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‘Capital Compression’ explores the poetics of blockchain. On a semiotic level, a blockchain is self-referential. It is a document documenting itself. This publication employs strategies of authentication and documentation, both photographically and discursively. A nineteen-line poem mimics blockchain technology by employing a system of hashing, encrypting the poem with each successive line and page. The history, progression, and sequence of the poem in this way becomes immutable. The poem intertwines with a series of photographs and an essay entitled “The Glow”. What erodes elsewhere, gathers here. Until carbon turns into diamond, and compression into capital.
Katinka Bock’s book ‘Der Sonnenstich’ appears with the first exhibition to focus solely on her photographic work. Parallel to her work as a sculptor, she often takes pictures using an old analogue camera. The subjects are diverse, and when people come into the frame they tend to be anonymised, close-up details of body parts like hands, feet, and necks. The book includes 55 reproductions of analogue photos taken between 2015 and 2023, attesting to the ‘sculptural’ view she has on objects, spaces, bodies, and living organisms. Many of them appeared previously in Bock’s ‘One of Hundred’ publications, an ongoing irregular series in collaboration with graphic designer Louis Lüthi.
Berlin-based artist Alexandra Leykauf appropriates the gender-oriented or feminine cultural gaze via the medium of photography, playing with varying degrees of appropriation in order to reveal the superficiality of images. She often deconstructs different aspects of photography and cinema, in turn exposing the complexity inherent to the construction of images. This book presents an overview of Leykauf’s practice through three exhibitions – Both Sides Now (2020), Animus (2021), What We Do in the Shadows (2022) – her series ‘Stick People’ and ‘Faces’, and a number of video works. Texts by the artist and Garance Chabert illuminate the connections between these works.
Over a period of 11 years, Bergbauer photographically collected "image rags" and "object scraps" at flea markets in 11 European countries. He was particularly attracted to art reproductions. For a moment the long-gone aura of "pictures of pictures" seems to be recharged by being unconsciously staged. In the immediate vicinity of reproduced "masterpieces", almost everything turns into an equally seductive sensation. For the concept and design of this book, two particular publications have been inspirational: Le Musée Imaginaire (1947) by André Malraux, and the Xerox Book (1968) by Seth Siegelaub.
Dana Lixenberg’s ‘Polaroid 54/59/79’ is a remarkable collection reflecting the American celebrity culture she encountered in the 1990s and 2000s. It takes us back to the heyday of print media, when photos were primarily analogue. The title refers to the types of peel-apart instant film Lixenberg used between 1993 and 2010, when Polaroid prints formed an essential part of her work process, serving as test and reference material for lighting and composition. She made these Polaroid tests in between shooting, usually in black and white. Their inherently analogue qualities – marked by uneven patches, notes, scratches, or fingerprints – attest to their uniqueness and utilitarian function.
This book presents a selection of the images collected by Mexican architect Luis Barragán (1902–1988) as part of a reference archive that he displayed on a lectern in the living room of his home. In an ever-changing arrangement of pictures, Barragán’s thinking was made visual. Because it was a personal archive from which the architect simply added or removed images over time, the 170 currently registered pictures are all that can provide us today with a kaleidoscopic insight into Barragán’s mind, itself a myriad network of personal relationships, professional influences, and formal obsessions. The publication is the manifestation of a project by Roger Willems and Mark Manders.
This publication is a catalogue of all the material published up until 2022 by ROMA Publications, founded in Amsterdam in 1998 by Roger Willems, Mark Manders, and Marc Nagtzaam. It appears with the exhibition ‘One can build a table for 425 books’ at Sitterwerk and contains a selection of photographs made between 2001 and 2021 by fellow designer and studio mate Hans Gremmen. As Roland Früh, head of the art library at Sitterwerk, suggests in the preface, “None of the 425 books listed here stand out because they want to; they’re not shining with metallic ink, they’re not oversized, not heavy or loud or shrill. But they radiate something that makes them special.”
