World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2021, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 21.5 × 17 cm
Published by
Viscose / Copenhagen
$42.00 - Out of stock
Viscose is a new journal for fashion criticism. Launched between Copenhagen and New York in 2021, the periodical publishes critical writing and projects by a wide range of authors from the worlds of art, fashion, literature, and academia. Through specially edited thematic issues, Viscose gives space to projects that challenge and expand the possibilities of research, practice, and critique of fashion.
Issue 2 of Viscose inverts issue 1’s focus on the immaterial notion of style to instead explore the most material of fashion’s building blocks: Clothes.
Clothes are literally everywhere and cite complicated systems of production, distribution, and exchange on their paths around the world. Still, they never fully reveal their journey or destination, and may often signify little else than their own commodity status, the total genericness of the fashion product. Bringing together a wide range of artists, thinkers, and writers, the issue sets out to explore clothes as a signifier at once empty and over-burdened: as expressions of desires, people and places, as palimpsests for capitalist production cycles and histories of dressed bodies, and even, as nondescript material debris. While not necessarily foregoing an analysis of the fashion system, we hope to develop a form of fashion criticism that begins – and perhaps ends – with the single garment, that takes the everyday use of clothing objects as an intellectual starting point. What knowledge can we gather from the studying of fashion objects, be they material or immaterial? What is the difference between clothes and fashion? And to which extent is even "fashion" ever successfully signified by things?
Featuring Nina Beier, Anna-Sophie Berger, Paige K. Bradley, Laura Brown, Pia Camil, Dal Chodha, Victoria Colmegna, Exatitudes (Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek), Anna Franceschini, Laura Gardner, Rhonda Lieberman, Eric N. Mack, Kristian Vistrup Madsen, Christian Oldham, Kembra Pfahler, Carl Gustaf Von Platen, Mattia Ruffalo, Tenant of Culture, Torbjørn Rødland, Barbara Sanchez-Kane, Else Skålvoll Thorenfeldt, Jeppe Ugelvig, Femke de Vries, Issy Wood, Bruno Zhu.
2017, English
Softcover (die-cut), 244 pages, 19 x 26 cm
Published by
Walker Art Centre / Minneapolis
$88.00 $50.00 - In stock -
Edited with text by Fionn Meade. Foreword by Olga Viso. Texts by Jordan Carter, Adrienne Edwards, Isla Leaver-Yap, Robert Wiesenberger.
Question the Wall Itself examines ways that interior spaces and décor can be fundamental to the understanding of cultural identity. It showcases 23 international artists who explore the political and social dimensions of interior architecture as well as its complicated relationship to history and their own backgrounds. The featured artists are Jonathas de Andrade, Uri Aran, Nina Beier, Marcel Broodthaers, Tom Burr, Alejandro Cesarco, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Theaster Gates, Ull Hohn, Janette Laverrière, Louise Lawler, Nick Mauss, Park McArthur, Lucy McKenzie, Shahryar Nashat, Walid Raad, Seth Siegelaub, Paul Sietsema, Florine Stettheimer, Rosemarie Trockel, Cerith Wyn Evans, Danh Vo and Akram Zaatari.
The book and the exhibition it accompanies take as its guiding principle what Marcel Broodthaers termed “esprit décor”: a critique of ideas of nationality, globalization and the space of the institution through constructed interior scenes. Recasting our conception of interior space and design, the featured works exist between art, prop, and set or stage. Espousing this mise-en-scène approach, Question the Wall Itself plugs readers into material that expands the show in the form of book-as-exhibition. It includes an extensive photographic walk-through of the installations, and essays by Jordan Carter, Adrienne Edwards, Isla Leaver-Yap, Fionn Meade, and Robert Wiesenberger, as well as contributions from participating artists.
2016, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts / Cambridge
$79.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Martin Beck, Nina Beier, Silvia Benedito, Ulla von Brandenburg, Katarina Burin, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Jonas Ekeberg, Alex Farquharson, Fernanda Fragateiro, Simon Fujiwara, James Goggin, Tone Hansen, Owen Hatherley, Henriette Huldisch, Damon Krukowski, Le Corbusier, Maria Lind, Markus Miessen, Eline Mugaas, Elise Storsveen, Gloria Sutton, James Voorhies, Naomi Yang, Amy Yoes
New Institutionalism, a mode of curating that originated in Europe in the 1990s, evolved from the legacy of international curator Harald Szeemann, the relational art advanced by French critic and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, and other influential factors of the time. New Institutionalism’s dispersed and varied approaches to curating sought to reconfigure the art institution from within, reshaping it into an active, democratic, open, and egalitarian public sphere. These approaches posed other possibilities and futures for institutions and exhibitions, challenging the consensual conception, production, and distribution of art. Practitioners engaged the art institution with renewed confidence by imbuing it with the potential for new aesthetic experiences and different relationships among artists, institutions, and spectators beyond engrained modernist ideologies. Working in these new modes, the art institution could become a site of fluidity, unpredictability, and risk.
