Urgent Matters
Sanja Iveković
Published by BAK – basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, 2009, 83 pages (b/w ill.), 19.5 × 13 cm, Dutch/English
Price: €6

The work of Sanja Iveković has been seen only rarely in museums and art spaces in the Netherlands. This two-part exhibition aims to introduce a new audience to Iveković’s work, and seeks to provide an understanding of the artist’s practice by connecting her feminist voice to the social, political, and historical developments in general, and specifically to such realities in Croatia, her country of residence. Iveković’s body of work performs a crucial role in understanding how European art has developed over the past thirty-five years. This exhibition presents a selection of key works from Iveković’s oeuvre from the 1970s to today.

The exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum focuses on more historical work from before 1989, consisting primarily of photographic series, collages, and filmed performances. The works are installed around the large vertical space of the museum tower, where a newer monumental sculpture, realized originally as a public art project in Luxemburg in 2001, Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, is reconstructed.

At BAK, a selection of more recent work is shown, including three new productions, amongst which a new version of the well-known Women’s House, a collective portrait of women from a local shelter for abused women. The exhibition is also planned to extend into the public realm with Iveković’s proposal to rename a city street in Utrecht after the Unknown Heroine.

#2009 #sanjaivekovic
Triptychos Post Historicus
Braco Dimitrijević
Published by Le Consortium, Dijon, 1989, 32 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 20 × 26 cm, French / English
Price: €12

Dimitrijević gained an international reputation in the seventies with his Casual passer-by series, in which gigantic photo portraits of anonymous people were displayed on prominent facades and billboards in European and American cities. The artist also mimicked other ways of glorifying important persons by building monuments to passers-by and installing memorial plaques in honour of anonymous citizens.

In the mid-seventies he started incorporating in his installations original paintings borrowed from museum collections. The Triptychos Post Historicus, realized in numerous museums around the world, unite in a harmonious synthesis high art, everyday objects, and fruit. The artist’s statement “Louvre is my studio, street is my museum” expresses both the dialectical and transgressive nature of his oeuvre. In the last thirty years, Dimitrijevic has realized over 500 Triptychos Post Historicus, with paintings ranging from Leonardo’s Madonna to Malevich’s Red Square, in numerous museum collections including the Tate Gallery, London, the Louvre, the Musee National d’Art Moderne Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, the Musee d’Orsay, and the Russian State Museum, St Petersburg, amongst many others.

#1989 #bracodimitrijevic #leconsortium
The Artist As
Aileen Burns, Johan Lundh, and Tara McDowell (Eds.)
Published by Sternberg Press, Berlin; Curatorial Practice at MADA, Melbourne and the IMA, Brisbane, 2018, 328 pages (b/w ill.), 12.5 x 20 cm, English
Price: €17 (Out of stock)

The Artist As is based on a lecture series with the same title that ran throughout 2016. It was presented at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane, and at Monash University’s Faculty of Art Design & Architecture (MADA), Melbourne, as part of the Curatorial Practice program.

“How do artists work today? What kinds of roles do they occupy, have these roles changed over the years, and how does this impact the ecology of art?” These are some of the questions that contributors Brook Andrew, Walter Benjamin, Heman Chong, Ekaterina Degot, Hal Foster, Helen Hughes, Helen Johnson, Isabel Lewis, Adam Linder, Suhail Malik, Tara McDowell, Emily Pethick, Terry Smith, Cecilia Vicuña, and Tirdad Zolghadr, seeks to address in this reader.

The Artist As is edited by Aileen Burns, Johan Lundh, and Tara McDowell. Designed by Ziga Testen and Robert Milne.

#2018 #adamlinder #ceciliavicuna #emilypethick #halfoster #helenhughes #helenjohnson #isabellewis #robertmilne #taramcdowell #terrysmith #tirdadzolghadr #zigatesten
The Number of Inches Between Them
Gordon Hall
Published by Gordon Hall, New York, 2019, 94 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 15.3 × 21.5 cm, English
Price: €18

The Number of Inches Between Them continues a body of work in which Hall creates replicas of found, one-of-a-kind pieces of furniture. The replicas refer to objects Hall has encountered by chance and feels a magnetic attraction to, furniture that the artist wants to investigate physically through remaking. The Number of Inches Between Them doubles a geometric stone bench happened upon in a friend’s backyard in 2016. The replication is done twice: first as eight cast concrete interlocking panels that are shown assembled as a twin of the bench, and second as the same set of eight concrete panels presented disassembled and leaning against the walls of the gallery.

#2019 #gordonhall
Bestiary of Corona Animals
Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk
Published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven, 2020, 24 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 24 × 30 cm, English
Price: €14

Bestiary of Corona Animals is an essay that illuminates the causal relations between the human tendency to objectify the world, the continuous expansion of extractive activity, the trace effects of the current climate regime, and the outbreak of the current coronavirus pandemic. These seemingly distinct phenomena, often analyzed and discussed separately, in fact share the same roots. The text introduces a cast of different animals, both fictional and tangibly real, whose personal opinions and experiences— informed by animal rights and ethics, biopower, geopolitics, and necropolitics—give credence to the hypothesis that the human colonization of the natural territory of the virus enabled the pandemic to spread in the first place. These animal voices seek for a type of worlding that provides an equal footing for humans and non-humans, starting by exchanging self-interest for empathic non-understanding and selfless reciprocity: from the isolation of thinking and acting in a vacuum, to a world continuum.

#2020 #niekolaasjohanneslekkerkerk #onomatopee
Ginger&Piss #4: The Intern
Published by Kunstverein Publishing, Amsterdam, 2019, 24 pages (b/w ill.), 21 × 22 cm, English
Price: €15

Kunstverein’s in-house magazine is a cross between an academic journal and a darts club newsletter. Each issue contains a limited amount of contributions that vary in length according to the subject matter at hand. The remit of ‘Ginger&Piss’​ is simple: to provide a platform for candid critique but at the same time allow the author to stay hidden. Therefore, each contributor writes under a pseudonym. ‘The Intern’ is both the theme and mastermind behind the fourth issue of ‘Ginger&Piss’. With contributions by A. D. Cinzano, Even Steven, The Great Illusionist, Jennifer Jessica Jane, ………… …….. Office, Mads-Egil Petersen, and Roxana Rosenthal.

#2019 #gingeramppiss #kunstvereinamsterdam #kunstvereinpublishing