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 Ibrahim Mahama and Eva Brioschi
Texts by Bernard Akoi-Jackson and Ibrahim Mahama; Eva Brioschi; karî’kachä seid’ou and Selom Kudjie
Design: Studio Temp
Softcover, 272 pages, 21 x 28.5 cm
English / Italian
ISBN 979-12-80579-20-1
Ibrahim Mahama was born in 1987 in Tamale, a city in northern Ghana where he lives and works. He studied painting and sculpture at Kwame Nkurumah University in Kumasi, Ghana, earning a master’s degree in painting and sculpture in 2013. During his university years, he began working on installations reflecting on the theme of globalization, labor, and the movement of goods, with works made in collaboration with local communities. In 2019, Mahama opened the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), a foundation run by a group of artists and curators active in Ghana, which was followed by the establishment of Redclay in the suburbs of Tamale. This large facility incorporates artist studios (including his own), research spaces, an artist residency, a permanent collection of artworks, workshop rooms (some set up inside old decommissioned airplanes), and large plots of land dedicated to various types of cultivation. All of this contributes to this visionary artist’s desire to take an active part in the economic, social, and cultural development of his country, providing powerful incentives and teachings to new generations, to make the local population as participatory and economically self-sufficient as possible.
This volume, published to accompany Mahama’s inaugural exhibition at Eataly Art House, in Verona, is constructed as visual diary of artist’s impressive work in his native Tamale, a community-based project founded on the understanding of art as totalizing, reparatory experience: a catalyzer of energies directed for change and social progress. It features texts by the curator Eva Brioschi, Mahama’s professor and mentor karî’kachä seid’ou with Selom Kudjie, and Mahama himself with Bernard Akoi-Jackson.
Voli-ni, which literally means “inside the hole,” is composed of individual particles with their own meaning: Vo, “to pull out,” “extract”; li, “to transfer,” “teleport”; and ni, “here and now.”
Voli-ni therefore indicates an emersion from darkness, from a failed past of defeat, towards the possibility of redemption, regeneration, through a portal that is real (recovered architecture) or imaginary (art).
