“Betye Saar’s work occupies a pivotal position in American art. Her assemblages from the 1960s and early 1970s interweave issues of race, politics, and supernatural belief systems with her personal history. Having grown up in a racially segregated society, Saar has long held that art can transcend our darkest moments and deepest fears. Today, the emergence of a new generation of artists mining her poignant legacy attests to how profoundly Saar has changed the course of American art. The 2020 Wolfgang Hahn Prize not only acknowledges her extraordinary achievements and influence, but also recognizes the need to revisit how the history of art in recent decades has been written.”—Christophe Cherix, Guest juror of the Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis 2020

For almost thirty years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been creating new pictorial worlds of abstract photography with his Silver works, which sound out and compellingly expand the boundaries and representability of photographic processes. Brought together for the first time in one opulent artist’s book, Tillmans describes the pictures as ‘stained, impure, bright, unstable, exhausted, fugitive, smear, shimmer, as solid colours’. In addition to the pictures, Tillmans also shows images of the Silver works in exhibition settings: as elements of installations, for example at K21 in Düsseldorf in 2013 or as pure Silver installations like those at Tate Britain in 2003, the Venice Biennial in 2009 or, most recently in 2020, at WIELS in Brussels.

Bottled humanism, colored neon contaminations, tattered flaps of skin, and limp penises bring humanist self-assurance crashing to the ground. What appears as poison or chemical devastation is in fact an appeal to understand metamorphosis as a state of being. Over a period of three decades, from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, the Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo created a consistent body of work that serves as a model for contemporary conceptual approaches of Posthumanism and the New Materialism. The catalogue brings together contributions by artists and theorists and documents Kudo’s comprehensive oeuvre in work and archive images as well as exhibition views from the retrospective at the Fridericianum (2016). Texts from Mike Kelley, Antje Krause-Wahl, Susanne Pfeffer & Reiko Tomii. Designed by Dan Solbach.

A text by Leslie Dick runs adjacent to 10 postcards featuring a Sequence of Events, a series of mostly permanent installations in homes. The project draws lines between public institutions, apartment galleries, private residences, owned homes, social housing, and rented apartments. A Sequence of Events questions the duration, visibility, and boundaries of a site, including that of an artist’s book.

This publication is dedicated to pioneering curators and presents a unique collection of interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist: Anne d’Harnoncourt, Werner Hofmann, Jean Leering, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Walter Zanini, Johannes Cladders, Lucy Lippard, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hulten, and Harald Szeemann are thus gathered in this volume.

The contributions map the development of the curatorial field, from early independent curating in the 1960s and 1970s and the experimental institutional programs developed in Europe and in the USA at this time, through Documenta and the development of biennales.

With texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Christophe Cherix and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Tense is a never-realised title, originally intended for the Top Stories series. It was created by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in the early 1980s but published only now by Kunstverein Publishing, Amsterdam. This limited number of 250 copies was printed to accompany the exhibition Top Stories which focused on the publishing work of Anne Turyn at Kunstverein, Amsterdam, 2 April–26 June, 2021.