Three volume artist book reproducing avid fan of the Japanese avant-garde, Teruo Nishiyama’s scrapbook. Despite not having personal contacts in the art world, Nishiyama witnessed many of the emerging radical art events and exhibitions of the 60s, including those by the Neo-Dada Organizers and Tokyo Fluxus. He also meticulously documented everything he saw in photographs and copious written notes, as well as by collecting ephemera. He preserved the material he had assembled over the course of two years in a scrapbook album.

The first volume of this new publication depicts the exhibitions Nishiyama attended in Tokyo from 1965 to 1966. In the second volume, Chung and Maeda have attempted to follow Nishiyama’s methods, documenting various exhibitions held in Tokyo from January 17th to February 3rd, 2017. The third volume includes an English translation of the notes in the Nishiyama’s scrapbook, as well as an interview with Nishiyama by Chung and Maeda.

Produced on the occasion of CAConrad’s Mapping Dimensions 27, a multi-part series of writing workshops at: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Contemporary Art Center (CAC), Vilnius; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

“CAConrad will create a (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual at KW Institute for Contemporary Art based on the work of Ian Wilson. For the two-day workshop he will use handmade maps and a reconfigured version of Jason Dodge’s sculpture A golden lightning rod pointing north to study the many aspects of our planet’s directional points of East and West. He will use these references to explore life and death, as the known and the unknown forces of our world and how these directional archetypes help and hinder our lives. This is a love letter to the Future Wilderness of our world.”

Diagrammatic Writing is a poetic demonstration of the capacity of format to produce meaning. The articulation of the codex, as a space of semantically generative relations, has rarely (if ever) been subject to so highly focused and detailed a study. The text and graphical presentation are fully integrated, co-dependent, and mutually self-reflexive.

This small book work should be of interest to writers, bibliographers, designers, conceptual artists, and anyone interested in the meta-language of diagrammatic thought in graphic form.

Johanna Drucker is a writer and book artist known for her work in experimental typography. She has published and lectured widely on topics related to the history of the book, contemporary art, graphic design, and digital aesthetics. She is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Information Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Poets, activists, writers and artists respond to what it means to be lonely in 2017. Contributors include porn actor Colby Keller, writer Olivia Laing, artist Marc Hundley, librettist Alice Goodman, poet Timothy Thornton, anti-drag performer David Hoyle & many more. Curated by Richard Dodwell.

The concept of ’dilution’—bringing together healthy and mentally ill people to overcome the formation of a polarised and hierarchical society—was developed during the Nieuw Dennendal experiment at a Dutch mental healthcare institute in the 1970s.

With this book we broaden the scope of what dilution could mean today, viewed through various historical, artistic, sociological and philosophical lenses. Could the historical concept of dilution be deployed as a contemporary artistic principle and be rediscovered as a means to achieve peaceful cohabitation? Does it have the potential to bridge and unify radical forms of otherness as part of an artistic process or perhaps life in general?

This publication comes out of the artistic research for the video work Homestead of Dilution, and is the result of an artist-in residency by Domenico Mangano & Marieke van Rooy at Het Vijfde Seizoen (located on the grounds of the mental health institute Altrecht in Den Dolder, The Netherlands), from January to May 2015.

Designed by Bardhi Haliti.

A–The Mail Art Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeld, was published by ChertLüdde on September 2017, on the occasion of the exhibition which has the same title. The publication project presents the archive of mail art works received by the two German artists from beginning of the 1970s until the early 1990s. The exhibition presented all correspondence with artists whose surname (or name of an artistic group) began with the letter A.

Ruth Wolf and Robert Rehfeld met in Berlin in 1954 and married one year later. They played a central role in the dissemination and development of the Mail Art Movement in Germany. Their activity, spanning for more than two decades, created an impressive web of connections between artists and artistic groups from all over the world.

More information on the project and archive can be found here.