“For more than 35 years, Jochen Lempert’s photographs have stood out as a singular oeuvre within contemporary art. The trained biologist’s gaze is marked by constant wonder. At first, and not without irony, at the history and forms (and warps) of our cultural fascination for the inexhaustible potential of plants and animals. He is increasingly interested in the phenomena of perception and how they are translated into images, in the life forms of flora and fauna and their analogies to his own creative process… Following the publication of Phenotype in 2013 by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Natural Sources is Jochen Lempert’s second major artist’s book.” Florian Ebner

A collaboration between Jochen Lempert and Jürgen Stollhans on the occasion of both artists’ duo show at the Kunstverein Ulm in July-August 2007.

This series of translations from fivehundred places is designed to explore some of the outer reaches of translation. Each book in the series is dedicated to multiple translations of a single poem. Inspired by a comment from Ilya Kaminsky about how translation should open windows and not create mirrors, artists, dancers, musicians, poets, philosophers, curators, writers and visual thinkers were invited to imagine translations from their unique perspective, using a poem as a starting point, to make a version of that poem.

Bernadette Mayer’s I am a common Merganzer..., is translated by: Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Ferris, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Jennifer Lacey, Jochen Lempert, Dorothea Lasky, Raimundas Malasauskas, Donika Kelly, Luca Lo Pinto, Eva Barto, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, Claire Fontaine, Imaad Majeed

Bill is an annual magazine of photographic stories without any accompanying text to prioritise visual reading without distraction. Designed, edited, and produced by Julie Peeters and associate editor Elena Narbutaitė, it includes contributions by Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, filmmaker Gillian Garcia, Swiss visual artist Beat Streuli, Takashi Homma, Adrianna Glaviano, French visual artist Mimosa Echard, British-Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashashibi, Martiniano shoes, and Amsterdam photography studio Blommers/Schumm.

Edition of 100 copies numbered and signed by the artist on a certificate, plus 13 artist’s proofs.

As the Latinization of the Japanese name akebi, “akebia” designates fives species of plants native to East Asia. These are climbing evergreen shrubs that have been used in many ways (decoration, medicine, craft), including for the consumption of its sweet, white fruit. Delicately placed at the center of the composition, the leaf appears in this work as in an herbarium, its familiar but inexhaustible form offered to the viewers for their contemplation. But a closer examination reveals a constellation of water droplets on the surface, as well as irregular edges – and we finally understand that the leaf is a photographic cut-out. Just for a moment, we mistook the reproduction for its original. What appeared to be a clear reference to the standards of scientific, botanical representation drifts off towards another domain.

Produced on the occasion of Jochen Lempert’s exhibition Natural sources at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, 10 September–4 December, 2022.