Pages #8: When Historical

Pages is a bilingual -English and Farsi- magazine that aims to function as a platform for exchange, dialogues and projects: a place for collaboration between artists and writers from Iran and elsewhere. The magazine’s interest lies in the socio-political flows within spaces of urban and everyday life.

The diversity of contributions expand and even transgress the geographically bound subjects and subjectivities, as they often develop, return, change and interact with one another from one issue of Pages to the other. It emphasizes on localities and it is the intricacy and dissonances within local currents that give way to chains of meanings, relations, differences and exchange.

Pages is a project initiated by Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, both artists living in Rotterdam. However, activities regarding the magazine are organized from both Rotterdam and Tehran, platforms from which all communications and exchanges take shape and place.

In Issue #8:

What determines our place in history? If it is the past, there we also find the material support with which we reconstitute our historical place. Our relation to history remains retrospective, but also anticipatory.

Events begin with a break from history. But they soon are recaptured by it and fetishized as historical triumphs or failures. Still something remains of past events that, although conditioned by history, is irreducible to it: a surplus that finds way to our time, something out of time that forces us to actively anticipate a renewing in past events.

With contributions by:

– Dariush Moaven Doust / Machinic Life
– Alireza Rasoulinejad & Saleh Najafi / Minor/Major [conversation]
– Norman Klein / Imaginary Future and the Archive [interview]
– Gerald Raunig & Roberto Nigro / Molecular Revolution and Event
– Saleh Najafi / Hope Against Hope
– Sven Augustijnen / Coincidences of History: Reflections on E’mile Meurice’s ‘Sketch for a psychologial study of Leopold II’
– Jalil Ziapour, Houshang Irani, Gholam Hossein Gharib / Excerpt from Khoroos Jangi magazine, 1949-50
– Performance in Iran [conversation] with Neda Razavipour, Jinoos Taghizadeh, Shahab Fotouhi, Bavand Behpour, Amir Mobed and Mahmoud Bakhshi

128 Pages
English / Farsi
Graphic Design by LUST

D €10

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CODE:RED. Tadej Pogačar. Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E

CODE:RED includes a series of theoretical essays from the fields of gender studies and feminism, the history of the struggle of sex workers, their political actions, their fight for human and social rights, their cultural work, their inclusion in labor syndicates, and so on. The publication pays tribute to the extraordinary individuals who through their courage and boldness have managed to escape the vicious circle of ignorance and stigmatization.

The book also presents essential information about the CODE:RED project – its beginnings, structure, strategies, actions, networks, and collaborations. Also included are visual documents from projects in São Paulo, Venice, Madrid, and New York, as well as three issues of the Sex Worker newspaper. The authors of the essays are Ana Lopes, Pia Covre, Gabriela Silva Leite, Suzana Milevska, Maria do Mar Castro Varela and Nikita Dhawan, Mamen Briz, Mojca Pajnik, and Melissa Ditmore.

The book was edited by Tadej Pogačar, with language editing by Rawley Grau and Jana Wilcoxen and graphic design by Ajdin Bašić. The book has been published in English.

The publication of CODE:RED was made possible by the financial support of the Erste Foundation, the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, and the Department of Culture of the Municipality of Ljubljana. The publisher of the book is the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute.

236 pp., 240 ill.

D €30

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Bidoun #25: Summer 2011

Featuring contributions from Magdi Mostafa, William Wells, Mahmoud Othman, Abdel-Halim Qandil, Egyptian Museum, Doa Aly, Nawal El Saadawi, Ganzeer, The Seif Family, Abdel-Moneim Abou El Fotouh, Sanaa Seif & Hanin Tarek, Hassan Gamal, Omar Nagati, Shahira Amin, Mohamed Abdullatif, Albert Cossery, Mohamed Hamdy Mustafa, Mido Sas, Will Raynolds, Esraa Abdel Fattah, Ramy Raoof, Amina Abaza, Abdallah al Alfy, Marie Antoinette Castelli, Mona Khalil, Heather Nagy, Susie Nassar, Zahara, Jarett Kobek, Jenna Krajeski, Sophia Al-Maria, Sherine Amr, Perry Moataz, Nancy Mounir