What Ever Happened to New Institutionalism? reflects upon the aspirations of these curatorial strategies and assesses their critical efficacy today within the landscape of contemporary art and globalized culture. The first in a series of readers examining changing characteristics of art institutions, this publication thinks through New Institutionalism by bringing together facsimiles of seminal texts, new critical essays, a history of trends and practices, and commissioned artist projects and contributions. These are complemented by documentation from the inaugural year of programming at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University focused on reimagining CCVA as a twenty-first-century institution.
Copublished with Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Design by James Goggin, Practise
2015, English / Italian
Softcover, 120 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Ed. of 1000,
Published by
Cura Books / Rome
$35.00 $15.00 - In stock -
Artists: Francesco Arena (Italy), Nina Beier (Denmark), Katinka Bock (Germany), Giorgio Calò Andreotta (Italy), Dario D'Aronco (Italy), N.Dash (USA), Michael Dean (UK), Oliver Laric (Austria), Mark Manders (Netherlands), Michael E. Smith (USA), Fernando Sánchez Castillo (Spain) and Francisco Tropa (Portugal), Oscar Tuazon (USA)
Edition of 1,000 copies
Produced by Palazzo Strozzi Foundation
Sculptures Also Die offers a reflection on contemporary sculpture curated by Lorenzo Benedetti through new and existing work by twelve Italian and international artists who will be forging a reflection on the meaning, the potential and the New Experimental Approaches in sculpture today. Contemporary artists tend to use new forms and materials to address a broader timeSpan in on ongoing dialogue between the past and the future;yet at the sametime, the exhibition reflects on the way in Which today's artists are so Rediscovering examined material as bronze, stone or ceramic, That Appeared to have been relegated to the Purely academic sphere.These materials are rediscovered and used in a conceptual manner to reflect on themes examined: such as the monument, the fragment, the way material wear over time, and the recovery of the recent modernist past.
2017, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 16 x 24 cm
Published by
Mousse / Milan
$54.00 - Out of stock
Cash for Gold is the most comprehensive monograph on the work of Nina Beier, copublished with the Kunstverein in Hamburg, in conjunction with Kunsthaus Glarus. Nina Beier’s art presents a particular challenge to critics, Alexander Scrimgeour outlines in the introduction to this catalogue— indeed, an anthology of eight different essays: a textual bounty that proved necessary. The conventional functions of the art writer: interpretation, judgement, critique, contextualisation, etc., stand in an uneasy relationship, not to say opposition, to the explorations of openness, assignations of value, and unspoken cultural codes in her work. The development of this catalogue, and the fact that it does not coalesce into a single, authoritative voice, can perhaps best be seen as a reflection of the work itself, and what makes or lets it carry meaning for different people in different ways. For all the specificity of its materials and forms, it draws its energy from the emotional valence of culturally embedded desires, pressures, norms and glitches within what Rosalind Krauss called, after Fredric Jameson, “the total saturation of cultural space by the image.” The sprawl and partiality of this catalogue is itself a mirror of a crisis of representation that is itself the ground occupied by the images, confused objects, and art-historical references in Beier’s work to date.
Bettina Steinbrügge, Alexander Scrimgeour, eds.
Texts by Karen Archey, Laura McLean-Ferris, John Miller, Post Brothers, Dieter Roelstraete, Chris Sharp, Bettina Steinbrügge, Alexander Scrimgeour, Ana Texeira Pinto
2014, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 19 b/w and 35 color ill., 16.4 x 24 cm
Published by
Museu Coleção Berardo / Lisbon
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$36.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Erika Balsom, Sladja Blazan, Kerstin Stakemeier, Ana Teixeira Pinto
Often referred to as the “narrative turn,” an explosion of interest in narrative practices at the end of the twentieth century was predicated on the notion that life itself is storied, or—as Jacques Ranciére put it—that the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought. Postmodernism itself was described as a “narrative turn” in which a rekindled interest in the fictive, the chronicle, and the anecdotal upstaged the symbolic unity of high modernism. But as Susan Buck-Morss has noted, modernism and postmodernism are not historical moments, they are political positions: two poles of a recurring movement, expressing the contradictions inherent to the industrial mode of production in the identity and nonidentity between social function and aesthetic form. Rather than opposing a myriad of micro-narratives to the grand narrative of modernism, The Reluctant Narrator attempts to map the migration of narrative modes across several media, bringing together works that intertwine personal biography with historical events, or that deal with stories that fell through the crevices of history.
