Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land

Past Words is three books in one: a collection of previously published texts and two exhibition-like experiments: A Year with Prem Krishnamurthy at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and Endless Exhibition at the Kunsthal Gent. These parts are iinterconnected but distinct, not least because each is designed by a different designer—Ann Richter, David Knowles, Mark Foss & Valentijn Goethals. Together, they chart the past—and future—of a peripatetic performance of a practice, taking stock of a fifteen-year period through writing, a medium that 1s both primary and secondary. This writing is about design, about curating, about exhibition-making, and about how all three are themselves forms of storytelling. They allow us to draft narratives that stand just to the side of accepted realities, to sneak wild ideas into the world with the hope they may—with time—turn into facts. 

Based in Berlin and New York, designer and curator Prem Krishnamurthy (born 1977) is head of the artist group Department of Transformation and of the design consultancy Wkshps. In 2015 he was the recipient of the Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award for Communication essDesign. As both creator and curator, Krishnamurthy aims to discover “how art & design can be agents of transformation for individuals, communities and institutions.” 

With an introduction by Krist Gruijthuijsen.

A collection of interrelated short stories by Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael. First published in private limited edition, it was intended as a cheap holiday read to titillate and entertain summer visitors to the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, and as a piece of site-specific work; the location of the action and the place in which it is read being the same.

The visual art subsequently generated by Unlawful Assembly includes work by Josephine Pryde, with whom the artists collaborated to produce this second edition’s cover image.

Featuring coloured pencil, watercolour, ink, airbrush, acrylic and graphite, alongside other more unusual media like sand, silicone or olive oil, this book is a sumptuous, visual document of Marten's drawing and painting practice on paper. Designed as an unruly "artist's book", Treatise of a Coat has multiple physical and linguistic folds. The title is a forcing of the homonymic similarities of coat: the literal jacket that is unfurled to expose the naked and unruly shame of human forms; the fur or hair of an animal; the verb-function of to coat, with its intentional building up of visual desire - the acts of lacquering, spreading, enclosing, flooding, directing, or husking that line and colour expedite when creating an image. The constituent materiality of this book is designed with the physicality of making a work on paper in mind.

Jack Smith presented his performance Irrational Landlordism of Bagdad as part of the Cologne Art Fair fringe in the summer of 1977. Many other events were documented photographically and can now be found in the Cologne Art Fair archives - not so Smith's performance.

This book shows him in his fair stall and during his performance for the first time. The pictures are perfect documents of a completely eccentric transaction by this pioneering director and performance artist.

Published in conjunction with the first major U.S. museum show of Joan Jonas’s art in nearly fifteen years, this monograph features new scholarship on her multimedia installations and performance practice from the early 1970s to the present. Inspired by the format of a reader, it breaks new ground by contextualizing and expanding understandings of Jonas’s body of work through three thematic approaches: the critical notions of gender, being and otherness; the politics of landscape and ecology; and new conceptions of medium specificity and un-specificity. Richly illustrated, with never-before-published sketches and drawings, the volume includes an interview with the late Douglas Crimp and Jonas’s personal reflection on their enduring friendship.

Edited by Barbara Clausen and Kristin Poor with Kelly Kivland, with an introduction by Clausen; essays by Clausen, Adrienne Edwards, André Lepecki, Poor, and Jeannine Tang; interview with Douglas Crimp; writings by Joan Jonas; conversation between Heather Davis, Joan Jonas, and Zoe Todd; and coda by Kivland

A special edition issue curated, designed and published by AVARIE, Paris and Labor Neunzehn, Berlin. It accompanies KAMERA SERIES, while it is an independent and valuable object to collect. The central idea that informs and directs the booklets’ montage is the interplay between the concepts of addition and subtraction. This is achieved by unveiling a missing image in the screening or an unreleased second from an artist's film, expanded to 24 pages. Additionally, each booklet contains a piece directly removed from the show.

The editing establishes a dialogue between film frames and performed writings derived from texts, scripts, storyboards, and notes. The KAMERA exhibition is consequently extended into a physical space—the book—allowing for its widespread dissemination, complementing and contrasting with its potential online occurrence.

KAMERA SERIES is a screening program of experimental films, video art works and printed matter taking place in a former GDR building in Berlin. Each event showcases a retrospective of selected films by an artist and a small exhibition of his/her publications or works on paper over a span of 4 days.

KAMERA centers on fostering a critical dialogue between different film formats and artists’ books. Through its regular occurrence, it aspires to create a space for community exchanges about contemporary image-making. KAMERA is a series conceived and curated by Labor Neunzehn and AVARIE.

Fascinated by the intersection of visual art and cinema, Helga Fanderl’s short poetic films evoke intense and sensitive experiences of the real world. Using a small hand-held super 8 camera, she creates filmic responses to her perceptions, weaving together imagery and emotions in dense, rhythmic patterns solely through in-camera editing. She presents silent films in the form of ‘compositions’, crafting unique programs for site-specific personal projections and transforming spaces into temporary cinemas.

The materials collected in the publication have been developed departing from the documentation, transcription and translation of textual, visual, sculptural and audio materials produced between March and November 2021 for STILI DRAMA. 

STILI DRAMA is an open-ended episodic para-cinematographic project, which functions as a spontaneous expression of MRZB research. STILI DRAMA XVIII-XXI and LA GIOSTRA DI LULU XLI-XLIV are the two first fragments of the work.

Language: English, Italian
Edition of 100 copies

The book includes Mendieta's first published comprehensive filmography resulting from three years of collaborative research conducted by the Estate of Ana Mendieta and the University of Minnesota as well as original essays by John Perreault, Michael Rush, Rachel Weiss, Lynn Lukkas, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, and Laura Wertheim Joseph.

The first book-length treatment of Mendieta's moving-image practice, Covered in Time and History aims to locate her films centrally within her larger oeuvre and at the forefront of the multidisciplinary shifts that characterized visual arts practice during the 1970s.