Solution 186–195: Dubai Democracy is the fifth book in the Solution series. Using Dubai as a sort of modernist blank slate for urban and social renewal, author Ingo Niermann confronts today’s most relevant cultural and technological developments with analytical elixirs that are as pertinent as they are unbelievable. Niermann’s Dubai will become as specialized as housing the global center for treating diabetes—called Sugar World—and as universal as offering non-confrontational public spaces where both a state of total advertising and compulsive kindness, or what he calls a “personal humaneness account,” co-exist.

Translation from the German by Gerrit Jackson. Design by ZAK Group.

The publication unfolds and draws an open-ended connection between individual and collective struggles and (emotional) conflicts intertwined with the colonial and decolonizing histories of Indonesia and the Netherlands by taking two film works by artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh, No False Echoes (2008) and Instruction (2009), as points of departure. Both films take up rarely spoken fragments of the Dutch colonial past, particularly related to Indonesia, that are dormant but still affective in contemporary Dutch society. With the participation of different historical and contemporary stakeholders set against specific built environments, these two films are presented in the form of photo-novels. The film No False Echoes introduces one of the major historical sources cited in full in the publication, that is, a 1913 essay on national freedom by Soewardi Soeryaningrat, an Indonesian nationalist—or “revolutionary”—whose radical position manifested in the essay is widely known in Indonesia. The reprint of this essay is accompanied by two contemporary responses by Lizzy van Leeuwen and Nuraini Juliastuti, which in turn open another text written in 1935 by Soeryaningrat under a different name, Ki Hajar Dewantara, concerning national education in Indonesia. The latter text indicates the shift in political strategies, which, instead of fearless resistance, moves forward toward gradual building of counter-institutions of “upbringing” of new independent subjects. Designed by Julia Born.

To coincide with the 350th birthday of the philosopher, mathematician, lawyer and political writer Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (born 1646 in Leipzig), Hanne Darboven’s Evolution Leibniz was publicly exhibited for the first time in the Sprengel Museum Hannover. This complex work is divided into three extensive topics: Encyclopedia, image documentation and daily bills. Hanne Darboven combines Leibniz’s biography with her and our immediate present.

Gerd Arntz was a German Modernist artist renowned for his black and white woodcuts. A core member of the Cologne Progressives he was also a council communist. The Cologne Progressives participated in the revolutionary unions AAUD (KAPD) and its offshoot the AAUE in the 1920s. In 1928 Arntz contributed prints to the AAUE paper Die Proletarische Revolution, calling for workers to abandon parliament and form and participate in worker’s councils.

In her work, Aleksandra Domanović (b. 1981 in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia) takes a probing look at a wide range of phenomena of contemporary society, among them cultural techniques, scientific and technological developments, history and culture, popular culture and the shaping of national and cultural identity. Her work often has its starting point in the examination of the past and present of her home country, the breakup of Yugoslavia after the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the struggle for a new national and cultural identity.

For her exhibition Calf-Bearer in Bonn, the artist expands on one of her themes – Bulls Without Horns – and looks at current scientific developments in bioengineering, namely research carried out by Alison Van Eenennaam at the University of California in Davis who works on the breeding of certain genetic traits in cattle, for example the lack of horns. The artist not only presents the protagonists of these experiments in colour photographs, she also translates the underlying ideas into sculptures, which she produces by means of computer modelling, 3D printing and casting in synthetic plaster. Made of Corian, her votive stelae are transformed and abstracted depictions of the sixth-century BC Greek sculpture of the Moschophoros (Calf-Bearer) found in1866 on the Acropolis of Athens in the so-called Perserschutt, the bulk of the architectural and votive sculptures destroyed by the Persians in 480 BC.

Published on the occasion of Jason Dodge’s 2017 exhibition at the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin.

From the press release “We are pleased to announce the final instalment of our exhibition series Porzellan und Vulkan with the exhibition Jason Dodge and Paul Thek. In the Schinkelklause several of Paul Thek’s major drawings will be displayed, while on the upper floor of the Schinkel Pavillon Dodge will present a sculptural installation. Dodges installative work and a program of poetry readings will draw conceptual reference to the work of Paul Thek and his engagement with rituals of diverse kinds.

The paralells between Thek and Dodge’s work in material and meaning are unmistakable. In addition to the visual exhibitions, the collaborations include readings by poets Dodge has published, and a workshop from Thek’s teaching notes for his 4D class at Cooper Union 1978-1981—all of these elements contribute to the interweaving between the artistic disciplines and embellish the notion of collaboration.”