Produced on the occasion of Patty Chang: Glass Urinary Devices at A Tale of A Tub, Rotterdam, 14 September – 3 November, 2024. In 2015, American artist Patty Chang followed the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, the longest aqueduct in the world, which brings water from southern to northern China. While walking, she collected her urine in discarded plastic bottles found along the way, drawing a connection between the large-scale infrastructural attempt to control the flow of water and the uncontrollable flows of her own body. Once back in Boston, Chang made a series of hand-blown glass sculptures modelled on the plastic bottles that she utilised during her journey. For Chang’s exhibition at A Tale of A Tub, a collection of these prosthetic-like sculptures will be presented on the ground floor, reflecting on the flow of water that once passed through the former washhouse alongside Chang’s own ruminations on water as a metaphorical point of departure for geopolitics, human excess and waste.

This catalogue is the outcome of research into Australian artist Ian Burn’s work of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Grounded in the traditional genres of landscape, still life and portrait, little is known about this early work, yet a substantial collection of it – juvenilia, art school paintings, yearbook cartoons, hinged boxes, paint palettes, still lifes, orientalist prints and more-resides at the artist’s brother Robert’s house in Newtown, Geelong. This material has not been exhibited or reproduced previously and thus expands knowledge of the artist’s oeuvre.

Documented are two exhibitions of Burn’s early work held at Guzzler gallery in 2022 and 2023. The first exhibition rehung his ambitious entry into the 1962 Travelling Scholarship Prize at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, a large Antipodean-esque painting of a bar scene. The second exhibition, comprised of several genre pictures and a drawing exercise, further showcased the humble origins of Burn’s art.

Author: David Homewood
Design: Alexandra Margetic
Photography: Luke Sands

A strange hybrid of Teletubbies and Videodrome in the age of algorithms, Telebodies is a techno-somatic, multifaceted endeavour referring to the ever-growing entanglement of our bodies with epistemic, cybernetic, and kinetic materialities.

The book offers an alternative art history in the near-present of automation and disinformation, portraying a Central Eastern Europe populated by speculative cultural producers.
Written in collaboration with a cloud-based typing assistant with “main character syndrome,” the text can also be interpreted as an academic novel about the doctoral research of an overcaffeinated generation with slight attention deficit disorder, or processed as a speculative script for (im)possible collaborations with AI or machine-based personalities to come. It is also an attempt to write a practice-based fine-arts PhD thesis at the Vilnius Academy of Arts.

Designed by Nerijus Rimkus.

Kahlo/Modotti–Forty Years Later is the result of a visit by Laura Mulvey to the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich in November 2022. The booklet contains two texts: Mulvey’s evening lecture at the Cabaret Voltaire, revisiting hers and Peter Wollen’s exhibition and film on Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti, and Wollen’s 2003 essay on the phenomenon of “Fridamania.”

Laura Mulvey is a feminist film theorist and director. Peter Wollen (1938–2019) was a British film theorist and filmmaker.

The volume contains 378 screenshots of benches found in real estate listings—from summer houses, homesteads, barns, garden houses, timber sheds to wash houses and saunas—in provinces and towns of Lithuania.

Monika Janulevičiūtė is a Lithuanian designer and artist. For her, the frankness of bench-making binds design, craft and art practices together. The bench takes centre stage to the extreme. A multifaceted quotidian subject swivelling around its vertical axis, showing the elastic attachments to life and functionality.

During the 1930s, a large number of works influenced by surrealism were shown in Japan under the heading “avant-garde photography”. Among these were works by Shuzo Takiguchi (1903–1979), who soon thereafter founded the Avant-Garde Photography Association along with Nobuya Abe (1913–1971). Their theoretical approach to the photographic medium would in turn influence other experimental Japanese artists such as Kiyoji Otsuji (1923–2001) and Shigeo Gocho (1946–1983). Collectively these artists have made an indelible impact on 20th-century photography in Japan, which is the subject of this seminal exhibition catalogue on their work and legacy.