowboarder Haku Shimasaki performing a technically challenging trick. The idea for the publication came to Marcopoulos after working on his short film ‘Butter’, in which he documents elite snowboarders in Switzerland. He asked a group of them to send him their favourite clips of tricks; this one of Haku, captured by Nishizuka Zensei, stood out. Marcopoulos desaturated the clip and inverted it so it looks like a black-and-white negative. The result is not just an elegant and powerful display of the athlete’s skill – the explosive snow moving around him seems to evoke the dynamic origins of the universe.