Magical images that defy time from the grand master of conceptual photography.
Through his expansive exploration of the possibilities of still images, the internationally renowned artist and photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has created some of the most alluringly enigmatic photographs of our time; pictures that are meticulously crafted and deeply thought-provoking, familiar yet tantalisingly ambiguous.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine is a comprehensive survey of work produced over the past five decades, featuring selections from all of Sugimoto’s major photographic series, as well as lesser-known works that illuminate his innovative, conceptually-driven approach to making pictures. Texts by a collection of international writers, artists and scholars - including Geoffrey Batchen, Edmund de Waal, Mami Kataoka, Ralph Rugoff, Lara Strongman and Margaret Wertheim - will highlight his work’s philosophical yet playful inquiry into the nature of representation and art, our understanding of time and memory, and the paradoxical character of photography as a medium suited to both documenting and invention.
As Time Passes and Details Fade, Photographs Turn into Memories
“As time passes and details fade, the photographs that we choose to hold onto become our memories. As a result when an image is made, explicitly or subconsciously, decisions are being made about how things will be remembered.” These images are Australian photographer’s Mark Forbes Collected Memories.
His debut monograph presents a cohesive blend of carefully composed scenes, from faded interiors and common, relatable spaces, to the romance of our environment being reclaimed by nature. Turning the pages there is a stirring sense of both subtle ordinary beauty and inherent personality sprinkled across each of the large plates. Forbes’ photographic preference, using medium format film, is slow and methodical–and this approach can be felt throughout the quiet pages.
A Time Machine to the Early Days of Video Art And Right Back into the Future
John Sanborn became one of the most prominent protagonists of the American video art scene in the 1970s and 1980s. His work ranges from the beginnings of experimental video art to MTV music videos, interactive art, and digital media art. Consulting with Apple and Adobe, he contributed to shaping the possibilities of new image tools and was instrumental to the dawning of the digital image revolution in California. This monograph brings together a collection of works that spans over four decades of exploring sound, music, cultural identity, memory, mythologies, and the human compulsion to tell stories. Essays by video art experts, contributions by his friends and companions, and a conversation between Sanborn and acclaimed media artist Dara Birnbaum explore the tension between mass media and contemporary art. Sanborn himself traces the unique arc of his career and talks about a journey that took him from museums and alternative spaces to television networks, Hollywood and Silicon Valley before returning to the art world. Few other artists working with media can claim to have delved into so many visual territories.
The pilot issue of DELUS offers a range of diverse insights into landscape and urban questions. It introduces new methods to unpack multiple worlds and narrate manifold stories. The contributions range from unraveling histories of land-body relations through recipes with Luiza Prado de O. Martins, following living fossils and their mythical counterparts with Christina Gruber, working with communities to examine extractive environments with Karin Reisinger, exploring postnatural aesthetics with the Institute for Postnatural Studies, to recording wastelands with Sandra Jasper and developing speculative curricula engaging with overlooked forms of knowledge with Federico Pérez Villoro. As a collection, these contributions address the complex relations between humans, non-humans and their environment across time and space.
Ugo Rondinone’s 2022 exhibition 'the water is a poem unwritten by the air / no. the earth is a poem unwritten by the fire' at the Petit Palais in Paris explores the theme of transformation.
Ugo Rondinone presents three ensembles of sculptures and a monumental video installation. Earth, sky, air, water and fire are invoked in the fullness of their spiritual dimension. Under the museum’s painted ceilings, the first ensemble welcomes visitors in a farandole of suspended bodies painted in a clouded sky camouflage, underlining the ephemeral melding of air and water. A second ensemble is composed of seated sculptures of dancers at rest made from a blend of wax and earth collected from seven continents. The centerpiece artwork titled burn to shine, is a film installation presented in a monumental charred wood cylinder. The artwork depicts bodies coming together throughout movement, with dancers and musicians gathered around a fire in the desert from sunset to sunrise. In echo with John Giorno's poem titled You Got To Burn To Shine.
This catalogue is a unique document of the dialogue between Rondinone’s works confronted with the museum’s architecture and its collections.