‘Motivi’ is a collection of graphic compositions by artist Simon Boudvin, who created this during his residency at Villa Medici in Rome between 2020–2021. Drawing inspiration from famed Italian architectural and design magazines, Boudvin collected noteworthy pages from issues published in the 1980s. He then enlarged them by 400% to create 192 close-ups of seemingly random shapes and patterns. These reproduced fragments present a chapter in the history of Italian design, creating a background of the time.
This cahier is a visual sketchbook for an exhibition by Marlene Dumas at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, in dialogue with the museum's collection. Although the exhibition has been postponed towards 2025, this anticipatory publication already arose from Dumas' enthusiasm and affection for this combination. The enigmatic Cycladic antiquities, dating from 3000-2000 BC, speak to us in the same timeless language as Dumas' contemporary works.
Every day, people come to the municipal outdoor gym in Parc de Bercy in Paris. Among them is Medhy, who is behind several initiatives to transform the site into more than just a workout space. In 2020, he invited Marine Peixoto to photograph the scene there. Her practice then took on the rhythm of the gym. Just as some do push-ups and pull-ups, Peixoto carried out an intensive photoshoot. The routine, the repetition, and the cycle of the seasons challenged her determination to “occupy the present”, forcing her to constantly renew her perspective on the same subject. This experience of exhausting a place and a way of seeing is a relentless act of faith in others and in oneself.
‘Then, Now, and Then’ consists of 16 films that Marijke van Warmerdam made during her stay in Rome in 2017 and subsequent visits to the city. All the films are loops, and most last no longer than a few minutes. They portray life on the street as the artist takes us on a walk through the city. Distance and proximity, visibility and invisibility, movement and rotation alternate as the films show how the dynamism of the Baroque lives on in today’s Rome. With her keen eye for abstract image qualities, Van Warmerdam celebrates the hidden order of chance that makes street life so colourful throughout the centuries. This collection of stills and summaries brings the films to life.
Updated reprint in black of a book featuring a collection of Na Kim’s work from 2006 to 2015 published on the occasion of her fourth solo exhibition, SET (named after this publication) at DOOSAN Gallery New York, from October 8 to November 5, 2015. For this book, fragments of her works are set in more or less personal categories, taking on a form reminiscent of a sample book. In contrast with the first edition, published before the show’s opening, this book also contains images of the actual exhibition and a text by Jae Seok Kim.
Based in New York, the Lebanese-born artist Walid Raad (1967) often deals with the significance of locale in his work, and particularly with how different forms of violence or disruptive events can affect the lives of objects, ideas, or artworks. The artist’s appearances during and literally in the midst of his exhibitions are also an integral part of his practice. This extensive catalogue is published on the occasion of ‘Let’s be honest, the weather helped’, shown at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and offers a comprehensive overview of three long-term projects by Raad, along with a live performance piece entitled ‘Kicking the Dead and/or Les Louvres’.
A set of 12 postcards by Karel Martens, published to accompany the first major retrospective exhibition at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
For this publication Nagtzaam made compositions with frames, lines, dots, bars, scribbles, numbers, and pictures, all scanned from magazines and books in the library of the Laimun artist-in-residence program in Sardinia (Italy). With an accompanying text by Anya Jasbar. Design: Marc Nagtzaam & Roger Willems.
Jordi de Vetten describes his photographs as a visual testament to the mundane as found in the landscape. While moving past houses and photographing roads, he stumbles upon the most everyday but unusual scenery. From nondescript homes and shadows cast over empty fields to a crumpled electrical transmission tower, scattered jigsaw puzzle pieces, and a piano that seems to have been left behind in a park, the images kindle the observer’s curiosity despite their anonymous and unremarkable appearance.