Copublished with Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, on the occasion of the exhibition “The Reluctant Narrator” (October 15, 2014–January 11, 2015) with works by Julieta Aranda, Armando Andrade Tudela, Leonor Antunes, Kader Attia, Nina Beier, Derek Boshier, Aleksandra Domanović, Dani Gal, Karl Holmqvist, Christoph Keller, David Levine, Amalia Pica, Bojan Šarčević, John Smith, Hito Steyerl, Stephen Sutcliffe, Andreas Töpfer, Gernot Wieland.
A Portuguese edition is available from Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon.
Design by Andreas Koch
2011, English
Softcover, 220 x 293 mm
Published by
Kaleidoscope Press / Milan
$18.00 - Out of stock
Kaleidoscope #12 – Fall 2011
Kaleidoscope is an international quarterly of contemporary art and culture. Distributed worldwide on a seasonal basis, it offers a timely guide to the present (but also to the past and possible futures) with an interdisciplinary and unconventional approach.
HIGHLIGHTS: Public Movement interview by Alhena Katsof; RON NAGLE INTERVIEW BY STERLING RUBY; Lucie Stahl by Joanna Fiduccia; The Suburbs by Michele D’Aurizio; Uri Aran by Bartholomew Ryan.
MAIN THEME: STATE OF THE ART BOOK: EXPERIMENTAL COLLECTIBLE LIONEL BOVIER AND AA BRONSON IN CONVERSATION; Why the Book? by Chris Sharp; Special Project by Nina Beier; Secondary into Primary
‘c5bäke and Gavin Wade in conversation; Archive Fever Chris Decon interviewed by Florencia Serrot.
MONO: BERNADETTE CORPORATION: I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On words by Chris Wiley; Matter Expands Away by Vincenzo Latronico; IF EVERYTHING WORKS INTERVIEW BY ANNIE OCHMANEK; Special Project by Bernadette Corporation.
COLUMNS: PIONEERS: Hannah Wilke by Simone Menegoi; FUTURA: David Hominal interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist; MAPPING THE STUDIO: Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet by Luca Cerizza; ON EXHIBITION: “Carlo Mollino. Maniera Moderna” by Paola Nicolin; LAST QUESTION: What Is Going on out in the Street? answer by Ari Marcopoulos.
2012, English
Softcover, 171 pages, 11.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Mousse / Milan
$22.00 - Out of stock
The Object Lessons – Nina Beier & Marie Lund by Francesco Pedraglio, published by Mousse Publishing.
The Object Lessons is an exhibition.
The Object Lessons is a story inspired by an exhibition, considered through three parallel accounts told in the first, second and third person.
The Object Lessons is an exhibition inspired by the narratives, characters and artworks features in a short story.
2011, English/Danish
Softcover, 96 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kunsthal Charlottenborg / Denmark
$50.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
This out-of-print publication accompanied an exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen by the Danish artist Nina Beier. The exhibition – which is the artist’s first major solo show in the Scandinavian region – consisted of an entirely new body of work.
The book is the third in a series of publications related to the exhibitions in Charlottenborg's North galleries (the first editions featured Clemens von Wedemeyer and Pablo Bronstein). It is designed by Sara De Bondt studio in London and features an introductory essay entitled Demonstration by Charlottenborg’s curator and editor of the publication, Rhea Dall, together with an essay by the writer and curator Dieter Roelstraete. The latter text was generated by Roelstraete together with Beier as a result of their conversation and, rather than explaining the exhibition, it heads straight into an exploration of its conceptual span. The text weaves into and expands upon the art works, which is also why it is presented with a range of photographic footnotes – many of which document or relate to Beier’s practice. This essayistic stream of consciousness functions as an integral part of the show, one that does not separate the object (the exhibition) from its illustration (the catalogue).
Very Good copy.