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Hokusai Manga is one of the masterpieces by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), a master of Ukiyo-e art, depicting ordinary people's lives, animals, plants, landscapes, historical figures and mythological monsters. Originally intended as sketches for his students to copy, Hokusai Manga was quickly distributed throughout Japan and became very collectable by the feudal lords and the general public during his time.

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This publication assembles three phases of Termite Economies, a major series of artworks produced between 2018 – 2020 by the Australian artist Nicholas Mangan. In Termite Economies (Phase 1) Mangan researched an anecdote that termite abilities might one day lead humans to gold deposits. Phase 2 explored termite eusociality, pheromonal communication, building behavior, biomimicry, superorganism and swarm intelligence. Phase 3 deployed termite collectivism as a speculative model for rerouting human neural pathways. Within each phase, Mangan developed specific methods to explore these phenomena formally, spatially, and through moving images. Termite Economies grappled with the potentiality of collective social behavior and complexities of systematic exploitation of non-human intelligence. The book presents each phase in the order of the exhibition series. It includes process and research photographs, diagrams, installation and detailed imagery. It includes an essay by Artist Mariana Silva, a fictional text by writer ST.Lore, a conversation between Mangan and cultural theorist Ana Teixeira Pinto, and a republished essay by Dr. Guy Theraulaz Research Director Member of Team CAB: Collective Animal Behavior Center for Research on Animal Cognition, CNRS.

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Let’s say a blank page is not actually blank. In fact, let’s say it is anything but blank. Devoid of colour, yet infinitely colourful; full of possibilities for multicoloured pens and literally covered by multitudinous life forms. It turns out that even the emptiest page is technically more than full – it’s alive. Do microbes respond to colour on paper? Can spontaneous doodles give rise to new species? Based on Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s term for microorganisms, this age-fluid book considers a world where the smallest is suddenly in control of the largest. Its illustrations function as an exploration into morphological occurrences, rejecting the goal-oriented, the figurative and the categorical. Following a traditional format, these pages attempt to open up a creative bypass. To draw is to embrace mutational forms, and to colour in these pages is to understand that many possible forms may emerge as a bear or a bacterium. We are what we draw. Time then to let those animalcules express the possible colours of kingdoms to come.

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Adrian Williams. The Curve focuses on the sunset, the moment between day and night structuring our days into a before and an after. Our baring witness to the sunset relies on the specific constellation of time and place, events bound to the trajectory of the sun. The book is composed of three reflections on this space of transition as the sun slips beyond our line of sight. The horizon, the line between earth and sky becomes a surface for projection, for form in the absence of it, and although the sun sets every day, its movement familiar and predictable, it is nevertheless spectacular. The Curve is based on a performance of the same name by the U.S. artist Adrian Williams, realized in 2019 with six musicians at Preußenstadion home of the third-division soccer team SC Preußen Münster. At sunset, the stadium became the setting for an acoustic intervention of light and sound. The book extends the performance beyond its original venue with Münster’s Preußenstadion as its starting point. The three authors introduce encounters at dusk from different perspectives and tell stories linked to the course of the sun. Merle Radtke shares memories of sunsets seen and the art historical relationships to the natural spectacle we award them. From a rooftop in Washington, D.C., Matthathias Schwartz reenacts The Curve, listening to recordings from the stadium in Münster, at another place and time. Adrian Williams writes through the piece of the piece, voicing a possibility for the work’s intent. These three texts are wound between Williams’ photographs of sunsets at dusk: light on clouds, a reflection in a window, the glow behind a mountain. These images are always evidence of an instance recorded, of having been present at a time and place, for the meeting of the sun at the horizon.

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The circus is a drama that extends its own means, and the metaphor of its name (itself clowning around with the word) is widespread across the art industry, financial world, and, of course, anything to do with performance. For four years during the mid-aughts, photographer, video and film artist Ieva Epnere immersed herself in the life of the Riga Circus – a type of traditional circus that cherishes the respectful use of animals, operating on a circus-family model (skills are passed down through generations to produce family units that travel and live on the road), and the big top tent (the landmark interior of one of the oldest circus structures, built for this purpose in Europe since 1888) as a performance space. This publication, that was developed during Ieva Epnere’s fellowship with the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD, symbolically marks four stages of her single, larger work. Fine-tuned digital color shots, a collection of black-and-white 35 mm film prints showing action at the Riga Circus, followed by a burst of color shots and black and white photos taken on a film camera, to end with a set of intimate black-and-white portraits of the performers. Whereas the conversion of circus into text might to some degree be a violation of the true nature of its subject, Ieva Epnere’s book – with the help of elephants, clowns, all the “freakery,” and her kaleidoscopic peek into the machinery that makes performances in the arena possible – itself stands as an adventurous act of reinvention.

