Social Aesthetics
Merlin Carpenter
Published by The Institute of Social Hypocrisy, Paris, 2010, 32 pages (b/w ill.), 21 × 29.7 cm, English
Price: €5 (Out of stock)

Twice a year, The Institute of Social Hypocrisy publishes a fanzine. These publications serve as a tool with a dual purpose. Primarily they are a means to put out developing art projects by a range of invited artists and contributors, throughout the duration of the Institute project.

These fanzines are neither publications for reference, nor books of completed projects. They are a means for artists to put their work in front of new audiences in order to invite input and discussion, thus helping the project to develop. They allow the artist to take a level of control and give a certain independence with regards to the traditional scope of the distribution of their work.

#2010 #merlincarpenter
Posters
Experimental Jetset
Published by The Narrows, Melbourne, 2007, foldout poster (colour & b/w ill.), 10 × 21 cm (folded) 30 × 42 cm (unfolded), English
Price: €6

Poster/invitation produced on the occasion of Experimental Jetset’s exhibition Posters, 13 July–4 August, 2007 at the Narrows, Melbourne.

Experimental Jetset is a small, independent, Amsterdam-based graphic design studio, founded in 1997 by (and still consisting of) Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers and Danny van den Dungen. Focusing on printed matter and site-specific installations, and describing their methodology as “turning language into objects”, Experimental Jetset have worked on projects for a wide variety of institutes.

More information on the exhibition can be found here.

#2007 #design #ephemera #experimentaljetset #poster #thenarrows #warrentaylor
I love it when translation can be found to agree with our weird desires
Ulufer Çelik and Alaa Abu Asad
Published by Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, 2020, unpaginated (b/w ill.), 10.3 × 14.5 cm, Palestinian Arabic, Turkish, English
Price: €30

From the authors: “Do you know what şemsiye means? Do you use the word kırbaç for a whip? For around three years, we have been asking each other about identical words used in both our languages: Turkish and (vernacular) Palestinian Arabic. It is a process that can last for good – as long as our friendship lives. We spend time together uttering words that are held in common and draw them, discovering whether they carry the same meaning, are slightly different, or are false friends.”

#2020 #alaaabuasad #ulufercelik
Serena
Josephine Pryde
Published by Walther König, Köln, 2001, 72 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 21.5 × 27 cm, English
Price: €20 (Temporarily out of stock)

Produced on the occasion of Josephine Pryde’s exhibition Serena at Kunstverein Braunschweig, 28 April–10 June, 2001.

Pryde’s work attacks stock photographic aesthetic by technically reworking and reconfiguring images and by addressing the conditions of their display. The surfaces of glossy fashion photographs are disrupted by the insertion of aluminium tubes, which emphasise their ‘objectness’ and their status as artworks. Colourful photoshop juxtapositions of MRI scans of the human foetus and macro-lens desertscapes are unnervingly loaded. They refer to the history of darkroom experimentation and to contemporary medical-imaging techniques. Pryde doesn’t reject the language of photographic imagery, rather she adopts it and layers it up. Her guinea pig portraits are inspired by ‘cute pet photography’ but her choice of subject conjures associations with laboratory research.

Texts by Pamela M. Lee, Pauline van Mourik Broekman and Josef Strau.

#2001 #abstractphotography #josefstrau #josephinepryde #photography
My body, this paper, this fire
Pedro Barateiro
Published by P/////AKT, Amsterdam, 2019, 72 pages (b/w ill.), 19.5 × 26.2 cm, English
Price: €7.50

My body, this paper, this fire is an artist book featuring this text and the essay Kissing Someone in the Middle of a Crowd: Translating Ernest de Sousa’s “Orality the Future of Art?” (2018). The book features a variety of images by the artist including drawings and other materials gathered around the texts.

#2019 #pedrobarateiro
Limericks, Philosophical & Literary
Justin Clemens
Published by Surpllus, Melbourne, 2019, 148 pages, 11 × 16 cm, English
Price: €8

Brief, risible, finicky, the limerick is a form whose greatest successes never rise above the mildly embarrassing. Yet despite never having enjoyed unqualified approbation from critics or public, the form has its enthusiasts and eminent ­aficionados: there is no lack of literary luminaries who have lavished love on the limerick. This title continues this queer minor tradition, ­presenting seventy-seven limericks about writers and philo­sophers from St Thomas Aquinas to Simone Weil. Of all the grades of doggerel, the limerick is one of the lowest. Populist and participatory if not precisely popular, the limerick first becomes a hit in Victorian England with Edward Lear’s books of nonsense. It spreads at once across the English-speaking world like a highly contagious linguistic rash. Including a critical essay that delineates the limerick’s salient features, along with a dictionary that collects brief physiognomies of the subjects of the limericks, this book dares to descend into the maelstrom of ­mediocrity and to return, arms overflowing with mixed metaphors and mouldering microplastics.

#2019 #justinclemens #poetry #surpllus