Individual artists, art monographs Books

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisThe script for, and conversations around, artist Jesse Ash's multi-dimensional project built around a play about a bitter argument between two ex-lovers.Avoidance--Avoidance is a multi-dimensional project built around a play about a bitter argument between two ex-lovers. The project incorporates artworks which act as props, set pieces, and stage, and as individual artworks in their own right. Brought together through an evolving script, the narrative unfolds to reveal a multiplicity of secrets through an ongoing, interrogative dialogue. The individual artworks act both as backdrops to, and reflections on this repetitive exercise in extracting and concealing information. The culmination of which shines a light on public and private forms of disclosure within a contemporary context of state and commercial surveillance.Bringing together material from each iteration of the project, spanning multiple continents and languages--including annotated and translated scripts, rehearsal and performance stills, studio sketches and intricate newspaper collages--the book explores the theme of transparency in emotional, material and political terms.The project is introduced through a text by curator Elsa Coustou. Conversations with actor Ansu Kabia, writer Peter Pomerantsev, and artist Daniel Sinsel consider issues such as performed intimacy, troll farms, and trompe l'oeil through the lens of the Avoidance--Avoidance project.

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Book SynopsisForthcoming from the MIT Press

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Book SynopsisEssays, conversations, and documentation map the work of the artist Janek Simon.Artist Janek Simon tends to say he is interested in many, even too many, things: from globalization and political geography to artificial intelligence and financial speculation, from DIY strategies to postcolonial theories within Eastern Europe. This reader decodes fifteen years of his work. It opens with the world of synthetic folklore, a speculative visual language between particularism and universalism, created with the help of AI and composed of mosaics generated by algorithms combining motifs from India, Africa, South America, Europe, and Poland. Simon's work asks if AI can protect us from the traps of homogenization, xenophobia, and essentialism, and what a new universalism would look like in the era of the identity politics. Essays, conversations, and documentation map Simon's footsteps, extensively presenting for the first time his work and life, which has been from time to time supported by art institutions such as the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, where he held his survey show in Spring 2019.ContributorsInke Arns, Max Cegielski, Ekaterina Degot, Łukasz Gorczyca, Nav Haq, Virginija Januškevičiūtė and Monika Lipšic, Nina Katchadourian, Joanna Kordiak, Lev Manovich, Daniel Muzyczuk, Sina Najafi, Lech Nowicki, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Aleksandra Przegalińska, Mohammad Salemy, Sumesh Sharma, Jan Sowa, Joanna Warsza and others.

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Book SynopsisExplorations of the radical film praxis and extensive oeuvre of filmmaker Želimir Žilnik.Shadow Citizens offers insights into the radical film praxis and extensive oeuvre of filmmaker Želimir Žilnik (b. 1942). Since his beginnings in the lively amateur film scene of Yugoslavia in the 1960s, Žilnik has made more than fifty films, often in the genre of docudrama. Many of Žilnik's films have anticipated real-world events--the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the economic transition from socialism to a neoliberal order, the annihilation of workers' rights, and wider social erosion related to labor and migration. The title, Shadow Citizens, reflects Žilnik's lifelong focus on invisible, suppressed, and under- and misrepresented members of society. As a concept, shadow citizens is related to amateur politics as a form of political engagement--the imaginative and subversive non-normative knowledge and alternative sensibilities that lie dormant but occasionally push back against politics as usual. Courageous amateurism is prominent in Žilnik's films, both as a concept and as a method, and the texts in this book elaborate on the potential of shadow citizens and the pressures of the amateur undercurrent in emancipatory politics and artistic production. The notion of shadow citizens, conceived as different minorities that are increasingly becoming majorities everywhere, runs through Žilnik's oeuvre, where it is used to imagine a new concept of citizenship that pushes current limits and borders.ContributorsBoris Buden, Greg de Cuir Jr, Ana Janevski, Dijana Jelača, Edit Molnár, Bert Rebhandl, Marcel Schwierin, WHW, Želimir Žilnik