D €11.20

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Metropolis M #4

20X Protest
Domeniek Ruyters / Ann Goldstein / Koen Brams / Experimental Jetset / Dieter Roelstraete / Ann Demeester / Constant Dullaart / Bik Van der Pol / Moosje Goosen / Willem Oorebeek / Hito Steyerl / Elena Filipovic / Sara van der Heide / Lotte Geeven / Camiel van Winkel / Joost de Bloois / Jeremiah Day / Marcel van Eeden / Hans Ulrich Obrist / cover: Willem de Rooij

Falke Pisano interview
Academiespecial: 5 starters
Neil Beloufa
40 jaar Robert Smithson in Emmen

128 pages
Dutch/English
21 x 28 cm

D €10

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Vancouver Anthology – Stan Douglas (Ed.) – Or Gallery/Talonbooks

The essays collected in the second edition of Vancouver Anthology were first presented in the autumn of 1990 as part of a lecture series entitled “Vancouver Anthology: Lectures on Art in British Columbia”, a forum in which each contributing writer could test his or her research on the question of art and politics in public, before their papers were sent to print. The papers documented a range of Vancouver cultural practice, including the emergence of artist-run centres, experimental performance and video, feminist activity, collaboration, sculpture, painting, art criticism, conceptual art and landscape, as well as critical reflections on perceptions of aboriginal cultures.

Vancouver Anthology has been out of print for several years and earlier attempts to reprint the book were thwarted due to the fact that design files and production films had been lost or destroyed. In the absence of a second printing, scarcity and high-demand drove prices for existing volumes as high as $300, making the book unaffordable to artists and students in particular. The new edition, which has been over two years in production, was recreated using early text files of the essays and by sourcing and re-scanning images from their original negatives and transparencies. A new design by Derek Barnett pays tribute to Douglas’s original 1991 book design, yet provided the opportunity to move to a larger hardcover format. Most significantly, the second edition features a new afterword by Douglas, reflecting on sociopolitical changes since the anthology’s beginnings in 1990.

Essays in the book include: A Particular History: Artist-Run Centres in Vancouver by Keith Wallace; Daring Documents: The Practical Aesthetics of Early Vancouver Video by Sara Diamond; Expanded Consciousness and Company Types: Collaboration Since Intermedia and the N.E. Thing Company by Nancy Shaw; Independent Film After Structuralism: Hybrid Experimental Narrative and Documentary by Maria Insell; Some Are Weather-Wise; Some Otherwise: Criticism and Vancouver by William Wood; A Working Chronology of Feminist Cultural Activities and Events in Vancouver: 1970–1990 by Carol Williams; Sculpture and the Sculptural in Halifax and Vancouver by Robin Peck; Painting and the Social History of British Columbia by Robert Linsley; Discovering the Defeatured Landscape by Scott Watson; and Construction of the Imaginary Indian by Marcia Crosby.

Vancouver Anthology is co-published by the Or Gallery and Talonbooks, Vancouver. Printing and production of the second edition project was generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, British Columbia Arts Council, and the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts in British Columbia.

320 pages
English

D 32€

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Under Deconstruction. Libia Castro, Ólafur Ólafson. Sternberg Press

The publication by Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson on the occasion of the exhibition at the Icelandic pavilion at Venice Biennale 2011 is conceived as a first comprehensive overview / in depth analysis of more than ten years of their artistic practice—leading up to their most current works.

Four essays by internationally renowned writers approach Castro/Ólafsson’s work from different angles, while a conversation with the exhibition curator, Ellen Blumenstein, meanders through the book, takes up the artists own perspective on their work, and focuses on the production of the new projects while digging into recent social and political developments in Iceland.