In this gorgeous book, Brigitte Lustenberger explores the passing of time, memory and the fragility of life. She transforms flowers dried on glass used for photographic slides into delicate photographs. Celebrating the beauty of decay, Lustenberger leads us into a fascinating world of withered flowers. Her images reveal the incredible details of nature’s ingenious constructions. The artist manages to combine both the fleetingness of a drawing made with light and the preservation of a photograph. Four essays by renowned curators provide insight into the artist’s process-oriented working method, the interweaving of analogue and digital technology in her practice, and contextualize An Apparition of Memory within Western and Japanese photographic and art history.
Life in its many forms is intertwined in manifold ways. Making the coexistence of different beings and worlds tangible through an exploration of objects, stories and works of art, this book shows that in many regions of the earth, our co-world is experienced as an animated being. Mountains and rivers are not just resources or backdrops to human endeavors, but powerful sources of life; plants and animals are not just food, but companions; ancestors and spirits influence everyday life. Understood in this way, local perspectives and alternative forms of social coexistence provide pathways to shared futures. A great variety of international authors tell stories of interwoven lives that invite us empathically and informed to rethink our relationships with the world.
Ars Electronica 2023 is dedicated to the complex questions of truth and the concept of ownership in this digital age. In doing so, the festival navigates the central questions of our time. The focus is on how our perception of “authentic” and “original” is being transformed and whether truth can be owned, and how this relates to digitalization and the rapidly developing performance of artificial intelligence. How can the achievements of a tool that is so much based on the globally collective “raw material” of knowledge and creativity be made accessible to everyone and be harnessed to the benefit of all?
This comprehensive volume brings together the works of artists, scientists, developers, designers, entrepreneurs and activists from around the world and delves deep into the themes of the festival, offering insights, perspectives, and thought-provoking content that reflect on the intersection of art, technology, and society.
The Edizioni Conz of the Italian collector, publisher and photographer Francesco Conz–including portfolios, large silkscreen prints on fabrics and objects–are among the finest and most elaborate art editions of the second half of the 20th century. A friend and patron of Viennese Actionism, Fluxus, Concrete Poetry, and Lettrism, he was an obsessive, knowledgeable enthusiast open to all the arts, for whom hospitality, the magic of community, and respect for the arts were more important than any mercantile aspirations.
This publication is the first comprehensive catalogue raisonné of the editions published by Conz between 1972 and 2009. Comprising more than 500 editions, it is both a reflection of his passions and a memorial to the art of the avant-gardes. Texts by contemporaries such as Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Milan Knižak, Eugen Gomringer, Emmett Williams, Nicholas Zurbrugg, and others complete the richly illustrated catalogue.
The Prix Ars Electronica is the world’s longest-running media art competition. With the award-winning works of international artists as a trend barometer, it offers an inspiring, current and forward-looking insight into the interface between art, technology and society.
3,176 projects from 98 countries were submitted to the Prix Ars Electronica 2023. The competition included the new category “New Animation Art,” which focuses on forward-looking animations at the interface of new visualization techniques and new forms of communication, as well as the categories “Digital Musics & Sound Art,” “Artificial Intelligence & Life Art” and “u19 – create your world.
Whether in the visual arts, literature, cinema, science or fashion–in the crises after World War I, the fascination with “types” was largely influenced by a debate that was pervasive in the Weimar period: the search for the “face of the era.” People were looking for new role models, and the portraits by artists of the New Objectivity movement such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Jeanne Mammen and Hanna Nagel testify to this. Many of the clichéd images, such as those of the “new woman” or the “worker,” however, continue to have an effect in the present, reminding us with their classification of individuals of a problem that lives on in today’s bigotry. A broad spectrum of contributors from art history, medical history, media studies, and sociology venture into a detailed investigation of the historical context of the 1920s and the complex interactions between art and its time. An installation developed especially for the exhibition by contemporary artist Cemile Sahin, born in 1990, spans an arc to the present.
Jeewi Lee is interested in all the traces–the intimate imprints and distinctive markings–that we leave behind and that inhabit the spaces surrounding us. Abstract compositions of rescued stories, worn-out pavements and stripped down wallpapers, cut out floors, grains of sand that have traveled millions of years around the world, coffee stains or burnt wood. These traces, both human and historical, become vessels of stories and memories, inscribed on various materials, bearing witness to the past, present, and future.
