Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
Vogliamo tutto. Pratiche culturali e lavoro è una pubblicazione sul lavoro all’interno del contesto socio-culturale in evoluzione: dagli impatti della rivoluzione industriale, al declino post-industriale, fino alla rapida accelerazione dell’era digitale.
Divine Drudgery is an artist book with collages and artworks by James Richards and Leslie Thornton, and contributions by artists, writers and poets centred around liminality and the aesthetics and politics of the invisible.
The book is the first comprehensive monograph on the polymorphous work of Athanasios Argianas. It is published on the occasion of Hollowed Water, a major solo exhibition at Camden Arts Centre in 2020 and ARCH, Athens, in 2021.
Through exquisite craftsmanship, and with reference to romantic nationalism, Ann Böttcher explores how aesthetic and political projections characterize notions of nature, and how such conceptions are taken up by countries, political movements, and other institutions.
Voices (Towards Other Institutions) is the final act of the coral, multiform, articulated, two-year-long experiment carried out by Open, the Russian Federation Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition.
The book deals with Diego Marcon’s practice through the analysis of three film and video works. Monelle (2017), Ludwig (2018), and The Parents’ Room (2020) are his most recent and complex projects, and they are all emblematic of central aspects of his production.
Edited by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti and Beatrice Gibson
Texts by Laura Barreca, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Allison Grimaldi Donahue, Alice Notley
Design by HIT
2023, English / Italian, softcover, 21 x 13 cm, 56 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-43-0
Dreaming Alcestis is an artist’s book by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, conceived as an accompaniment to her holographic film installation of the same name. Dreaming Alcestis was co-directed and co-scripted by Gibson, her partner Nicholas Gordon and critic Maria Nadotti. The publication features a specially commissioned essay by poet and translator Allison Grimaldi Donahue, as well as a reprint of the American poet Alice Notley’s 1991 essay What Can Be Learned From Dreams?
Drawing on the protagonist of Euripides’s ancient myth as its ancestral guide, Dreaming Alcestis offers a poetic reflection on living and dying at a time of acute social, political and economic turmoil, documenting—via dream life—Gibson and Gordon’s relocation from Northern to Southern Europe. In the film, two characters, dreaming of a long-dead queen, are filmed in long takes, refracted holographically and interrupted only by the sounds of the city and the sea. In Gibson’s words, “2,500 years after her birth, Alcestis—in the film, a mysterious, Lynchian figure—returns from the underworld, dreaming of, or possibly dreamed by, a man and woman who have traversed Europe in search of her, from North to South, with family in tow. Meanwhile, the ice caps melt, 43 wars rage around the globe and another city burns on TV.” In a feminist key, Gibson, Gordon and Nadotti reclaim a minor heroine from Greek mythology, using her as a therapeutic device to reflect on what it is to be human in the contemporary context.
Premiering at the British Art show in 2022, Dreaming Alcestis was exhibited on the occasion of the artist’s first solo show in Italy, Dream Gossip, at Ordet in Milan, and was subsequently taken on tour, first to the Museo Civico di Castelbuono and then to Macro, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. The book and the film Dreaming Alcestis are part of Alkestis, a project orchestrated by the Museo Civico di Castelbuono in partnership with the British Art Show 9 (Hayward Gallery Touring, Southbank Centre, London), and made possible thanks to the support of the Italian Council (10th Edition, 2021), a program run by the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity.
Photos: Studio Chair