Edited by Ellen Blumenstein
Texts by Maurizio Lazzarato, Susanne Leeb, Halldór Björn Runólfsson, Simon Sheikh
Conversation with the artists by Ellen Blumenstein
Design by jung + wenig
144 Pages / English

D 22€

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The Ramallah Lecture – Jakob Jakobsen – Nebula

This book is based on a blog written by the visual artist and political activist Jakob Jakobsen during a six-week stay in Ramallah and the West Bank.

“In the summer of 2008 I visited Palestine. ArtSchool Palestine had invited me over for the purpose of meeting and working with local artists and other people in the occupied territories. As the theme of my visit was relatively open, my Palestinian host explained that my stay here could be understood as a type of artistic research. That suited me fine as I had worked with activist investigations and artistic research in The Copenhagen Free University for almost six years.

I’ve followed the situation in Palestine for many years and the Palestinian cause has persistently challenged my political sense of justice. Since September 11th 2001 the conflict has been spun more and more into the War against Terror and life for the Palestinians appears to have become even more troublesome. But what do you really know as an outsider and a media consumer in the West? In terms of the struggles over territory that go on in and around this small piece of land some call Palestine, what actually shapes the scenery that is produced in the public sphere? My stay in Palestine was an opportunity to get closer to the everyday conditions in the occupied territories, although I was constantly asking myself about my own role as an artist and a political person in this situation of conflict.” – From the introduction of ‘The Ramallah Lecture’

Jakob Jakobsen is an artist, organizer and activist. He ran the Copenhagen Free University, co-founded the artist run TV-station tvtv and has participated in exhibitions and projects all over the world. He has been visiting and working in Palestine at several occasions.

D 14€

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Born in Flames. Lizzie Borden

Born in Flames, the publication, is an illustrated transcript of Lizzie Borden’s 1983 film ‘Born in Flames’, edited and designed by Kaisa Lassinaro. It includes an interview with Borden conducted in L.A. by Lassinaro, as well as the lyrics of Undercover Nation by The Bloods and Born in Flames by Red Crayola, kindly supplied by Adele Bertei and Mayo Thompson.

Size 21 x 29.7cm, 32 p, soft cover, full colour throughout

D 12 €

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Expect Anything Fear Nothing, The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere, Mikkel Bolt & Jakob Jakobsen

This volume is the first English-language presentation of the Scandinavian Situationists and their role in the Situationist movement. The Situationist movement was an international movement of artists, writers and thinkers that in the 1950s and 1960s tried to revolutionize the world through rejecting bourgeois art and critiquing the post-World War Two capitalist consumer society.

The book contains articles, conversations and statements by former members of the Situationists’ organisations as well as contemporary artists, activists, scholars and writers. While previous publications about the Situationist movement almost exclusively have focused on the contribution of the French section and in particular on the role of the Guy Debord this book aims to shed light on the activities of the Situationists active in places like Denmark, Sweden and Holland. The themes and stories chronicled include: The anarchist undertakings of the Drakabygget movement led by the rebel artists Jørgen Nash, Hardy Strid and Jens Jørgen Thorsen, the exhibition by the Situationist International “Destruction of RSG-6” in 1963 in Odense organised by the painter J.V. Martin in collaboration with Guy Debord, the journal The Situationist Times edited by Jacqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn’s political critique of natural science and the films of the Drakabygget movement.

Contributors: Peter Laugesen, Carl Nørrested, Fabian Tompsett, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jacqueline de Jong, Gordon Fazakerley, Hardy Strid, Karen Kurczynski, Stewart Home, Jakob Jakobsen.

The book was published in association with Autonomedia, New York.
288 pages + inserts
2011

D 25€
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A special edition OLD NEWS BOXSET is now available…

It contains OLD NEWS #1, #2, #3, #4, #México, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #9 1/2, #10 and Vinyl News NO.1 / KARL HOLMQVIST READS OLD NEWS 11 AUGUST 2010.

Published by Pork Salad Press

D €100

Buy: orders@mottodistribution.com