A-FL’s 78 kilograms (2020) is the first installment in an annual edition of postcards, titled My Weight in Gold. The phrase is a pun on the metaphoric idiom ‘worth its weight in gold’, which has its origin in the Roman Empire and first appeared in English by the early 1300s.

For each edition, A-FL weighs himself, after which seeks out four objects of the same weight. Images of these objects, in this first installment ranging from a naval ammunition rig to ten cans of 3Coty Cat Food, are printed as postcards with the corresponding weight hot-foiled in gold onto them.

The four cards are collected in an envelope, with 312 kilograms rubber stamped in gold on its recto side; making up the total weight of the objects on the cards when added together.

Over the last forty years, Moyra Davey’s work in photography, film, and text presents a wide-ranging model of engagement with the world: reflections on producing and consuming, on writing and reading, and on novelty and obsolescence. Based on Davey’s eponymous 2019 film of the same title, i confess triangulates the lives and work of three writers: the American novelist and essayist James Baldwin, the Québécois revolutionary Pierre Vallières, and Ottawa-based political philosopher Dalie Giroux. With Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country as its point of departure, the narrative arrives at the work of each figure in succession, threading themes of race and poverty, language, and nationalism into Davey’s personal chronicle of the 1960s and 1970s;a turbulent period of Québécois history marked by separatism and violence, unresolved to this day.

With text by Moyra Davey, Dalie Giroux, Andrea Kunard. Designed by Santiago da Silva.

Produced on the occasion of Josef Strau’s exhibition at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 3 September–22 November, 2020, the first comprehensive institutional solo exhibition by Strau in Germany.

The exhibition brought together objects and text production made between 1991 and 2020 as an attempt to create an autobiographical depot, as if these objects were simply the result of time or of durations of psychological states, such as fear and anxiety, and sometimes also of desire. Strau’s complex, nested retrospective vessel contains, in addition to everyday stories, a random selection of objects representing, among other things, tigers, temples, tears, fences, children’s letters, angels, icons, and cured turtles. The most recent work is a spider clock, The 13 Hour Cymbal Spiderclock that exhales the Dreams, which announces a new time beyond the usual twelve hours.

Katja Mater’s series Time is an Arrow, Error entails layers of duration. The process begins with a drawing of half an analogue clockface. The drawing is then photographed in natural light, producing two separate negatives that each capture the image over different extended exposures. Subtle shifts in light lead to variations in colours and, in some cases, the uneven transcription of shadows on the photographic plate. Finally, one of the two semicircles is flipped or rotated, resulting in a whole clock formed by two irregular halves. The steady passage of mechanised time is thus expressed in imprecision and irresolution. Designed by Elisabeth Klement and with a text by Amelia Groom.

Evol/Love is a project in three parts: a billboard series, installation and new publication connecting 160 subtitled movie stills that all contain the word Love. A collage of voices and definitions arranged in alphabetical order, from ‘Love is where you find it’ (A: A Date with Judy, US 1948, 00:22:37) to ‘But even if it’s a little late, love has a way of coming back to you’ (Y: Yeonae/Love is a Crazy Thing, KR 2005, 01:38:02), but read backwards to sound like its antonym: evil.

Produced on the occasion of Mode and Mode issue 8 Rogue which is assembled around the modernist satirical magazine Rogue (1915–1916) with newly commissioned texts by Astrid Lorange, Femke de Vries, Matthew Linde, Ulrich Lehmann, Isabelle Sully, Yair Oelbaum, Katherine Bernard and Rowan McNaught.

The issue produces a conceptual mirror in the form of a split screen: on the left, a facsimile of the first issue of Rogue, published in March 1915, and on the right, Mode and Mode. This collective enquiry into Rogue not only recirculates and reconsiders this distinctive project in the context a radically different scene of art, fashion and poetry of the present day.

You can read the issue online here.