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An essential sourcebook on conceptual art's famed champion, reproducing his texts as scans to immerse the reader in this deep archival dive. "Better Read Than Dead" was the title Seth Siegelaub had chosen for an anthology of his own writing—one of the projects for which he never found the time, busy as he was running his global one-man operation. The selected writings, interviews, extended bibliography and chronology in this source book fill historical gaps in the sprawling network of exhibitions, publications, projects, and collections that constitute Siegelaub’s life’s work. "Siegelaubian" paperwork comprises Siegelaub’s writings, which are reproduced as scans in order to convey the variety of the documents and to give a sense of archival immersion. Interspersed with these “writings” are interviews and talks, several newly transcribed. The majority of interviews from 1969-1972 are reprinted here.

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Jupiter is the monograph of the artist Andreas Sell by the curator Joel Mu and the outcome of their collaboration. It includes a selection of Andreas Sell's work of the last fifteen years, an essay in five parts by Joel Mu, and a poem by Alice Heyward

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The motifs produced during time-intensive dyeing processes – which uses indigo, urine, and extracts of natural waste materials – are neither conventional fabric nor lace patterns, and they have only a distant relationship to batik painting. Yet, they are simulations and portraits of both. Pattern Nor Painting starts in a batik Workshop in Bantul, Indonesia where an artist reconnects with her blank canvas and the batik techniques she learned from an artist in Serekunda, the Gambia many years ago. As documented in this publication Van Hoorebeke’s installations and performances deftly combine unique textiles and ceramics with production-chain goods, ranging from car parts to strawberry jam. Engaging with ages-old traditions of batik production for present-day communities and settings, her work embodies ancient craft, story-telling, time, female thinking, and above all, a connection to the natural world.

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A reproduction of one of the architect’s personal sketchbooks this beautiful volume contains fifty-two drawings and collages that explore the passage of time and the possibility of a tender architecture. The thoughts and drawings in this book were made in the month of January, 1994, Hejduk explains, I wanted to make two architectures in love . . . to have architectural intercourse on every level...chromosomic exchange.The drawings are explained in his essay Sketchbook Notes, and Still Life/Dead Nature elucidates his thoughts about space.

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In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter - with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book - and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists - Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others - in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.

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Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.

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In 1979 Munari donated part of his personal archive to the CSAC in Parma: a sort of encyclopedic collection of solutions for possible answers. From the very first drawings for abstract paintings in the Thirties to the studies for the Negativi-positivi, to the sketches for publishing graphics, to the series of the original editions of his games: a rich collection of Munari’s projects, many of them previously unpublished, which help understand Munari’s poetics “behind the scenes”. From the Bauhaus to Piaget’s psychological theories, Munari assimilated many visual and conceptual trends of the XXth century, re-proposing them in a very new and original creative richness. As it has been said, he “burns” a quantity of principles, each one of them could hold up a whole artistic life. From this collection is born an accurate and complete publication, an instrument with lots of cues and informations to know Munari before his works, through the projects. The book includes: A systematic essay by Gloria Bianchino, director of the CSAC, about Munari’s project poetics seen through his most important works; the “historical” essays written in 1979 on the occasion of the exhibition Bruno Munari at the CSAC in Parma: an introduction by Giulio Carlo Argan and a detailed interview to Munari by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle. Also, a rich collection of more than 500 colour images from the Bruno Munari Fund in the CSAC Archive with the corresponding index cards and a bibliography of the most important publications about Bruno Munari’s works. This book is published on the occasion of Minimondi – 8th edition of the children’s literature and illustration festival (15th February – 9th March 2008) in Parma and province. It is also the catalogue of the exhibition Bruno Munari: il disegno, il design. The Bruno Munari Fund in the CSAC Archive at the Salone delle Scuderie of the Palazzo della Pilotta in Parma from 16th February to 30th March 2008.

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DISCULPE. On bus travel, the cycle of gifting and counter-gifting and a quest for meaning. During their performances travelling on the city busses of Medellín and Bogotá, the hawkers locally known as “vendedores ambulantes” dish out compliments and pleasantries to their audience, as well as excessive apologies and gratitude. As these busses are flagged down by prospective travellers along the route, they face the crowd with all of their spectators already conveniently seated in front-facing rows. The vendors practice something that may be loosely described as “rebusque”, or “the quest for what makes a life”. What this boils down to is making money with whatever is readily available: chocolate bars, ballpoint pens, music or stories. The German-Colombian artist Jan Lotter Benavides has collected 65 such scenes in his unpretentiously laid out, heartfelt small-format book. Titled DISCULPE, it revolves around his clear and knowledgeable transcripts of recordings he made secretly while in Colombia on a travel scholarship from Hessische Kulturstiftung, the Cultural Foundation of the State of Hesse (Germany). It quickly becomes clear that the “vendedores” provide more than just a show, and that the audience gives them more than just small change; in fact, it is about much more than surplus value. In the ethos becoming apparent here we begin to witness a cycle of gifting and counter-gifting that marks the entire practice out as an act of existence rather than one of subsistence. Life is remembered, imagined and narrated as something that is by necessity shared. The bus is then turned into a theatre of a common symbolic space, and it is on this stage that something akin to catharsis becomes possible.

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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.

