Produced on the occasion of Continuous Moment: Trans-Company, The Other Side, 9 February–17 April, 2015.

Continuous Moment: Trans-Company is part of Bertoli’s ongoing research and investigation into Picasso’s play Le Désir Attrapé par la Queue (Desire Captured by the Tail). Referring to both a 1944 reading of the play and a staging of the play in 1967 by Jean Jacques Lebel, Bertoli’s work addresses ideas of repetition, reprise and continuity. Like Picasso’s text and Lebel’s production, Bertoli draws on a vast network of references and influences. In this light,Continuous Moment: Trans-Company can be understood as an assemblage of existing voices through which Bertoli is part of the aggregating authorship around ‘Le Désir’.

Text by Nik Papas. Designed by Warren Taylor.

Eva Olthof’s book takes as it’s starting point the American Memorial Library in Berlin (Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek), which opened in 1954, and two books, which were returned after 50 years, accompanied by a handwritten personal letter. The library was a gift from the American people to the population of West Berlin after enduring the Berlin Blockade, promoting the “illimitable freedom of the human mind”, as it reads in a quote on the library’s wall from US President Thomas.

The book brings together the charged political history of this library, and the recent events connected to the revelations of NSA files by Edward Snowden.

Contributions by Doreen Mende, Eva Olthof, Eben Moglen

With texts by Federica Bueti, Malak Helmy, Francis Mckee, Haytham El Wardany, Brian Kuan Wood.

Five essays that take an intimate look at what language’s role is in moments of dramatic change, and how to find meaning for artistic practices in these transformative conditions. Taking its cue from the aftermath of the events of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, Final Vocabulary doesn’t provide answers as much as it captures the spirit of the moment of searching in which the writers find themselves. The book was developed out of a live conversation at an event called “The Informal Meeting” that took place in Leuven in January 2015, where participants were asked: Our histories and references are often in a different language (abstract or actual) than we use ourselves, what tools do you think are or might be useful to help you trust your own memories and narratives? What, if anything, do you think we might borrow from art to experiment with language in different situations? In English and Arabic.

Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt is a German artist associated with visual poetry and mail art. She is most known for a period of geometric and poetic typewriter works produced between the 1970s and 1990 while employed as an administrator for the German Democratic Republic.

The 6th installment of The Social Life of the Book series is a section of the catalogue of publications from English artist Helen Chadwick’s personal library, reproduced by Will Holder for single mothers. The library was acquired in 2006 and is held by the Henry Moore Institute archive, Leeds, UK.

The Social Life of the Book is a collection of commissioned texts dealing with books, and how they engage with the circulation of ideas and the agency of social situations. It brings together artists, publishers, writers, designers, booksellers, etc. who consider books less as finished objects or forms but for their disruptive potential and their ability to produce new relationships, new publics and new meanings.

Designed by Will Holder.

This record brings together the three components from a major body of work by Ruth Buchanan. Here, the forms of performance, exhibition and film are compressed through and into audio; the record becoming both the documentation of the work at the same time as proposing a script for future versions. Buchanan’s texts and graphics are rendered into paired back dense sound pieces where the capacity of language as a system that is both employed by and defines the subject is emphasized. Buchanan explores the examination of subject and system by language, where language itself constitutes a contested field of interaction between the two.

Or, a building was recorded in part at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe. Or, a screen was recorded in part at the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Berlin.

This record is released on the occasion of the exhibition Or, a camera Or, a building Or, a screen by Ruth Buchanan at the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, September 19 – December 13, 2015 curated by Anna Sabrina Schmid.

The exhibition and the record act as the epilogue to the body of work commissioned by the Badischer Kunstverein, Karslruhe and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.

You can here an audio sample here.