Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land

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.

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.

Curator, writer and dealer Seth Siegelaub (1941–2013) is legendary for his promotion of Conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Acknowledging the unusual scope and essentially unclassifiable nature of his manifold interests and activities, this volume shows how Siegelaub’s projects and collections are underpinned by a deeper concern with printed matter and lists as ways of disseminating ideas. The book’s chapters explore the various facets of and connections in Siegelaub’s work, from his groundbreaking projects with Conceptual artists and his research and publications on mass media and communications theories to his interest in handwoven textiles and non-Western fabrics. It also highlights his collecting activity, which culminates in a unique ensemble of books on the social history of textiles and a textile collection comprising over 750 items from around the world. The survey also reflects on current practices through contributions by contemporary artists, such as Mario Garcia Torres and writer Alan Page, who co-created a new work inspired by Siegelaub’s bibliographic project on time and causality.

With essays by art historians and curators, a previously unpublished conversation between Siegelaub and artist Robert Horvit and an annotated chronology, this comprehensive survey pays homage to one of the most distinctive characters in 20th-century exhibition-making.

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

This publication departs from three video works by the artist Hu Wei, exploring the possibilities of devising new scripts within the manifold connections between materials for creative works, images, and texts.

The first part of the publication transcribes and recompiles the narrations in his videos into three sets of juxtaposed scripts. Each of these textual fragments showcases an “anatomical section of an era” from disparate geopolitical contexts: a family letter from Sabah, a set of Rashomonian testimony, and an anecdote about the anonymous.

The second part is a notebook-like atlas that unfolds following the clues of three keywords: “Fabrication,” “Anonymity,” and “Boundary.” Within this section, different types of images and texts, including factual materials, embodied research and survey records, as well as fabricated documents, interlace with each other. They serve as an interrogation, extension, reconstruction, and reassemblage of three muted histories or events.

Sasha Phyars-Burgess’ first monograph, Untitled. Spanning three bodies of work, this 200-plus page monograph includes poems by Ser Alida and Aurora Masum-Javed, a conversation between Sasha Phyars-Burgess, Juliana Huxtable and Carolyn Lazard, and essay by Bill Gaskins. Designed by Studio Lin.

As recipient of the second annual Capricious Photo Award, Sasha is a vital, emerging voice in contemporary photography, engaging the charged line between documentary and fine art. Her work ranges from affecting studies on diaspora, family and place to revolving social phenomenons in which energy, beauty and power meet.

The second annual jury panel was helmed by Capricious Founder and Publisher Sophie Mörner and Associate Publisher Anika Sabin alongside Lauren Cornell, Katherine Hubbard, JOFF, Matt Keegan, Guadalupe Rosales, Ka-Man Tse, and Lyndsy Welgos.

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.

75 numbered copies +
screenprinted newsprints’ fragment
24 pages / color plates
book size 21 x 14,5 cm
papers fedrigoni sirio rough pearl 210 and arena white rough 120