Program was produced by Bergen Kunsthall on the occasion of the exhibition For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 10), curated by Solveig Ovstebo. With texts by Solveig Øvstebø, Diedrich Diederichsen, John Kelsey, and Christopher Williams, and design by Christopher Williams and Petra Hollenbach.

Christopher Williams’ work operates within the conventions of advertising, the superficiality of surface, and, ultimately the history of Modernism. In photography, film, performance, sculpture, graphic design, and video, the process of reproduction is the artist’s point of entry; from there he exposes the flaws in a near-perfect, carefully constructed reality. Each image, whether architectural or figurative, natural or manufactured, is subject to the conditions of production and the inevitable boundaries of the pictorial surface.

Tormented Hope is a book about mind and body, fear and hope, illness and imagination. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And in an intimate investigation of those nine lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body, by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Brian Dillon, whose brilliant debut In the Dark Room established him as an uncommonly intelligent and fluent explorer of the realm where ideas and emotions overlap, looks at nine prominent hypochondriacs—James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol—and what their lives tell us about the way the mind works with, and against, the body. His findings are stimulating and surprising, and the stories he tells are often moving, sometimes hilarious, and always gripping.

You can read a review of the book here.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Until it Fitted! at Établissement d’en face, Brussels, 24 March–28 April, 2007.

Jacqueline Mesmaeker (born 1929 in Brussels) started her career as a fashion designer from 1962 till 1972, before she turned to visual and artistic issues. Drawing, an art form she taught in several art schools (ERG, La Cambre…), runs throughout her rich work that includes installation, video, photography, writing and design. She won the Norwich East Award, in 1996.

Edited by Suzanne Cotter. Text by Catherine Wood, Jan Verwoert.

Rendered in pallid, ghostly tones, Silke Otto-Knapp’s watercolors and gouaches recall turn-of-the-century painters such as Bakst, or children’s illustrators like Arthur Rackham. Her delicately delineated vignettes of encounters, dances and isolate doings seem to take place beyond a veil, in a submarine realm of amphitheaters and botanical gardens. Present Time Exercise surveys her work from the past five years.

This is the first re-issue of Stephen Willats’ major text The Artist as an Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour since its original publication in 1973. Willats wrote The Artist as an Instigator while he ran the Centre for Behavioural Art, a cross-disciplinary research and discussion platform he established at Gallery House, London, in 1972–73. Long out of print, and as relevant today as it was in the early 1970s, the essay includes rigorous analyses of social forms of artistic production and descriptions of a number of projects by Willats. Along with the original text, this edition features archival images and a specially written introduction by the artist.

Produced in accompaniment to Jef Geys’ exhibition Woodward Avenue, Summer 2010.

Kempens Informatieblad, was a newspaper published by Belgian artist Jef Geys between 1971 and 2018.

Since the early 1960s, in addition to his interlocking artistic and pedagogical work, Geys was also involved in the production and distribution of a local newspaper, the Kempisch Reklaamblad, on whose pages he began to publish various textual and pictorial material among the advertisements placed therein. After it was discontinued, Geys took over the paper and continued it under his own direction as Kempens Informatieblad.

Functioning as an alternative to the conventional artist catalog, the issues, over 50 in total, were mostly published in connection with his exhibitions. As an information system directed by the artist, it successively developed into a kind of meta-medium within his practice, through which he himself organized his representation and mediation—beyond the exhibition context.