Antonio Obá: Rituals of Care

Covering the past thirty years of William Scott's practice, this monograph offers the largest comprehensive selection of paintings, drawings, masks and architectural models, as well as an unique insight on his creative and transformative approach.

Published on the occasion of Malmö Konsthall William Scott's exhibition at Mälmo Konsthall en 2022.

William Scott (born 1962 in San Francisco) has developed his own artistic practice while working at Creative Growth, an art center in Oakland where people with development disabilities are given the opportunity to work and advance creatively as artists. Combining image and text, his colourful paintings tie in stylistically with current popular culture. Scott's vividly graphic and highly detailed paintings, drawings, and sculptures explore the intersections of community, cultural memory, faith, and science fiction. "Rebirth" is a constant subject for the artist, who reimagines the social topography of his native San Francisco as well as new, interstellar organizations. His portraits depict family members and neighbors, and celebrate Black actors, musicians, and civil rights leaders. For Scott, painting is a transformative as well as a documentary tool; a way to re-craft his personal narrative and even undertake extraordinary acts.

Edited by Nicola Wright
Texts by Carson Cole Arthur, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Helen Delaney, Tom di Maria, Simona Dumitriu, Nathan Hamelberg, Kathleen Henderson, Matthew Higgs, William Scott, Nicola Wright

Hardscapes / Here documents and brings together two exhibition projects by artists Nina Canell and Maria Hassabi. Produced on the occasion of the exhibitions of the same name curated by Samuele Piazza at the OGR Torino, the publication consists of two graphically specular books that merge into a single volume. Essays, unpublished materials and a rich set of photographic materials form the driving force behind two visual narratives that offer new keys to understanding the research of the two artists.

Hassabi's live installation Here calls on visitors to share space and spend time with six performers portrayed in a decelerated rhythmic choreography within a sculptural environment. In constant motion, the dancers contribute to a situation of shifting presence, demonstrating the contestable nature of the "here and now." Immobility and slowing down are thus used both as techniques and as subjects of representation: the performing bodies oscillate between dance and sculpture, subject and object, living body and static image.

Canell's Hardscapes combines two works that focus on the concepts of circulation and transformation as well as on unexpected forms of coexistence. Energy Budget (2017–18), a video that alternates between two subjects: a basement in which a leopard snail crawls over an electrical panel, and the gradual shifting of the frame away from "dragon gates"—portal-like openings in huge buildings on the Hong Kong waterfront. Muscle Memory (16 Tonnes) (2020–21) is a floor sculpture, decomposed and transformed by the density of moving bodies, which literally crumbles under the soles of passing visitors.

In addition to texts by the curator, the publication includes essays by Felicia Leu and Laura Preston, along with a conversation by Maria Hassabi and Nina Canell with Lorenzo Giusti.

Published on the occasion of the epoymous exhibitions at OGR Torino in 2022.

Edited by Samuele Piazza.
Texts by Lorenzo Giusti, Felicia F. Leu, Samuele Piazza, Laura Preston.

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.

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.

Curator, art historian, writer Chus Martínez and writer and curator Filipa Ramos bring together a group of artists who have been using clay, pottery and ceramics to imagine, project and shape the world they live in.

Some may associate clay, pottery and ceramics to tradition, and tradition to the past. Some may associate technology, digital communication and data with the new, and the new with the future. What if the future is only a technology as old and unusual as clay? What if clay is a matter that renews itself constantly and gives time its unpredictable configurations?

What if clay is the future and the future is clay? And if the feet of clay only reveal a vulnerability because the rest of the body is made of a different material? And if the feet of clay are actually rooting people to the earth, connecting them through the same matter? And if feet of clay are a way to establish a post-technological communication that requires no webs, no networks, no cables; only our many, one, two, eight, twenty feet and some clay?

These are some of the questions and enigmas addressed by curators Chus Martínez and Filipa Ramos, who brought together a group of artists who have been using clay, pottery and ceramics in an exhibition entitled Feet of Clay, presented at Galeria Municipal do Porto in 2021. Like clay, the project has now been moulded into book format, bringing together exclusive texts and interviews with the participating artists: Neïl Beloufa, Isabel Carvalho, Gabriel Chaile, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Formabesta (Salvador and Juan Cidrás), Tamara Henderson, Ana Jotta and Eduardo Navarro.

Texts by Neïl Beloufa, Isabel Carvalho, Gabriel Chaile, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Formabesta (Salvador e Juan Cidrás), Tamara Henderson, Ana Jotta, Chus Martínez, Eduardo Navarro, Filipa Ramos.

Created by Mary Heilmann in 1999, The All Night Movie beautifully wraps a memoir inside of a monograph, creating an artist book in which each page is designed as though it were a painting. The artist delicately utilizes color, text, candid photographs, reproductions of paintings, and song lyrics that unfold seamlessly to create an immersive visual experience. Heilmann has described the book as “the story of my life, told in words, painted images and photographs.”

Across eight chapters, Heilmann recounts her life, from childhood in California through New York in the 1990s, providing intimate insight into the development of her work, friendships, and formative life experiences. Snapshots by the artist and others provide a portrait of Heilmann’s evolving artistic community, which included Gordon Matta-Clark, Pat Hearn, Dicky Landry, Jack Pierson, Keith Sonnier, Pat Steir, William Wegman, and Jackie Winsor, among others. And this is just the first half of the book. Included with the artist’s memoir is an essay by Jutta Koether and a survey of paintings from 1972-1999. This highly revered and extremely scarce publication was co-designed with Mark Magill and is reproduced here as a facsimile edition. The All Night Movie was originally published by Hauser & Wirth and Offizin Verlag.

Mary Heilmann was born in San Francisco in 1940. She studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara, San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley before moving to New York in 1968. Heilmann began her career creating sculpture before quickly pivoting into abstract painting once on the East Coast, experimenting with bright colors and unusual geometries that bridge two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements. She has been the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award as well as a Guggenheim Foundation award.

A monograph / artists' book that engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories. Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.

Gabriel Abrantes has been making a career in cinema; with numerous international exhibitions, he's been keeping prolific, with video installations, drawing, painting, and now also VR. This book, published by maat and Mousse, attests exactly this. A book that is predominantly visual and clearly structured, efficient in transposing a certain formal and conceptual attitude that runs through Abrantes's work into the book's aesthetic approach, expressing humour and irony visually within a relatively classical framework.

"The juxtaposition of references to art and cultural history with personal and socio-political commentary is a guiding thread throughout Programmed Melancholy." writes Emily Butler, in one of the essays included in this book (other texts are an interview with the artist and short essay by Rosa Lleó). Butler continues: "His works engage with our emotions, with a range of personal feelings, often humorous, potentially rousing ethical and political beliefs. Unstable, multi-faced, polysexual, his characters waver between expressing personal emotions and wider social, environmental and political concerns."