Kontakt is the first publication to provide an overview of the eponymous art collection that was founded in 2004 by Erste Group and ERSTE Foundation. This collection, which now consists of over 600 individual works with an emphasis on Eastern, Southeastern, and Central Europe, is portrayed via an array of diverse, mutually complementary approaches.

Featuring artists such as Maria Bartuszová, Maja Bajević, Anna Daučíková, VALIE EXPORT, Bela Kolářová, Jiří Kovanda, Daniel Knorr, Edward Krasiński, Stano Filko, Mladen Stilinović, Július Koller, Sanja Iveković, Katalin Ladik, Ivan Kožarić.

Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Poetry. After his boyfriend Earth’s murder, CAConrad was looking for a (Soma)tic poetry ritual to overcome his depression. This new book of 18 rituals and their resulting poems contains that success, along with other political actions and exercises that testify to poetry’s ability to reconnect us and help put an end to our alienation from the planet.

Produced on the occasion of Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s exhibition Nothing for Eternity at Kunstmuseum Basel, 15 October, 2016–17 April, 2017.

Many of Tuerlinckx’s works originate in the artist’s gigantic archive. In addition to her own drawings, collages, photographs, and texts, it also contains objets trouvés, newspaper photographs, and the bric-a-brac of everyday life. Employing artistic approaches that Tuerlinckx, who was born in Brussels in 1958, describes in a dedicated “lexicon,” she alters the materials, dimensions, and appearance of these objects, transforming their reality and purport.

In Francis McKee’s first novel, observations of séances, scientific advances, group education outings, Kurdish protests for the ‘disappeared’, become mixed with his own Tarot influenced visions: a haunting spirit appears; the relation between political resistance and Spiritualism is cast as an insurrectionary force and a millenarian energy, celebrating the ecstatic moment. Histories of isolated early Christians and twentieth century mystics affect the psyche, all of this documented through journal entries that move from Scottish islands to Puerto Rico. Influenced by forms of 1960s new journalism, McKee pushes language to match the raw material of the stories, which become more erratic, signalling the looming fate of the text and its author.

Francis McKee is an Irish writer and curator working in Glasgow. He is Director since 2006 of the CCA, Glasgow, and a lecturer and research fellow at Glasgow School of Art.

You can hear the author discuss the book here.

Hei­mo Zobernig’s ex­per­i­men­tal ap­proach to the con­cept of sculp­ture of­ten leads him to pre­vi­ous­ly un­ex­plored boun­daries be­tween art and ar­chi­tec­ture or de­sign. For in­s­tance, he de­vel­oped two large-scale, black in­s­tal­la­tions for the floor and ceil­ing of the Aus­trian pav­ilion at the Venice Bien­nale in 2015, which play­ful­ly ques­tion the re­la­tion­ship be­tween bodies in space. Part of this rad­i­cal yet min­i­mal­ist in­s­tal­la­tion was trans­ferred to the Mu­se­um Lud­wig where he full-scale re­pli­ca served as a pedes­tal for the mu­se­um’s sculp­ture col­lec­tion. This succinct place­ment can be read as a hu­mor­ous and iron­ic com­men­tary on col­lec­tions and artis­tic self-con­cep­tion.

Facsimile of the seminal magazine created by Ulises Carrión and Cres, originally published in 1978. In this photographic book—one of very few of Carrion’s entire practice—the author is very critical about his own affiliation with the mail art movement. The book presents a series a photographs of his calling card filing box, which the author juxtaposes with witty and poignant captions.

Ulises Carrión (1941-1989) was one of the most important figures of Mexican conceptual art. His 1975 manifesto The New Art of Making Books helped define artist’s books as an autonomous artistic genre. His work includes numerous artist’s books—which were then designated as bookworks—but also video art, sound arts, performance and mail art.