Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
Published in conjunction with a solo exhibition at Kunst Museum Winterthur, this book provides the first overview of Altmann’s work to date, characterized by a strongly socio-critical consciousness, and reveals the artist’s influences and inspirations.
The first monograph dedicated to Paloma Bosquê addresses the Brazilian artist’s ways of understanding and giving shape to that matter which can be perceived, but not rationalized.
The first book on London based artist Gili Tal, whose practice identifies how the digital has long become a reality that has subjected our habits of perception to a radical change.
Through comprehensive and interdisciplinary readings of landscape, cinema, architecture, and visual culture, this first monograph builds on the storytelling dimensions that have always informed the photographic oeuvre of the Syrian artist.
The book is the outcome of an exhibition around the theme of the sacred. The resumption of historical figures, classical art-historical iconography, and everyday images intermingle in a reconstruction of reality that is dreamlike, painful, and sometimes grotesque.
Vogliamo tutto. Cultural Practices and Labor is a publication on work within a changing socio-cultural context: from the impact of the Industrial Revolution to post-industrial decline through to the rapid evolution of the digital era.
Edited by Giovanna Borasi, Albert Ferré, Francesco Garutti, Jayne Kelley
Texts by Sandrine Colard, Corinna Gardner, Oulimata Gueye, Claudio Gulli, Siliva Gutiérrez, Renato Leotta, Andrea Lissoni, Hannah Turner, Akram Zaatari
Designed by (Studio) Jonathan Hares / Amaury Hamon
Published with Canadian Centre for Architecture
2025, English, softcover, 224 pages, 24 x 31 cm
ISBN 979-12-80579-72-0
The CCA conceives The Museum Is Not Enough as a platform to reflect on some of the beliefs and concerns that define its curatorial activity—why and how it works—and, by extension, the role of cultural institutions in society. Stating that the museum is not enough means asking what a museum should be and do, and suggests that its entitlement to concentrate knowledge and meaning has dissolved.
As a follow-up of a first volume published in 2019 that built on years of thematic investigations, the book focuses on how the institution works out and on these questions by rethinking its tools and how it relates to others. The Museum Is Not Enough (no. 10–14) gathers conversations among curators, artists, academics, and architects on how institutions engage multiple contexts, objects, and perspectives: reflecting on strategies to unlearn and decentre established ways of seeing and doing; looking closely at how to describe and document archival sources while interrogating the stakes, and often the harm, in separating cultural objects from their context; questioning the relationship between institutions and “the public”; and discussing curatorial tools—and particularly film—that collapse research and display, observation and action, here and there.
Underlying these reflections is the realization that the museum’s activity can’t be constructed from a fixed position. Unless the questions it deals with are observed from another angle, it is hard not to perpetuate the thinking that created them. The book responds to an urgent need to equip the institution to understand how things around it are rapidly changing, and the importance of conveying and discussing this instability. Here, the museum gets outside its physical walls to explore on-site, to talk with people, to connect and activate collaborators, to design conditions for different forms of dialogue to happen on the ground.
Photos: Nicola Gnesi