Kahlo/Modotti–Forty Years Later is the result of a visit by Laura Mulvey to the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich in November 2022. The booklet contains two texts: Mulvey’s evening lecture at the Cabaret Voltaire, revisiting hers and Peter Wollen’s exhibition and film on Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, and Wollen’s 2003 essay on the phenomenon of “Fridamania.”

Laura Mulvey is a feminist film theorist and director. Peter Wollen (1938–2019) was a British film theorist and filmmaker.

Produced on the occasion of Josef Strau’s exhibition A Turtle Dreaming (… Echoes from an Encapsulated Space Exiled Sounds of Letters Requiring Symphonic Treatment) at Secession, Vienna, 24 April – 21 June, 2015.

Josef Strau’s experimental artistic practice developed out of the written word. In his installations he relates texts and objects to each other in manifold ways. On the surface, the texts are characterized by the typographic interplay of printed word and blank space. At another level their distinctive feature is Strau’s idiosyncratic style of writing, which nimbly and playfully tracks his stream of consciousness. Oscillating between the meaningful and the meaningless, he interweaves everyday stories and urban scenes with personal revelations and literary motifs. Both in his exhibition at the Secession and in the accompanying publication, Josef Strau references an old-established motif of literature and film—the artist as dreamer, resembling a turtle, an encapsulated observer and recorder of his urban surroundings.

The volume contains 378 screenshots of benches found in real estate listings—from summer houses, homesteads, barns, garden houses, timber sheds to wash houses and saunas—in provinces and towns of Lithuania.

Monika Janulevičiūtė is a Lithuanian designer and artist. For her, the frankness of bench-making binds design, craft and art practices together. The bench takes centre stage to the extreme. A multifaceted quotidian subject swivelling around its vertical axis, showing the elastic attachments to life and functionality.

With her “notebook of dreams” Dineo Seshee Bopape transports you into the world of African scents. The book has been left mostly unprinted, but each right-hand page is coated with a scented print varnish manufactured using a traditional hydro-distillation technique out of the material of earthenware clay vessels to simulate the fragrance of parched soil and withered plants after a rainstorm. Reinforcing this sense perception associated with powerful emotions and memories, a QR code opens an audio file recorded by Bopape that enhances the experience of rain with an acoustic dimension.

During the 1930s, a large number of works influenced by surrealism were shown in Japan under the heading “avant-garde photography”. Among these were works by Shuzo Takiguchi (1903–1979), who soon thereafter founded the Avant-Garde Photography Association along with Nobuya Abe (1913–1971). Their theoretical approach to the photographic medium would in turn influence other experimental Japanese artists such as Kiyoji Otsuji (1923–2001) and Shigeo Gocho (1946–1983). Collectively these artists have made an indelible impact on 20th-century photography in Japan, which is the subject of this seminal exhibition catalogue on their work and legacy.

This internationally-oriented journal is organised into sections based on the date and the city from which the contributor submits his or her thoughts, observations, photographs, and/or stories. The result is a collection of news and insights from around the world during a particular period, in this case, January 6 through May 2, 2007.

Contributors include Laetitia Benat, Mark Borthwick, Christophe Brunnquell, Anders Edström, Elein Fleiss, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Nakako Hayashi, Gary Indiana, Jeff Rian, Chikashi Suzuki, Antek Walczak, Cosmic Wonder Light Source, Henry Roy, Tomoo Gokita amongst others.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.