Experimental Jetset’s second volume in its self-reflective series is an inquiry into the role of the city as an infrastructure for language and vice versa, seen through the lens of four significant movements: Constructivism, Situationist International, Provo, and Post-Punk. Emerging from a research project and exhibition by the design studio, the book features extensive footnotes by 20 guest authors, including Linda van Deursen, Owen Hatherley, Adam Pendleton, Simon Reynolds, Lori Waxman, Mimi Zeiger, and others. An added bonus: it comes with a 26-page zine, zooming in on the design typology of the original exhibition.
Swiss-born, Amsterdam-based artist Batia Suter presents a recent project in which she deals in a humorous and indirect way with the fundamentals of sculpture. The book is comprised of reproductions of protective packaging material for fruits, vegetables, and headphones, interspersed with collected images of armour. The sense of a fossilised present offers a new perspective on the artist’s phylogenetic approach to imagery and her appreciation of unintentional beauty.
'One Wall a Web' gathers together work from two photographic series, 'Our Present Invention' and 'All My Gone Life', as well as two text collages all made in, and focused on the United States. Through a mixture of writing, portraiture, landscape, and appropriated archival images, the book describes quotidian encounters with fraught desire, uneven freedom, irrational fear, and deep structural division, asking whether the historical and contemporary realities of anti-Black and gendered violence – when treated as aberrations – do not in fact serve to veil violence’s essential function in the maintenance of "civil" society. The book traces a chronological path through the two series, concluding with an extensive essay that explores resonances between questions of black life and the strange ontology of the photographic image.
Over the course of 202-2021, during the pandemic, Kara Walker has produced series of drawings in the style of a medieval 'Book of Hours'. Enigmatic images appear to traverse a range of time periods, from scenes of biblical and mythological origins, to images of historical violence, to others that suggest more recent political strife. The highly personal nature of these images capture Walker's own response to the intersection of past and present as a way to understand our contemporary political moment. The book comes with a poster.
This book, 'A Model', parallels an exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. The museum’s director Bettina Steinbrügge conceived this exhibition as a conversation with the ever evolving contemporary art museum. This publication, with an essay about the roles museums can take, in theory, in practice, and in use, enacts how Steinbrügge engages the artists in the exhibition to sit with this shifting idea. Commissioning major works by Nina Beier & Bob Kil, Rayyane Tabet, Oscar Murillo, or Claire Fontaine and historical works by Alvar Aalto and Tomaso Binga the exhibition uses the format of prologue, body, and epilogue to overlap gestures in the museum space. Likewise, this book engages the designer Julie Peeters, photographer Adrianna Glaviano, and artist Jason Dodge as editor to stage a publication that makes a new exhibition, 'A Model', between these pages.
What might be considered the research output of a walking practice? An important caveat to this would be to ask where and when the research occurs in relation to the walk, the walking, and the walkers. Does the walk activate our senses, or do our senses demand that we walk? Since walking involves encounters with various objects and subjects, how might it help us emphasise our connection to the more-than-human world? In addition, walking reveals different entry points to a city. Could walking provide a path toward more socially just urban spaces and commons? With an introduction by design critic and educator Alice Twemlow and urbanist and researcher Tânia A. Cardoso. Published in collaboration with Soapbox Journal.
Artist and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa presents ‘INDEX 2025’, a book constituted by cuts, folds, citations, terms and images, all of which explore the resonance of its (im)proper name. The book may have begun in the summer of congressional Kente cloth, in the operation of summer camps, or in the imprecise materiality of social distance. Its origins are certainly multiple, multiply uncertain, as stable as any reflection given in space over time. Or, as fixed as any photograph.
Henri Jacobs has been conducting an investigation into two-dimensionality that involves the inherently flat nature and recto-verso proposition of a surface. Materialising in various forms, such as plaited paintings, murals, brickwork, wall hangings, ceramic objects, and drawings, the collection of works featured in this book were produced using a variety of techniques. In particular, the Brussels-based artist regularly experiments with plaiting paper, in which old and new works – or figurative and geometric images – are woven together into a two-sided, two-dimensional surface that is image, pattern, texture, and structure all in one.