American artist Peter Fend (born 1950) founded the Ocean Earth Construction and Development Corporation (“OCEAN EARTH”) in 1980, a legally incorporated successor to an artist venture initiated in 1979 to deliver art ideas and practices to real-world clients. The firm launched its worldwide business with a 1982 show at The Kitchen, NY called Art of the State.

Africa-Arctic Flyway: Physiocratic States is Fend’s first major publication since 1993’s Ocean Earth. It features projects and proposals located on the bird and insect flyways from Sub-Saharan Africa through Europe to the Arctic. Made over the past three decades, these projects take the form of extensive writing, his ubiquitous poetic “wordstacks,” and Fend’s signature cut-out maps, sketches, and installation views of sculptures.

Edited by Elisa R. Linn, Lennart Wolff. Designed by Dan Solbach.

Video peepshows, porno theatres, garden pavilions—with subtle insight, Tom Burr (*1963) sheds light upon what is marginalized, or not immediately recognizable. His works, which make reference to Minimal art’s object sculptures, redefine them in current socio-economic “queer” aspects. By acting as an intermediary between formal stringency and socio-political content, Tom Burr’s works overcome Hal Foster’s criticism that Minimal art tended to “handle the viewer as historically innocent and sexually indifferent.” With comprehensive texts and illustrations, this book features an artist who belongs among those who have shaped a new form of institutionally critical art.

With texts from Tom Burr, Carina Herring and Juliane Rebentisch.

Since the late 1980s, Tom Burr has been reusing appropriation strategies in his art. Not confined to his photographic and sculptural works, they also lend momentum to many of his writings. The artist has created assemblages of personal writings and sources, differing in nature and style, which he has used as both conceptual and aesthetic materials in his oeuvre. Thus, Burr extends his art praxis into the field of writing, and vice versa; art and language cannot be dissociated from each other. At times, the text precedes and anticipates the work; at others, it emanates and results from it; in most instances, it is an integral part of it. Words constitute the work.

Like a pictorial encyclopedia, Das Wunder des Lebens contains over four hundred drawings that show all that the modern world has to offer, from maps and city views to cars and airplanes. However, unlike conventional pictorial dictionaries, there is no symbolic system.

Copublished with Kunsthalle Wien and Kunsthalle Basel on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the former, 7 February–4 May, 2014, and Projekt 13 at the latter, 16 January–14 March, 2010.

Designed by Antoine Begon and Boy Vereecken.

Works 1965–Today stems from a retrospective held at the Grazer Kunstverein showcasing Josef Bauer’s experiments with language, colour, and their spatial contexts nearly forty years after his last exhibition in Graz. His practice combines sculpture, installation, painting, and performance to disturb our perception of words and colours as mere “carriers” of meaning. By removing their two-dimensional context, letters become objects that communicate directly with our bodies in an unfiltered and urgent language called “tactile poetry.”

Edited by Krist Gruijthuijsen. Designed by Marc Hollenstein.

This publication brings together extensive material from Hamlet, mise-en-scène presented at Portikus, along with recently restored as well as never-published stills, drawings, and writings by American filmmaker and artist Jack Smith, related to his film Hamlet in the Rented World (A Fragment) (1970–73).

Hamlet, mise-en-scène, directed by Mark von Schlegell, was an adaptation that retold Shakespeare’s most abused tragedy while channeling the ghost of Jack Smith. The two-night rendition of Hamlet was performed by members of Städelschule’s Pure Fiction seminar, presented here alongside a rare selection of works by Smith, both from private collections and from the Jack Smith Archive.

Texts By Sylvère Lotringer, Birte Löschenkohl, Sophie von Olfers, Laura Preston, Juliane Rebentisch, Mark von Schlegell.