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Book SynopsisA look, through the work of Ilona Németh, at the transitioning social and economic infrastructure of Eastern Europe.Eastern Sugar was the name chosen by Générale Sucrière and Tate & Lyle for their joint venture to acquire sugar factories across Central Europe after the fall of communism in 1989. In the mid-2000s, the Franco-British consortium cashed in its investment to take advantage of a European Union compensation scheme and permanently shut down its sites. This book takes as its starting point artist Ilona Németh’s extensive research into the history of sugar production in the region, from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century, when northern sugar beet emerged as a competitor to southern sugar cane, to the social impact of the rapid decline of the industry in the era of peak globalization. The fate of Eastern Sugar is explored as a microcosm of the mechanisms of postcommunist transition across Central Europe from the opportunism of financial speculators to the endemic corruption of privatization, posing the question of whether neoliberal marketization was the only viable exit strategy from state socialism. Contributions dealing with the social and environmental legacies of Caribbean sugar plantations situate the sugar histories of Eastern Europe within the spread of a monocultural system based on (neo)colonial extractivism. Through critical texts, conversations, and artistic interventions, Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar restores complexity to the history of the rapid decline of the Slovak sugar industry, and by extension the wider social and economic infrastructure of transition in Central Europe, while at the same time opening up planetary trajectories for postcapitalist alternatives. ContributorsEdit András, Fedor Blaščák and Rado Baťo, Johanna Bockman, Kathrin Böhm, Anetta Mona Chișa, Cooking Sections, Annalee Davis, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Ferenc Gróf, Dušan Janíček, Edit Molnár, Ilona Németh, Michael Niblett, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, Joanna Sokołowska, Imre Szeman, Raluca Voinea copublished with Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava 

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Book SynopsisOn artist Zach Blas’s wide-ranging practice that scrutinizes the relationship between digital technologies and the cultures and politics that animate them.Zach Blas: Unknown Ideals offers an inquiry into Zach Blas’s singular practice, exemplary among his generation of digital artists, through a series of newly commissioned essays by Alexander R. Galloway, Pamela M. Lee, Mahan Moalemi, Kris Paulsen, and Marc Siegel; an interview with Ovül Durmuşoğlu; and writings by the artist himself. These insightful contributions expand on the technological, queer, filmic, and cultural inquiries that comprise the rich world of Blas’s practice. Across his works, Blas closely engages the materiality of digital technologies while also drawing out the philosophies and imaginaries lurking in artificial intelligence, the internet, predictive policing, airport security, biometric recognition, and biological warfare. Blas embraces the media of computation, video, sculpture, and music in his installations that sharply confront biometric surveillance, the cult of optimization, and the reification of data bodies.  Blas uses research-based practices to scrutinize the relationship between digital technologies and the cultures and politics that animate them. Critical of today’s corporate internet giants and their ideological fascination with Ayn Rand, Blas extensively considers the beliefs, desires, fantasies, histories, and symbols latent in technical systems, but he also dwells on the horizons and edges, or what he calls the “outside,” of dominant power structures. Reclaiming Ayn Rand’s phrase the “unknown ideal,” Blas points to both liberatory potentialities and political challenges of the present: he imagines a proliferation of “unknown ideals” in order to dispute Rand’s vision of the future. Refusing technological determinism, Blas’s work makes space for escape through its celebration of queer ideality.

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Book SynopsisThe adventures of a French art student as she visits New York to work as an assistant for an established artist.While studying at the Fine Arts School in Paris in 2013 and having to complete an internship abroad, Mathilde Supe, a 24-year-old student, contacted Keren Cytter to be her assistant. The latter, who had just left Berlin for New York, accepted the offer. Supe embarked on a journey to New York City, where she had never set foot, barely speaking English, without a work permit, and without contacts. From this incredible adventure, she transcribed every detail of hardship and learning in a book that took the form of a logbook and followed the evolution of one young artist’s view of another established artist.Through experimental modes of storytelling and perception, Keren Cytter's work deals with social alienation, the representation of language, and the function of individuals in cultural systems. She is primarily a filmmaker, yet her work includes performances, plays, sculptures, drawings, novels, zines, children's books, and interdisciplinary festivals.Keren Cytter Does Not Like To Share is published on the occasion of Cytter's solo presentation Bad Words at the Ludwig Forum Aachen (June 25–September 25, 2022).Copublished with Ludwig Forum für International Kunst Aachen

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Book Synopsis

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