Murakami Saburō’s ‘Paper-Breaking’ performances, in which he burst through multiple sheets of kraft paper stretched across wooden frames with a sharp crack, were synonymous with the artist. He performed them on close to 40 occasions, between 1955 and 1994, throughout his artistic career. Murakami said that, in 1955, he was inspired to adopt this approach after his son came crashing through the fusuma (sliding door) of his locked room (where the artist was polishing up a plan for a new work to present in the 1st Gutai Art Exhibition) in a bid to get his father to play with him. From that time on, ‘Paper-Breaking’ became a physical means for him to present and investigate questions related to time and space, chance and inevitability, and the self and others.

With essays by Ikegami Tsukasa and Reiko Tomii.

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

Kai Althoff creates installations, drawings, paintings, photographs, videos and collages; he is also a musician and performer. His fragmentary and enigmatic aesthetic, where the figurative sometimes tends towards a stylization bordering on abstraction, is inspired by subcultures, historical events, religious imagery and his own childhood.

This comprehensive publication is Althoff’s third monograph. It contains never before seen works in addition to images from every stage of the artist’s career, concentrating most heavily on work since 2002.

Optimundus accompanies Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys’s major exhibition at M HKA of the same title—the term they use for their particular conception of the parallel world. Narratives and criticism by Michael Van den Abeele, Nav Haq, Jennifer Krasinksi, Dieter Roelstraete, and artist Peter Wächtler are presented along with photos, drawings, and text illustrating the unsteady barriers and tense contact between Optimundus and the real world.

Produced on the occasion of A Void: Henri Chopin, Guy de Cointet, Channa Horwitz at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 16 May – 30 June, 2013.

Each in their own way, Henri Chopin, Guy de Cointet and Channa Horwitz dedicated themselves to analyzing systems of meaning and working out their rules-based connections, transforming or reinventing them in the process. Horwitz’s drawings are indebted to the aesthetics of notation, the close link between idea, process and work. With the help of a set of rules she creates complex structures whose vibrating pictorial structure masks their underlying logic. Chopin, a key figure in French visual poetry and sound poetry—explored the relationship of chaos and order with his typewriter poems while de Cointet left behind numerous drawings full of codes and puzzles, in which he transformed meanings into visual signifiers.

Algirdas Šeškus found photography in 1975 when he learned that he would need to bring ten photographs to a job interview for the position of cameraman at the only television channel in Soviet Lithuania. Nobody looked at the pictures, but the camera he bought for the purpose showed him the world anew, and he continued photographing for the next decade.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Ed Atkins at MoMA PS1, New York, 20 January – 14 April, 2013.

Known for his high-definition videos that defy narrative conventions, Ed Atkins works with filmic and text-based forms in technological transition. The artist considers HD technology deathlike because of how it intensifies the visibility of the filmed subject, creating an image that prioritises its own representation over the language, character, and emotions of the figures it depicts. Often creating installations that include collage, drawing, and other mediums, the artist deploys this bodiless movie format to highlight the conflicting intimacies that today’s mechanisms of cultural production represent and allow us to achieve.

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