ART

Syntax and Society - The Abraaj Group Art Prize 2016

Sternberg Press 2016 ISBN 9783956792304 Acqn 26118
Pb 19x25cm 264pp 101col ills 21
Contributions by Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Dina Danish, Clare Davies, Nav Haq,
Rabeya Jalil
This double publication offers further investigation into the work of the recipients and shortlisted
artists of ninth instalment of The Abraaj Group Art Prize. Syntax and Society, the first volume,
reflects on the exhibition premise that considered the structure and meaning of language and the
role it plays in society, with a focus on the work of the three shortlisted artists, Dina Danish,
Mahmoud Khaled, and Basir Mahmood. Danish playfully questions how language is structured by
working with tongue-twisters and phrases from popular cinema; Khaled reflects on the
relationship between artistic forms and political history to reconsider the representations of class
and stereotypes in public space; and Mahmood deliberates on the notion of beginning and
endings, from the sending of letters that are never received to situations where disused artifacts
of one culture are newly adapted by another.
The second volume, Oh Shining Star Testify, focuses on the work of award-winning artist duo
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Their new video work commissioned for the prize, Only
the beloved keeps our secrets, examines how modern day technologies can enable a continued
existence for the deceased. Found material from a variety of sources, including images, texts and
testimonies, are collaged together to suggest a Palestinian narrative of collective history. This
book additionally includes a glossary of quotations from the various philosophical and literary
writers that have informed this duos working process, as well as images from their previous
trilogy of video and installation works.

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Eva Grubinger - Black Diamond Bay

Sternberg Press 2016 ISBN 9783956792175 Acqn 26120
Pb 20x29cm 28pp 10col ills 4.95
Eva Grubingers exhibition Black Diamond Bay explores the idea of psychological landscapes
a physical or mental journeythat evokes ideas of escapism and the search for the self.
Released in conjunction with the show, this catalogue features visual documentation of the
exhibition by Sylvain Deleu, and an accompanying text by Fato stek that comments on
Grubingers focus on parallels between global migration and sexual adventuring, contradictions in
the simultaneous pull toward escapism and discovery, and the employment of objects as
indicators of place. As stek writes: Black Diamond Bay posits a refinement of thought that
reflects on the dualistic condition of human nature: we want to see the unknown, yet we also want
a safe shore to land upon.

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Ina Blom - The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology
Sternberg Press 2016 ISBN 9783956791895 Acqn 26171
Pb 16x23cm 244pp 51ills 27col 18.95
In this innovative take on early video art, Ina Blom considers the widespread notion that analogue
video was endowed with lifelike memory and agency. Reversing standard accounts of artistic
uses of video, she follows the reflexive unfolding of a technology that seemed to deploy artists
and artistic frameworks in the creation of new technical and social realities. She documents,
among other things, videos emergence through the framework of painting, its identification with
biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its
construction of new realms of labour and collaboration. Enlisting a distinctly media-archaeological
approach, Bloms new bookher second from Sternberg Pressis a brilliant look at the
relationship between video memory and social ontology.
Ina Blom is a professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas,
University of Oslo, as well as visiting professor at the Department of Art History, University of
Chicago.

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Susanne Kriemann Duskdust

Sternberg Press 2016 ISBN 9783956792366 Acqn 26172
Hb 19x30cm 86pp col ills 14.95
Edited by Susanne Kriemann, Lvia Pldi
Texts by Kirsty Bell, Lvia Pldi, Jussi Parikka, Maria Barnas
Duskdust is an artist book by Susanne Kriemann. It takes as its starting point the former industrial
site of limestone mining at Furilden peninsula on the northeastern coast of Gotland, Swedens
biggest island. It is informed by the artists ongoing preoccupation with photography, labor, and
archaeology and includes photographs taken during her residencies and site visits, archival
material as well as text contributions by invited authors. Writer Kirsty Bell traveled to Gotland to
follow the artists research trails while media theorist Jussi Parikka situates Kriemanns artistic
approach within current discourse on geology and media. Maria Barnas wrote a poem based on
Kriemanns walk through a tunnel at the industrial site. Lvia Pldi, director of BAC Baltic Art
Center in Visby, Sweden gives an introduction to The Site Residency program and the specifities
of selected sites in relationship to Kriemanns work.

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Olivia Plender - Rise Early, Be Industrious

Sternberg Press 2016 ISBN 9783956791741 Acqn 26173
Pb 17x25cm 256pp 190ills 95col 25
Edited by Remco de Blaaij, Gerrie van Noord, Olivia Plender
Texts by Angus Cameron, Maeve Connolly, Lars Bang Larsen, Olivia Plender, Tirdad Zolghadr
As the first significant overview of the work by artist Olivia Plender, this monograph navigates
through the evolving attitudes to historical and contemporary forms of communication and
education that her research based practice has explored for the last ten years. From the
reappraisal of Plenders project Google Office (2010), in which artistic agency meets Liberation
Management, to rethinking of the Open University as a model where the educational role of
television and its relation to the public was reconfigured, her work is a critical envisioning of
labours extensive influence; addressing the work ethic embedded into mainstream educational
systems during the industrial era, and the alternative movements that placed creativity and the
arts as central to an attempt at emancipation. In specially commissioned essays, as well as
interviews, archival material, and new texts by the artist, this publication addresses the in-depth
investigation of Plenders research and artwork into educational models and their relation to
social organization.

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John Douglas Millar - Brutalist Readings. Essays on Literature

Sternberg Press 2016 ISBN 9783956791550 Acqn 26197
Pb 15x21cm 188pp 15.95
Literature is tiredstretched between a business model based on bestsellers and the literary
fiction of the Sunday supplements, on the one hand, and the late postmodern literature
department, on the other. We need something new. In recent decades, the art world has become
the place where radical and experimental writing is taking place. Terms such as the countertextual and extraliterary, as well as the conceptual turn in poetics and emergence of so-called
art writing, have attempted to capture something of the complexity of writing in the post-medium
digital age.
In a series of essays, John Douglas Millar explores the influence of art on writing and writing on
art, and contemporary phenomena of artists who are writers, fictions that are theories, and
narratives that are objects. Millar attempts to reenergize the category of literature and
demonstrate the political urgency of writing.

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Transparenzen/Transparencies - The Ambivalence of a New Visibility

Sternberg Press 2016 ISBN 9783956792236 Acqn 26218
Pb 24x34cm 162pp col ills 21
Edited by Simone Neuenschwander, Thomas Thiel
With contributions by Emmanuel Alloa, Nel Beloufa, Clare Birchall, Juliette Blightman, Ryan
Gander, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, David Horvitz, Metahaven, Simone Neuenschwander,
Katja Novitskova, Yuri Pattison, Manfred Schneider, Thomas Thiel
The globalized world seems at once transparent and opaque. The exhibition project
Transparencies examined the cultural facets and atmospheres of these (non-)transparencies.
The two-part, joint exhibition project in Bielefeld and Nuremberg was dedicated to developments
in transparent society, asking how these are reflected in the current work by contemporary
artists. The paradigm of transparency and the ambivalence of the term was addressed by
participating artists in multiple, diverse ways. This book documents both exhibitions and outlines
all of the contributions to this substantial project. Conceptually designed by Metahaven, it
contains artistic statements and scientific essays that encourage an ongoing discussion of the
subject.

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