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The publication is a collaborative project bewtween Frac Île-de-France, the Cypriot artist Haris Epaminonda, and the Berlin designers Santiago da Silva and Simon Steinberger. It recounts and translates the experience of the exhibition VOL. XVI, presented at Le Plateau in 2015, for which the artist had created a global environment. Through a series of parallel actions the whole exhibition was connecting the interior and exterior with the presence of an old Japanese man “living” in the exhibition and with two young women dressed in traditional Japanese costumes who were walking in the des Buttes-Chaumont Park in Paris. This book concentrates the different perspectives of the artist’s work, where the idea of travel, of displacement – in time and space – offers a unique spatial experience combined with the cinematographic dimension included in the exhibition. At the same time, are gathered the critical texts of Philippe Artières (Historian and Research Director in CNRS, EHESS), Chris Sharp (Independent art critic), and Aurélie Verdier (Curator in Musée national d’art moderne, MNAM-CCI, Centre Pompidou).

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"All my pictures require no additional interpretation. They are suitable as a model for the viewer's imagination. My life's work is to produce pictures whose imagination immediately renews the diminished life efficiency of the viewer after any type of interruption." (Dietrich Orth).

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In 1986, four double-stelae were erected in Berlin as a part of the Marx-Engels-Forum, which display 144 photographs, showing the development of the working class. Commissioned by the state, filmmaker Peter Voigt and photographer Arno Fischer developed a formal translation for Marx’s and Engel’s philosophy of history. In line with their documentational focus, the two artists were concerned with demonstrating the historical situation of the international working class, its grief, and its overcoming. The photographs, compiled from archives worldwide, constitute the foundation of the project. The chosen motifs respond to historical events as well as figures, depict everyday life and illustrate “circumstances”.

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Throughout the twentieth century, Isamu Noguchi was a vital figure in modern art. From interlocking wooden sculptures to massive steel monuments to the elegant Akari lamps, Noguchi became a master of what he called the "sculpturing of space." But his constant struggle—as both an artist and a man—was to embrace his conflicted identity as the son of a single American woman and a famous yet reclusive Japanese father. "It's only in art," he insisted, "that it was ever possible for me to find any identity at all." In this remarkable biography of the elusive artist, Hayden Herrera observes this driving force of Noguchi's creativity as intimately tied to his deep appreciation of nature.

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Every living thing has two bodies. To be an animal is to be in possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems. When every human body has an uncanny global presence, how do we live with ourselves? In this timely and elegant essay, Daisy Hildyard captures the second body by exploring how the human is a part of animal life. She meets Richard, a butcher in Yorkshire, and sees pigs turned into boiled ham; and Gina, an environmental criminologist, who tells her about leopards and silver foxes kept as pets in luxury apartments. She speaks to Luis, a biologist, about the origins of life; and talks to Nadezhda about fungi in an effort to understand how we define animal life. Eventually, her second body comes to visit her first body when the river flooded her home last year. The Second Body is a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth.

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Brazilian artist Lygia Pape was a founding member of the Neo-Concrete movement, which was dedicated to the inclusion of art into everyday life. Her early work developed out of an interest in European abstraction, however, she and her contemporaries went beyond simply adopting an international style, and started to draw on their own local situation. Neo-Concretism is often seen as the beginning of contemporary art in Brazil, and Pape's work—which focus on the coming together of aesthetic, ethical, and political ideas—has formed an important part of Brazil's artistic identity.

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Replaying Life’s Tape explores a cycle of recent projects by the Berlin and Mexico City based artist Mariana Castillo Deball that take fossils and evolutionary trees as their subject matter, and departs from a research trip that she made to a significant fossil site in the Ediacara Hills of South Australia in 2018. Replaying Life’s Tape is also the first Australian exhibition of Mariana Castillo Deball at the Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (5 Oct – 7 Dec 2019). In this solo show, Castillo Deball presents a material and virtual recreation of the paleoecology of the Ediacaran Period, combining objects, sculptural display systems and viewing technologies to consider the relationships between site, time and history.

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The Memory of The Archive: Christoforos Savva in the 1954–1968 Cypriot Press & Literary Periodicals is published on the occasion of the survey exhibition project Untimely on Time: Christoforos Savva (1924–1968), co-organised by the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture, Cultural Services and Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia and presented at the State Gallery of Contemporary Art – SPEL, Nocosia, Cyprus, between 31 January and 31 March 2019. The book is a compilation and an archive of press cuttings, consisting of more than two hundred articles, commentaries, reports, and advertisements that appeared in the mainstream Cypriot press and literary periodicals between 1954 and 1968 and relate to the Christoforos Savva. The press cuttings are treated as objects with a story, a narrative worth telling with the goal of shedding new light on the artist’s life and career.

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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.

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This publication presents an extended interview with the French architect Claude Parent (1923 – 2016) by curator Mai Abu ElDahab and visual artist Benjamin Seror that took place between 2013 and 2015. Committed to experimentation throughout his life, Parent questioned his field and his own practice in his unique polemical and provocative manner motivated by his desire to see ideas circulate and conventions challenged. The book is based on transcription of conversations allowing Parent’s unique storytelling voice and style to come through.

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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.

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