Produced on the occasion of Japan’s Modern Divide: The Photographs of Hiroshi Hamaya and Kansuke Yamamoto at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, 26 March–25 August, 2013.

Throughout his career Hiroshi Hamaya pursued objective documentation, while Kansuke Yamamoto favoured avant-garde forms of expression. These photographers embody two sides of modern Japanese life: the traditional and the forward looking, the rural and the urban, the Eastern and the Western.

Both artists grew up during the brief Taishō era (1912–1926), a period of industrialization and experimentation that ushered in the modern Shōwa era (1926–1989). It was during this time, between the international Depression and World War II, that Hamaya began to document regional traditions and social issues, primarily on the country’s rugged “back coast” along the Sea of Japan. In contrast, Yamamoto found inspiration in Surrealist art from Europe and produced innovative, socially conscious photographs, poems, and other works that advanced the avant-garde movement in Japan.

Produced on the occasion of the awarding of the ABN AMRO Art Prize to Evelyn Taocheng Wang and the subsequent exhibition Het bloemblaadje, dat tijdens het ochtendkrieken was gevallen, paktte ik op in de avondschemering, which has a purposefully included typo and is a quote she translated from a book by Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) about his childhood home, a source of memories to him.

For the exhibition Wang made eight new paintings and a series of drawings and paintings on rice paper, including one drawing of more than seven meters long. Central are the customs and practices in Dutch culture, symbolized by Wang, among other things, by oliebollen.

Designed by Irma Boom.

Produced on the occasion of The Art of Connecting: Atsuko Tanaka at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, which illustrated an unprecedented balance between all aspects of Tanaka’s practice, ranging from her earliest gestures, including documentation of Gutai performances in the 1950s, to paintings made shortly before her death in 2005.

Through variety it conveys a remarkable consistency of vision, connecting art and everyday life as we know it. It articulates an artistic proposition that makes Tanaka one of the most important figures of the Japanese post-war avant-garde.

Isa Genzken’s Der Spiegel 1989–1991 consists of 121 reproductions of black-and-white photographs cut out of the influential German newsweekly Der Spiegel over a period of three years. The images are presented starkly, bereft of photo credits or captions: having been freed from their usual meaning-giving context, the images assume a mystery and free-floating universality as the viewer unconsciously struggles to recall the specificity of the sensational news story and headline to which they were once attached. The book is produced in a limited edition of 700 numbered copies.

With translations by Galina Rymbu, Georgia Sagri, Elena Narbutaitė, Freya Choi, Jakob Kolding.

Valzhyna Mort’s Guest in translation initiates a new series co-produced by Fivehundred Places and V–A–C Press, Moscow, and is designed to explore some of the outer reaches of translation. Each book in the series is dedicated to multiple translations of a single poem. Inspired by a comment from Ilya Kaminsky about how translation should open windows and not create mirrors, artists, dancers, musicians, philosophers, curators, writers and visual thinkers were invited to imagine translations from their unique perspective, using a poem as a starting point, to make a version of that poem.

With translations by Kirill Mededev, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Mayra Rodríguez Castro, Denise Ferreira da Silva & Valentina Desideri, Fernanda Brenner, Monika Szewczyk, Alix Eynaudi, Iman Issa, Natasha Ginwala.

Jericho Brown’s Duplex in translation is the second book in a new series co-produced by Fivehundred Places and V–A–C Press, Moscow, and is designed to explore some of the outer reaches of translation. Each book in the series is dedicated to multiple translations of a single poem. Inspired by a comment from Ilya Kaminsky about how translation should open windows and not create mirrors, artists, dancers, musicians, philosophers, curators, writers and visual thinkers were invited to imagine translations from their unique perspective, using a poem as a starting point, to make a version of that poem.