A Greater Miracle of Perception explores how miracle making â making the impossible possible â is reflected in artistic practices today. The publication accompanies the exhibition by The Miracle Workers Collective at the Finnish Alvar Aalto Pavilion in the framework of the 58th International Art Exhibition â La Biennale di Venezia.
This is not an artistâs book about borders. Rather, it is an artistâs book about overcoming the influence of politics on the land within the borders of unrecognized or semi-recognized states. It is a document of the fragmented symptoms of the âBosnian potâ character of governance, in which all components simultaneously complement and eliminate each other.
The anthology Politics of Memory aims to investigate the document as such, as an objective trace left by events, as material proof or the creation of reality â the strategies with which they transform a state of memory into State memory, those by means of which a historical removal is enacted, those, ultimately, in which there is an attempt to challenge permanent or temporary amnesia, opening up to the future. The artists and filmmakers contributing to this publication represent the most advanced area on an international scale of a research that inaugurates a new relationship between artistic practices and the documentary.
Instead of passing off art as a model for a better politics, we wish to test it for the signatures, the markers and forms of these deeply antagonistic relations of which art itself is a material part: we are concerned with art as a class language, as well as with class languages in art; with artâs room for maneuver as well as with its limits and restrictions, curatorially, in writing and debate.
Forty-eight entries are organized alphabetically as a lexicon, each written by various members of the aneducation team and documenta 14 Chorus, as well as curators, artists, and educators who contributed to the program. The publicationâs many points of departure present just as many desires for other sites of learning. Cross references among the entries show the deep relationships that existedâand continue to deepenâbetween the methods, programs, and locations of aneducation.
Forty-eight entries are organized alphabetically as a lexicon, each written by various members of the aneducation team and documenta 14 Chorus, as well as curators, artists, and educators who contributed to the program. The publicationâs many points of departure present just as many desires for other sites of learning. Cross references among the entries show the deep relationships that existedâand continue to deepenâbetween the methods, programs, and locations of aneducation.
Towards (Im)Measurability of Art and Life gathers together various stories, practices, and essays about measurement that embrace paradox, contradiction, and humour. The book creates and introduces incidents of ideas, conceptual methods, acts, and processes of measurement that dwell in a conceptual transition between science (technology) and everyday life. When measurement is viewed as a practice, it is important to recall that data processing, especially visualisation, actually necessitates many aesthetic decisions.
Cantiere Barca is an experimental art and architecture project for public space that, between 2011 and 2013, involved dozens of people in actions of construction and place-making under the guidance of the architecture collective raumlaborberlin, in a neighbourhood at the farthermost northeastern corner of the city of Turin. In the years of endless crisis â in the economy, in politics, and in the environment â Cantiere Barca has fulfilled the demand for the identity and social recognition of a group of residents, breathing life into a workshop of shared creative practices and an exchange of knowledge, thus undertaking a journey from the urban periphery to the MoMA in New York. Cantiere Barca is also a case study, which has wit- nessed both success and failure, to ponder on the meaning of such concepts as collective, community, the common good, participation, responsibility, utopia, and future.
Fight-Specific Isola traces the long history of the Isola area of Milan and the organic, spontaneous progress of the Isola Art Center over the past 12 years. Featuring texts and many images, the book tells the story of an artistic and urban transformation, led by artists, who often had to invent tools and concepts along the way. This publication serves as an example of how to act on the ground in todayâs urban condition. Different narratives of history, artistic intervention and action allow the reader to trace the complex idea of collectivity, solidarity and fight-specificity. Testing new terms such as dirty cube and dispersed center this book shows a possible way to respond to the constant pressure of neoliberal development and gentrification.
The White Hunter, African Memories and Representations is a publication produced on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition produced by FM Centre for Contemporary Art in Milan. This book is not only a catalogue on the exhibition, but it is rather a context in which the subjects of the show, are interrogated in another form.
History and Interregnum looks at the relationship between history and fiction through the practice of re-enactment, as seen in three works by Stan Douglas. The Secret Agent (2015), Disco Angola (2012) and Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) all draw upon the same historical period, which saw the emergence of different universalist and multicultural hopes for a transformed world. The recent history of Portugal, namely the Carnation Revolution of 1974 and decolonisation, and manifestations of culture such as jazz-rock, disco, funk and afrobeat, contribute to a political and multicultural emancipation dreamed of in those times, but ultimately eclipsed by new configurations of power. This book is a consideration of a politics of means, taking as its starting point the idea of a state of interregnum exemplified by these moments, exploring it in the light of artistic devices used by Stan Douglas.
Stonemasons, cinema staff, a climbersâ cooperative, a group of 1970s militants. These communities testify to a period of upheaval that swept across Europe from the late 1960s to 1989. The fragments of biographies and the social relationships that Cora Piantoni depicts, are episodes in the context of this historic narrative: the legacy of anti-fascism in Italy, political dissent in the former Eastern Bloc, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The publication presents five cinematic works of Maya Schweizer and examines how the artist approaches the relation of montage editing techniques with the concept of film and memorial and film as memorial â a relation which traces back to both the very beginnings of montage and incorporates the research of French historian Pierre Nora. Recurring moments in Schweizerâs multiform art practice revolve around the examination of subtly treated processes of memory regarding historic-political events in public space. In the places, structures and situations she investigates, historical threads intersect.
Firenze 77 tells the story of a number of artists who passed through Florence, and Villa Romana, between the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s. This book brings together a series of notes, comments, book summaries and various kinds of devices and does not pretend to be other than a collection of heterogeneous, autonomous material and is open to the prospect of a future, broader and unified work.
This publication was made in collaboration with Archivio Luciano Bartolini, which since 1994 â the year of the artistâs death â has conducted careful research for the conservation and cataloguing of his works. Created in parallel with the volume Firenze 1977 it takes a position of ideal continuity with the essay by Paolo Emilio Antognoli Viti, accompanying the historical-critical recontextualization of the figure of the artist with an important tool of documentation on his work from 1973 to 1979.
Display and its social dimensions are leitmotifs in the multiform art practice of Martin Beck. His exhibition âLast Nightâ at Kunsthaus Glarus reflected on the relations between exhibiting and community by bringing together two bodies of works: one drawing on modern exhibition history, the other building on the history of countercultural communes in the 1960s and early 1970s United States. Summer Winter East West discusses Beckâs engagement with display not only as a tool of presentation but also as a form of communication â within and beyond the realm of the exhibition. What are the possibilities for imaging community? How can togetherness be presented (or present itself), and to what degree is exhibiting already an aspect of community building?