Gigi’s looking for his cap. Where can it be? Let’s help him find it by opening closet doors, lifting lids and looking around. A book to rummage through, like an attic or a messy bedroom, with direct and captivating pictures drawn over half a century ago. Ah! Gigi finds his cap in the end! ↑ ↓ ↓

Final Kadath Fatal is the third and last volume in a series of artist books by Henning Bohl. The title loosely refers to H. P. Lovecraft’s novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926/27), in which Kadath appears as a mystical place to where the gods have betaken themselves “in the cold waste where no man treads.” The publication accompanies Bohl’s installation of four large-scale murals for the subway embankment wall along Paltaufgasse in Vienna’s 16th district, whose rough-faced, square-dressed stones are reminiscent of imperial architectural gestures like the rusticated facade of Palazzo Medici in Florence. It has been on display since Summer 2016, made possible by KÖR – Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Wien. ↑ ↓ ↓

Neither the book is a publication that arose from Neither the exhibition, curated by Fernanda Brenner in 2017 to inaugurate the Brussels gallery of Mendes Wood DM. Yet Neither the book is not a documentation of Neither the exhibition. Instead a selection of the artists who exhibited have been invited to produce new works for the page that, alongside a fictional history of the gallery’s new European home, written by Oliver Basciano, mingle with a photographic commission from Mauro Restiffe. They, like the exhibition, evoke a space somewhere between moving in and feeling at home, a capturing of a place that was no longer a family abode and not yet a fully functioning commercial gallery. By taking this conscious pause—respecting the distance and the journey of an exhibition from idea to materialization to memory—Neither the book hovers and loops between proposal, scrapbook and diary. ↑ ↓ ↓

This publication, in form of a leporello, captures a singular sixty-meter-long (one-hour) drawing by artist Tanaz Modabber. Conceived with the core idea that the piece would shift form, scale, and tone through multiple stages of translation, the work’s latest transition manifests as this artist-annotated publication with accompanying essay by Cassandra Edlefsen Lasch. Activated by varying means, the scroll-like drawing has been read as a score as well as, in this format, the basis for an expanded referential mapping. Along the length of the published piece a collection of images suggests potential relationships between prosody in poetry, music, architecture, and politics in Iran. In 2014 an hour-long video of the meandering drawing was displayed as notation for a prize-winning sound composition performed by Modabber and sound composer Pierre Mourle within the Tokyo Experimental Festival Vol. 9. The visual composition remains open to interpretation in future texts, sounds, and spatial arrangements. ↑ ↓ ↓

Trefferia – a made up word – mixing the words Treff and Cafeteria together. Appropriated from a cafeteria-like meeting place with filter coffee, beer and cold smoke. For Wilhelm Klotzek an ideal place to invite his own works to. Central to this book is Klotzek’s personal relationship with the medium of language. He embeds his body of works of the last ten years around his personal stories – growing up in East Berlin, going through his adolescence in the years of the post-fall-of-the-wall years. In sculpting his memories in dense moving texts that take us into the corners of the broken German past his dark and humorous approach creates a specific aesthetic language that he stretches and bends in various directions. Therefore Klotzek doesn’t only act as a sculptor of words, objects, memories and situations but furthermore also as a performer, display and furniture designer and collaborator when he works with his artist’s colleagues Konrad Mühe or David Polzin. ↑ ↓ ↓

“Invited by Lucie Stahl to respond to her gorgeous and trashy collaged posters, I look back in my diary and am surprised by the number of parallels in our dreams and notations. I’ve never met Lucie Stahl but we live in the same world: oil spills, palm fronds, novelty key chains, sports beverages. Like me, she’s a self-appointed reporter. Stahl’s posters begin with her odd inclination to write down fragments of overheard conversations, ambient thoughts and fleeting anxieties that – once preserved (and obsessively so, under buckets of chemical gloss) function as video-grabs from the deluge of information that we understand, more or less, to comprise consciousness.” (Chris Kraus) ↑ ↓ ↓

In Lifestyles Andreas Sell combines a diary with photographic documentation, pictures of sculptures and drawings from 2010 to 2015. These excerpts reflect his nomadic-like life, the clearance of his parents’ household and the enterprise of building a holiday house. Andreas Sell’s artistic process reveals a strategic method within the conventions of our capitalist society, which are simultaneously subject to critical analysis. A question discussed since the 1960s is a recurrent theme: Where does the private sphere cross over into the public sphere? Over the last years, Sell worked on the founding and operation of an employment agency, the documentation and sorting of his property, living without a permanent residence and travelling to the Sahara without mission or goal. The book co-constitutes together with the holiday house on the island of Lesbos the making of an art work. ↑ ↓ ↓

Unfold the poster. Lay it down. Take the prints in your hands. Place them on the poster. Cut the black tapes as you like. Fix the prints. Thank you. ↑ ↓ ↓

En algún lado y en ninguno is a compilation of poems by the jazz musician and poet Sun Ra (Alabama 1914 – Birmingham 1993), selected and translated into Spanish by Mariana Castillo Deball, Tania Islas Weinstein and Alberto Ortega. The adventure began in a library that looks like a spaceship, next to a monument in the shape of a burned marshmallow that celebrates the first atomic reaction generated by humans. A plaque in the monument suggests that the powerful energy should be used for beneficial purposes. Inside this lunar library is the Special Collections Centre at the University of Chicago, that keeps the archive of Alton Abraham – Sun Ra Collection, comprising the period 1822-2008. Alton Abraham (1927-1999), entrepreneur and hospital technician, was a friend and partner of Sun Ra, and throughout his life he collected manuscripts, ephemera, artifacts, photographs and audio-visual recordings of the work of Sun Ra and his collaborators. Within the archive, which occupies 48 m of linear shelf space (146 boxes and a large folder) we found Sun Ra’s wallet, containing his lawyer’s business card, the insurance receipt for his car, a cabalistic amulet, and a million dollar bill perforated in the center. We also discovered Sun Ra’s typed poems, with handwritten corrections and in various versions. His poems generate a parallel geometry, a world that is precise and ambiguous at the same time. A sidereal enthusiasm made us think that the translation of his poems into our mother tongue could bring us close to his cosmos, and simultaneously allow us to share them with the Spanish-speaking firmament. Selection and translation by Mariana Castillo Deball, Tania Islas Weinstein and Alberto Ortega. ↑ ↓ ↓

In the trilogy of videos portraited in this book, Insight, Suspension and The Lost Object, the artist invites us to suspend ourselves in a dream-like scenario dominated by lighting effects. We do not enter a dark room but an atmosphere subject to the different beams of light shining all around us. That is the point, to throw light on the unknown, or on what we take for granted as natural when in fact it is nothing more than an impoverished fallacy. Or maybe it is simply about shining a light on ourselves as subjects and returning to the true essence of things: beauty, surprise, novelty and illusion. The unknown. ↑ ↓ ↓