Edited by Lukasz Ronduda and Georg Schöllhammer.

Zofia Kulik and Przemyslaw Kwiek (KwieKulik) since the 1970s pioneered the transformation of artistic practice into social experimentation. KwieKulik sought to reconcile artistic praxis with everyday life, essentially basing on the premise that form is a fact of society. The couple’s pioneering approach to film, photography, and multi-screen slide projection epitomise their unique variation of expanded cinema.

This monograph, stemming from a long-term research project on the KwieKulik Archive, documents Zofia Kulik and Przemyslaw Kwiek’s collective works from 1971 to 1987, illuminating the radically unique position of the artists in the history of neo-avant-garde in Central Europe. The book covers and documents more than 200 events, and includes a “KwieKulik Glossary,” the collection of concepts introduced and applied by the artists. The essays in the book are featuring excerpts from texts devoted to KwieKulik in the course of the last decades.

In this artist’s book, Piero Gilardi reveals his working methods and explains how to create sculptures like those he has produced since the early 1960s. A pioneer of Arte Povera and a proud advocate of an ecologically concerned undertaking in the visual arts, Gilardi is also a political activist. The technique he developed for his sculptures has often been applied to produce masks, signs, and props for rallies and demonstrations, as this book and an interview with Andrea Bellini explains. For all this and for much more—his design and fashion creations, his social endeavors, etc.—Piero Gilardi is emblematic of the evolution of art and society over the last five decades. He is an artist whose works and theoretical research are still relevant to map what art might achieve and how art might be useful in the “real world.”

Produced on the occasion of the group exhibition Love is Colder than Capital at The Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2 February–14 April, 2013, which brought together 16 artists who explore the interrelationships of economics and feelings in contemporary society.

Curated by Yilmaz Dzierwior and including artists Neil Beloufa, Minerva Cuevas, Mariechen Danz, Isa Genzken, Hans Haacke, Keith Haring, Teresa Margolles, Ken Okiishi, Julika Rudelius, Yorgos Sapountzis, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Siekmann, Dirk Stewen, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Rosemarie Trockel, Cathy Wilkes.

From the mid-1970s until her death at age 31 in 1982, Korean-born artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha created a rich body of conceptual art that explored displacement and loss. Her works included artists’ books, mail art, performance, audio, video, film, and installation. Although grounded in French psychoanalytic film theory, her art is also informed by far-ranging cultural and symbolic references, from shamanism to Confucianism and Catholicism. Her collage-like book Dictée, which was published posthumously in 1982, is recognized as an influential investigation of identity in the context of history, ethnicity and gender.

Tris Vonna-Michell’s artist’s record/book is constructed around two works, Capitol Complex (2012–2014) and Ulterior Vistas (2012–2013), both of which are encapsulated on a ten-inch vinyl record. The spoken-word compositions are enclosed within a gatefold design and accompanied by the Capitol Complex manuscript as a booklet insert and a bound series of Ulterior Vistas photographic montages.

British artist Tris Vonna-Michell (born 1982 in Southend-on-Sea, England, lives and works in London and Berlin) is a memory traveler who runs through the past and present. In his works, images, sound, light, and the most ordinary objects become the material of a totally individual experience where reality and fiction merge, and journey, memories, and invention coexist.

More information on the work can be found here and here.

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.