Amateur is the first comprehensive publication about Wendelien van Oldenborgh‘s moving image works, and their accompanying installations. Developed over the past ten years of her practice, Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s works explore communication and interaction between individuals, often against the backdrop of a unique public location, in order to cast attention on repressed, incomplete, and unresolved histories. Through the staging of these encounters on film, van Oldenborgh enables multiple perspectives and voices to coexist, and brings to light political, social, and cultural relationships and how they are manifested through social interactions.

Designed by Julia Born.

Bik Van der Pol’s project revolves around one of the oldest objects in the collection of the Rijksmuseum: a moon rock. The crew of the first manned lunar landing mission, Apollo 11, brought this rock back to earth in 1969. That same year the three astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins visited the Netherlands. Willem Drees, a former Dutch prime minister, received the rock on that occasion as a present from the United States ambassador. And later, this piece of stone was donated to the Rijksmuseum.

Liesbeth Bik and Jos van Der Pol have worked collaboratively since 1995. They live and work in Rotterdam.

This publication accompanies two exhibitions of recent sculptural work by the artist Magali Reus: Hot Cottons (2017–18) at Bergen Kunsthall and As mist, description, (2018) at the South London Gallery. Featuring an essay by writer and curator Laura Mclean-Ferris and a poetic response by writer and poet Quinn Latimer as well as a fully illustrated overview of Reus’s work, this catalogue provides an in-depth exploration of the artist’s recent sculptural practice.

Producing a sculptural language that is both familiar yet unlocatable Reus draws heavily on the past and present landscape of industry and fabrication, creating forms using a plethora of materials that include: mesh, jesmonite, cotton, steel, rubber, leather. Interested in collaborative processes of making, from virtual design to handmade fabrication, Reus combines sculptural games with material explorations.

Designed by A Practice for Everyday Life.

With texts by Federica Bueti, Malak Helmy, Francis Mckee, Haytham El Wardany, Brian Kuan Wood.

Five essays that take an intimate look at what language’s role is in moments of dramatic change, and how to find meaning for artistic practices in these transformative conditions. Taking its cue from the aftermath of the events of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, Final Vocabulary doesn’t provide answers as much as it captures the spirit of the moment of searching in which the writers find themselves. The book was developed out of a live conversation at an event called “The Informal Meeting” that took place in Leuven in January 2015, where participants were asked: Our histories and references are often in a different language (abstract or actual) than we use ourselves, what tools do you think are or might be useful to help you trust your own memories and narratives? What, if anything, do you think we might borrow from art to experiment with language in different situations? In English and Arabic.

The “economization of art” began to take shape in the wake of the crisis of capital in 2009. The shifts that occurred in the art field during this time were accompanied by explicit critique and academic analysis that aimed to make the genesis of these transformations comprehensible. In this book, first delivered as a lecture at Kunsthalle Bern in April 2016, Diedrich Diederichsen follows Marx’s labor theory of value and counters the symbolic economies dominating the art field, as well as economic exceptionalism or calculation, with systems of recording and reading out. Expanded to include the sphere of individual aesthetic experience, these systems are not formulated as solipsism, or in terms of purposefulness, but as a means to compare relations within the productivity of open and incalculable connectivity, relations that allow aesthetic experience to be read out as the liquefied labor and lifetime of concrete others. Designed by HIT.

Libraries are generally perceived as storehouses, spaces of stable accumulation and containment. While the architecture may attempt to operate in this stable tone, the material contained within them is often far wilder. Histories, biographies, loose thoughts, detailed notations, bodies, and objects are all temporarily suspended, cataloged, and organized, creating relationships where perhaps previously there was none. An example of where the tension between what is contained in libraries and how it is contained emerges in a highly palpable way in the trajectory of the Staatsbibliothek Berlin. This new artist book by Ruth Buchanan charts three narratives associated with the life of this particular library. The anecdotes become both concrete examples and metaphors through which to interrogate the production, situating, and sharing of meaning.

With texts by Ruth Buchanan and Ian White. Designed by David Bennewith.