The catalogue of this ambitious project, held at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2017, reflects on the centrality of writing in contemporary visual art practices. Documenting its slippages from printed matters to the digital realm, from voice modulations to its sculptural presence, this book celebrates the word in all its forms.
A book emerged from the need to try to tell the story of architecture in a way quite unlike how it’s usually told, in a continuous dialogue between the anthropological gaze of Armin Linke’s photos compared with the ideation process of two public works by the Carlana Mezzalira Pentimalli architecture office.
The book documents and brings together two exhibition projects by Nina Canell and Maria Hassabi. Essays, unpublished materials and a rich set of photographic materials form the driving force behind two visual narratives that offer new keys to understanding the research of the two artists.
Can art, literature, filmmaking, and music draw out, make visible, legible, audible, or even contestable the patterns in which our lives are held? Considering the work by Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Ingri Fiksdal, Åke Hodell, Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, Susan Philipsz, and Elizabeth Price, this publication entertains this question.
This new major monographic publication on the Ghanian artist documents the work that transformed sites and repurposed buildings in his native town of Tamale to transformative outcomes rooted into the idea of art as a tool of understanding, rebalancing, and advancement.
For life and limbs, Austrian artist and curator Anna-Sophie Berger has assembled a group of works, from Arakawa and Gins to Lyle Ashton Harris, that register the body as a habitat that can be imaginatively stretched, altered, modified, adorned, replicated or destroyed.
Edited by Alison Coplan, Laura McLean-Ferris.
Introduction by Simon Castets. Texts by Annie Godfrey Larmon, Philipp Ekardt, Anna-Sophie Berger.
Design by Pacific
Hardcover, 152 pages, 20 x 28 cm
ISBN: 979-12-80579-09-6
The gallery becomes a mouth. It has four pointy teeth and is an aged, even sickly, shade of off-white. The teeth are walls, and on them hang artworks Anna-Sophie Berger selected for the exhibition life and limbs, Swiss Institute’s fourth installment of its Architecture and Design Series. Berger’s premise for the show considered the body an experimental testing ground for design, a living site that is both vulnerable and resilient. As the title implies, life and limbs exists in a world where the human body, unadorned, is at risk and often confronts threat with dark and knowing humor but also with grace. Across these works, which draw from speculative architectures, Surrealism, late twentieth-century fashion design, and Viennese Actionism, among many other subsects of modern visual culture, Berger’s singular understanding of corporeal awareness unfolds. In the clutches of this jaw, bodies find ways to disappear, though some stretch, reach, and metamorphosize in attempts to escape themselves. This book is a means to further explore Berger’s thesis. Three remarkable essays, by Annie Godfrey Larmon, Philipp Ekardt and Berger herself, ponder the works that populate this wunderkammer and question design’s transformative potential.
