Mouthful

Fugue is published on the occasion of the eponymous duo exhibition by artists Aaron Amar Bhamra and Céline Mathieu, presented at Jester in Genk, Belgium. The title, derived from the Latin fuga (flight), evokes both its musical and psychological meanings: a contrapuntal compositional technique and a state of dissociation. These dual connotations—aural and mental—resonate throughout the exhibition and this accompanying publication.

Céline Mathieu's work moves between the sensory and the conceptual, integrating multiple media to explore the circulation of thoughts and materials in relation to specific sites. Aaron Amar Bhamra's practice draws on recurring forms and materials to construct evolving personal and social archives, often reactivating exhibition spaces by engaging with their historical contexts.

In addition to documenting the exhibition, the publication features an introduction by Jester's artistic director Koi Persyn, a visual score of a sound composition by Charlie Usher, written contributions by Céline Mathieu, curator Eloise Sweetman, and researcher Johanna Schindler, as well as a series of analog photographs by Aaron Amar Bhamra.

Contributions by Koi Persyn, Céline Mathieu, Charlie Usher, Eloise Sweetman, Johanna Schindler, Aaron Amar Bhamra.

Austrian artist Aaron Amar Bhamra (born 1992) often procures exhibition spaces that subtly expose their systematics and physical experience by incorporating imprints reminiscent of other spaces or past exhibitions. He occasionally uses recurring forms and materials, weaving a site of shifting personal and social archives.

Céline Mathieu (born 1989) is a Belgian artist and writer. Her practice is often site and condition specific, using sound, scent, sculpture, performance, text and different materials in performative installations. The work is both sensory and conceptual. Her work looks into the circulation of thoughts and materials. Material and economic cycles merge with hyper-personal items, resulting in fluid work that cannot quite be pinned down.

This thrid edition of mnemotope magazine features pieces from contributors that range from playlist, recipes to poetic essays to drawings to private messages to a screenplay and beyond.

Mnemotope is a community magazine, published by bog bodies press. Mnemotope magazine takes this as its inspiration-it acts as a place in which lots of stories from across timelines and borders can sit together, and cultural memories can interact. It exists to create and hold the expression and knowledge of its diverse community, because of this, the contents of the magazine are wonderfully varied; some confessional poetry, some hastily notated recipes, some fiction, some history, lots of other things, all submitted during an open call. The format put spreads together of contributions that seem to somehow be in dialogue with one another.

The name of the magazine comes from a term that's used in writings about archaeological finds - it's a little complex when we speak about it abstractly, so take, for example, a bog body. A bog body is an object, but when we look at one it takes on another function as an image. This image is the part beyond the physicality of the object-it's what makes us think about what the world must have been like when this person was walking on it, what they looked like, what they did, who found them, how much the area they were found in must have changed and so on and so on and so on. A mnemotope is something that compresses time, and allows you to be in the bog two thousand years ago and in the museum looking at the body and at home reading about it all at once.

Part prose poem, part reflection on the relations between writing and place, Lagoon tells the story of the slow undoing of an idyll. In it the narrator walks for hours during long summer nights, gazing through the windows that line the streets. In between, she reflects on how she might write about the shifting space of the lagoon, where she spent summer holidays with her family years ago. In adolescence, the narrator watches quietly as her mother, father and sister go about building their holiday home. But she can sense something is awry, she just does not fully understand what.

Lagoon is the first novella by McCulloch.

Lagoon by Samantha McCulloch is the first title in Kunstverein Amsterdam's new imprint called First Drafts, which, inspired by artist and publisher Anne Turyn, celebrates experimental and commercially unviable work by publishing completed manuscripts that haven’t yet found a home in their first draft form. Importantly, each title is also the first attempt by the author to write in that particular form, or, to write at all.

Constructed in Pennsylvania in 1827, Gravity Road was a precursor to the modern roller coaster; a sloping stretch of railroad used to cart coal out of mines. With passenger rides on offer soon afterwards, the rapid descent became an attraction and the technology was appropriated for thrill rides in amusement parks.

Jesse Darling’s sculptures, drawings and installations address the fallibility, fungibility and mortality of living beings, systems of government, ideologies and technologies – nothing is too big to fail. For his exhibition at Kunstverein Freiburg in 2020, Darling created a sculpture of a dysfunctional roller coaster, broken down to a child-like scale, becoming an anti-monument to a modernity that celebrates progress, acceleration and mastery and produces violence.

Exploring the entangled history of labour, leisure, extraction and entertainment, Gravity Road: A Rollercoaster Reader was commissioned in response to Darling’s 2020 exhibition, bringing together new texts by artist and Darling-collaborator Joe Highton and writer Sabrina Tarasoff along with a correspondence between Darling and the Kunstverein’s director Heinrich Dietz.

FEATURING TEXTS BY:
Jesse Darling
Heinrich Dietz
Joe Highton
Sabrina Tarasoff

You wake up in the footwell of a mid-sized hatchback somewhere on a highway in outer Bangkok. You compile neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, whilst your work emails pile up without ever being read. You quit your job. You launch a banal start-up. You grieve for a past relationship. You stare endlessly at the waves coming in from a beach in Koh Pha Ngan. You vape intensely. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror.

i will pay to make it bigger is a novella, by poet and artist Ahren Warner, in which ‘you’ are the main character. Through text and image – autofiction, docufiction, and just plain fiction – you work your way through a tangle of preoccupations: from what it means to buy enjoyment, to the fragile construction of your own self as a cultural product.

i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced whilst living in Thai ‘party hostels’. Although these photographs might seem to exist as the documentation of intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.

With a Coda by Hana K. Ohnewehr, commissioned by Yu’an Huang

Hands & Feet of Friends & Family is a weave of Helen Korpak’s photocollages and locket-sized literary captions recording closely observed familiar and familial gestures. Granular renderings tenderly taped, Korpak’s collages meld the touching and the wryly humorous, balancing throughout the vulnerability of artist and subjects bonded by essential fondness.

Beginning to look 
I started to notice 
the older I get 
the more I notice 
studying the reproductions 
separating this from that 
noticing the gestures 
feeling the movements 
of the joints—

Designed and typeset with haptic craft by Samuli Saarinen.