Patterns

With the series '24 European Ethnographic Museums' Van der Heide questions the construction and identity of the ethnographic museum today. Here, the project becomes a collection of artefacts in and upon itself and by recording the names of these institutions Van der Heide places the viewer in front of the dilemma: who is authorized to decide what is an artefact, and what should be collected and for what reason? In the 19th century, with the birth of the current European nations, museums openly referred to their colonial past. Today the museums bare more euphemistic names like: ‘Museum der Kulturen’ or ‘World Museum’ but still place the West as the self-acclaimed center of the world.  The existence of the ethnographic museum, which is intertwined with the complicated and loaded colonial past, has been subject to contemporary criticism. While some of the European ethnographic institutions have attempted to come to terms with the past of their collections and their heritage, Van der Heide focuses upon how language continues to reflect the political present of the institutions.

This artist’s publication contains a sequence of unique letterpress monoprints, made by Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens between 2014 and 2022. The prints, which are both highly geometric and brightly coloured, are reproduced in the book at their actual size. Textual elements accent the various abstract shapes and repetitions on almost every page. ‘Small Prints’ is available in two different cover versions, which itself is the result of a printing experiment. By printing the contents of the book in three layers on a single print sheet, which was then cut and folded, variations in the cover emerged.

Sophie T. Lvoff revient avec « The Prime Times, Volume 2 » à l'occasion de la fin de sa résidence aux ateliers de la ville de Marseille, bye, bye! Au travers de poèmes en haïku, de gros titres et de photographies de son atelier traversé par la lumière du jour au milieu de l’après-midi, le journal chronique la torpeur des longues journées de travail mêlées d’attente, de glimpses et de glances. En attendant the prime time, Sophie lit les nouvelles sur son téléphone, parcourt paresseusement sa bibliothèque, écrit des emails à des amix éloigné·es et parfois à elle-même. Elle note des blagues et des poèmes dans son cahier, mange des snacks, doute d’elle-même, fume, jette des regards autour d’elle, jusqu’au moment précis où la photo doit être prise.

Sophie T. Lvoff is back with « The Prime Times, Volume 2 »! Through haiku poems, headlines, doodles and photographs of her studio pierced by mid-afternoon daylight, the journal chronicles the torpor of long workdays mixed with waiting, glimpses, and glances. While waiting for the prime time, Sophie reads the news on her phone and lazily reads her collection of books, writes emails to far-away friends and sometimes to herself. She notes things in notebooks and writes jokes and poems, stretches, eats snacks, doubts herself, smokes, glances around, until the precise moment when the picture has to be taken.

The very first issue of Viscose tackles the expansive notion of “style”. Both a noun and a verb, style can be understood as the most basic unit or currency of fashion. Style names the very movement of aesthetics in society, and thus holds an important place in the critique of art and visual culture more broadly.

As a verb, it connotes a tactic: a dynamic tool for persuasion and communication through the bricolage of signifiers. It also relates directly to the contemporary profession of “styling”; a practice native to the fashion industry, but increasingly prevalent across the arts, media, consumerism, and politics. Thiss issue of Viscose sets out to critically gesture to all of these connotations and their potential intermingling through concrete case studies and cross disciplinary philosophical speculation.

with contributions by:
Shanzhai Lyric, David Lieske, Bakri Bakhit, Dena Yago, Matthew Linde, Burke Battelle & Ada O’Higgins, Davide Stucchi, Taylore Scarabelli, Mahoro Seward, Jordan Richman, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl, & Milos Trakilović, Laura Gardner, Avena Gallagher, Alex Esculapio, Elise by Olsen and Jeppe Ugelvig

Special issue of this US magazine dedicated in its entirety to the late Australian artist/compositional linguist/raconteur Chris Mann, who died in 2018. The magazine contains tributes from Mann associates and admirers, including Warren Burt, Amanda Stewart, Pi-0, Ronald Robboy, Linda Kouvaras, Alvin Lucier, Ruark Lewis, Annea Lockwood, as well as Mann’s own writing and an interview with him by Philip Blackburn.

88 pages bound in soft-cover glossy colour cover by Brigid Burke.

The 2025 Ringier annual report (artist's book).

Since 1998, Ringier, the Swiss-based global media company, has traditionally commissioned an artist to design its annual report. Publisher Michael Ringier and curator Beatrix Ruf initiated this series as a means of reinforcing the links between art and the activities of the company.

For the 2025 edition, Slavs and Tatars' Simurgh Self-Help revisits Marcel Broodthaers' seminal work Musée d'Art Moderne: Département des Aigles (1968–1972), replacing or "translating" the eagle—a symbol of power and empire that is used to challenge our understanding of authority and value—with the Simurgh, a mythical bird found across the Turkic-Persianate world. Whilst the eagle is often associated with nation-states and masculinity, the Simurgh is decidedly transnational, metaphysical, and flamboyant, if not gender-fluid.

Much like the collective's geographic remit—between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China—this publication attempts to shift our focus elsewhere, eastwards, to regions which too often fall through the cracks of historiography and art history. If modern and contemporary art institutions in Broodthaers' time were largely situated between the Rhineland and Northeast United States, the multipolarity of today's art world is a fait accompli: with biennials in Uzbekistan and museums in Kazakhstan, amongst others, rivalling the traditional centers of power.

Once too a sacred bird—accompanying Zeus, for example—the eagle has, over the past two millennia, undergone a thorough profanation: a brawny, secular flex of nationalism. It would be remiss not to see the parallels in the world of media: print itself and the act of reading, once an activity for the few and anointed, has undergone a similar dynamic of democratization over the past several centuries and, especially in recent years with the internet, a vulgarization which would make medieval Church elders wag their shriveled fingers at us in an I-told-you-so meme meant for the ages. This profanation has challenged the very institution of media and the narratives it disseminates, much as important works of institutional critique challenged contemporary art in the 1970s and beyond—akin to Slavs and Tatars' genre-bending mix of high and low, East and West, sacred and profane does today.

Slavs and Tatars' (founded 2006) extensive publishing activity—some 15 books in 20 years—has treated subjects as diverse as alphabet politics, Uighur literary culture, political satire in the Muslim world, and German anti-Enlightenment thinkers. Alongside sculptures, textile works, installations, sound pieces, and even a brick-and-mortar Pickle Bar in Berlin, the collective's books have cleared new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production that draws on popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research.

Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective's work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians. 

Slavs and Tatars has published Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009), a celebration of complexity in the Caucasus, Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names (onestar press, 2010) and are currently preparing solo engagements at Vienna's Secession,  Museum of Modern Art, New York and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

I am Welton Santos reenacts a dialogue between the Brazilian geo-bio-architect Welton Santos and an Interviewer. The book, which is always read collectively, is used in reading performances by groups of at least 3 people.

Printed on the occasion of an artist residency at PAV, Parco d’Arte Vivente, Turin, July 2016. Texts based on transcripts of interviews with Welton Santos.