This publication offers a comprehensive exploration of the manifold tracings of the Berlin-based Korean artist over the past decade. It provides insight into her highly conceptual way of working and unveils previously unseen documentation of her deeply personal process of creation.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, this spectacular volume of the artist’s early paintings and sculptures is being reissued. The paintings from his so-called Blue and Rose periods to early Cubism, created between 1901 and 1907, are milestones on Picasso’s path to becoming the most famous artist of the twentieth century. In 2019, the Fondation Beyeler presented some 80 masterpieces from renowned museums and private collections in its most prestigious exhibition to this date. They are not only among the most valuable works of art ever to exist, but are widely viewed as some of modernism’s most beautiful and emotive artworks. This volume brings the early work of this exceptional artist to life in a unique way.
Architectural patronage was crucial for the thinking of Aby Warburg and his circle. In Hamburg the purpose-designed Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, completed in 1926, organized Warburg’s remarkable library. From 1927 Warburg developed ideas about orientation in the radical transformation of a disused water tower into the Hamburg Planetarium. After the Warburg Institute transferred to London in 1933 this pattern of seminal architectural commissioning continued, including projects designed by the avant-garde practice Tecton during the 1930s, and culminating in the construction of the library’s present home at Woburn Square, Bloomsbury in 1958. Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge follows this history, using archive photographs, architectural drawings and a series of architectural models to show how the Warburg scholars projected a connection between their own physical occupancy of architectural space and their shared ideas about intellectual order, cultural survival, and memory.
Celebrated and sought out during his lifetime for his emotionally charged seascapes and ships, Anton Melbye gradually fell into oblivion after his death and has only been rediscovered in recent years. Especially in his paintings of the open sea, which he began working on in 1846, the Danish artist developed his seascapes into a mirror of the soul, of the longings and ambitions of his time. Lacking any sign of people, ships, or coastline for the first time in art history, the shifting surface of the ocean, with its uniformity, impenetrability, and endless space, takes aim at the viewer’s uncertainty, becoming a projection surface for existential reflection. Now, Regine Gerhardt’s new standard reference work on the life and work of this unique painter is at last available.
Ash Keating has made an international name for himself with spectacular paintings of entire buildings and huge walls. Like few others, he has perfected the use of fire extinguishers as a tool for his abstract works in public spaces, leaving room for chance and improvisation. Inspired by the light and colors of his native Australia, the energetic color of his painting with their fluid, vertical gradients reveals an almost transcendent longing. In a public, performative action in August 2023, he transforms the former caretaker’s house in the park surrounding the Museum Langmatt into a huge, three-dimensional artwork. He will complement his presentation with new paintings scattered throughout the park, placing them in dialogue with the French Impressionists from the museum’s collection in its historic interiors. This publication provides an exemplary insight into the artist’s multifaceted oeuvre and documents his exhibition at the Museum Langmatt.
Cycling is not just a form of locomotion. Bike culture is in constant interaction with fashion, music, design, politics and urban planning. Cycling is a way of life and a form of protest. The Easy Rider Road Book shows the wild, subversive side of cycling and the powerful bond it can create between people. It aims to inspire utopian thinking and show where the bike can take us. The pioneers of this new bike culture can be found in subcultures across the globe.
In New York and Berlin, bike punks are building both fantastic and sustainable vehicles out of scrap metal and old bike frames. Riding a bike is a form of emancipation: When thousands of teenagers ride through London during BikeStormz, they are expressing their hope for a better future. Similarly, the Chilangos Lowbike Club’s Sunday rides through Mexico City are a symbol against violence. The bicycle is a promise of freedom. This book presents the bicycle as a vehicle for communal action that has the potential to change life in the city and, ultimately, the city itself.
We quite rightly celebrate human creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, but too often our triumphs in science, engineering and technology come at monumental cost. The human story is more often a tale of conflict and despair than of nurture, love, and coexistence. It would be easy to read the human story as one of tragic hubris. Yet it does not end here. We stand on the threshold of the future wondering which way the dice will fall. Our wager with posterity is that human ingenuity, intelligence, and resilience of spirit are powerful enough to insist upon a very different future for the human story. Prix Pictet: Human features over 100 outstanding works of contemporary photography by many of the world’s most acclaimed photographers.
