A collection of short stories written between 2018 – 2021 ↑ ↓ ↓

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. ↑ ↓ ↓

Conceived in close collaboration with Shimabuku as an extension of his exhibition The 165-metre Mermaid and Other Stories at Villa Paloma in 2021, this new publication tells of the poetic actions conducted during his travels, between his native Japan and Monaco via Brazil, Australia, and many other lands. The artist’s texts form the narrative thread of a subsequent ensemble of installations, films, sculptures and photographs made over the last thirty years. Three essays never published before have been written for the occasion by art critics and curators Nicolas Bourriaud and Claire Le Restif as well artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. As an introduction, Célia Bernasconi, curator of the exhibition, traces Shimabuku’s artistic adventures through a logbook, therefore, confronting the epidemic context. Through the logbook, she reviews productions made by Shimabuku in Monaco in 2021, amongst which the totemic work Erect is featured on the cover of the book. ↑ ↓ ↓

Over a thousand years ago a form of material code emerged among the Andes mountains. By means of knotted ropes, called ‘quipus’, numbers and words were enacted. This publication The Andean Information Age knots together a universe of stories related to the quipu system, the history of its ongoing decipherment, and the disruption that this sensorial code may be able to trigger in our present. ↑ ↓ ↓

Belonging and estrangement intertwine in these four lyrical short stories from the the author of Invisible Man. ↑ ↓ ↓

'Though their house was new, the wall had been there a long time.' In these two stories, which have never before been translated into English, Tsushima shows how memories, dreams and fleeting images describe the borders of our lives. ↑ ↓ ↓

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. ↑ ↓ ↓

During ‘wonder, wander’, a collective walk across Jordan organized by the Spring Sessions annual artist residency, Thomas Amouyal, Sara Elkamel and Charlotte York arrived in Wadi Rum, welcomed by a ruthlessly dry heat. One morning in the red desert, they improvised a workshop where they gave the rest of the group a series of drawing and writing prompts. The collaboration sparked the idea for The Ex-Clown, The Fan, The Stranger, and I, a book that proposes 161 prompts to draw and write. The trio wrote it in September 2018 on the Greek island of Tinos—in between visits to a green beach—with the generous encouragement and contribution of Spring Sessions curators Noura Al Khasawneh and Toleen Touq and the ‘wondering, wandering’ artists present on the island: Hanaa Safwat, Kari Rosenfeld, Raymond Gemayel, Gian Spina Nuno Cassola, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Noura Salem, Melika Abdel Razzak and Soraya Ghezelbash. The publication was designed by Åbäke, translated into Arabic by Yasmine Zohdi, proofread by Habiba Effat, published by Dent-De-Leone and produced with support by The Mohammad and Mahera Abu Ghazaleh Foundation (MMAG). Imagined as a generative tool for artists and educators, the book prompts its users to make drawings and write texts that respond to everyday objects, imaginary characters, as well as physical and celestial bodies. As they create stories of their own, there’s an invitation for the book’s users to engage with the mundane, the absurd and the profound. ↑ ↓ ↓

The title of this book references a mythical peak where gods dwell ‘in the cold waste where no man treads’ described in H.P.Lovecraft’s ‘The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath’ (1926/27). Lovecraft’s novel itself drew from William Beckford’s gothic horror ‘Vathek’ (1786), Robert W. Chambers’ ‘The King in Yellow’ (1895) and the novels and short stories of Lord Dunsany. Bohl’s drawings refer to a wide variety of popular and archetypal imagery familiar to him from his adolescence. They incorporate styles learned from, amongst others, Aubrey Beardsely, Métal Hurlant comic books and Blair Reynolds and other graphic artists associated with Pagan Publishing. As with his previous works, these drawings employ modest yet very specific materials. ↑ ↓ ↓

In this collection of stories and illustrations, Anna M. Szaflarski examines the subject of violence, in particular as it is experienced through the female body. Beginning with an autobiographical experience, the story triggers a dissociative state that plunges the book in and out of imaginary worlds and associative narrative threads. ↑ ↓ ↓

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. ↑ ↓ ↓