Motto Berlin

COUTURE
Arnaud Pyvka

Dimanche 29 Septembre 15h00-21h00

Motto
38, Rue du Vertbois
75003 Paris


Pyvka

The prison bookbinding service
Björn Larsson
TOXOPLASMA PRESS

Tokyo Monochromes
Yuki Aizawa
Nugg Film

Tokio Monochromes is a collection of 100 black and white prints capturing the essence of Tokyo through an observational lens. The project explores the interaction of natural light with man-made structures, aiming to freeze moments in time and reveal the hidden beauty of the city.

Survival is a Promise The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Ed.)
Allen Lane

This stunning new account of Lorde’s life and work illuminates how, for Lorde, survival was not simply about getting through, or about resilience. It was about how to live on, and with, a planet in transformation. Lorde’s commitment to justice was intimately connected to her deep engagement with the natural world; with the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For Lorde, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be on earth, and how to live fully as a Black feminist le***an warrior poet.

In Survival Is a Promise, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives, illuminates the eternal life of Audre Lorde. Her life and work swell to become a cosmic force, showing us the grand possibility of life together on earth.

Lost in Translation
Sean Peleman
ALAS!

Derived from the short film ‘Lost in Translation’ (2024) by Sean Peleman and Tamara Sam

One-time edition of 100

MORF
Hendrik Hegray
FLTMSTPC
2012

Die Dornevögel
Hendrik Hegray @ Motto Berlin
Opening Sunday Sept. 15, 2024
From 6pm

+

Z.B. Aids a.k.a. Valerie Smith a.k.a H.H. = sounds from the incense burner, active since 1999, solo electronic angina from Paris, France.

Performance at 7pm sharp.

ISOLATED PARTS
Agnieszka Grodzińska

Last day to see the show!

Motto Berlin
Skalitzerstr. 68
U1 Schlesisches Tor

STRETCHY @ Motto Berlin
September 11, 2024

Magazine launch 18-21:00

Motto Books Invites to celebrate the first issue of STRETCHY, hosted by Alicia Frankovich 

18:00 (Sharp) - Screening: Middle of Beyond by Keren Cytter

19:30 - I’m a Woman by Andreas Schlaegel 

20:00 - Room Service by Laris Maasas

20:30 - Free improv by HausWasser 

With ongoing Performances by Chiaki Nakaune, Alla Zhyvotova, and works by Amarin Lawton, Merit Trap and Anton Schmutzler

Stretchy is an Art Magazine that is made purely of art works, it includes fiction, poetry, drawings, and Photography. Participants of the first issue - Merit Trapp, Keren Cytter, Pascal Leyer, Laris Maas, Minhae Kim, Anton Schmutzler, Mira Hyein Sung, Jonathan Hinz, Jana Nestler, Lim Kim, Birthe Langner, Rosa Glaser, Amarin Lawton, Chiaki Nakaune, Kenske Miyano, Alla Zhyvotova

Bone Marrow
ArtCenter College of Design

FIRST COURSE

BORBORYGMUS I
HUNGRY
HOW TO GET OVER SOMEONE
A MEAL FOR TERRENCE BREWER
RECIPE FOR THE DEVIL’S TANGO
BRIDGE
QUIETUDE

SECOND COURSE

BORBORYGMUS II
THE DINING ROOM
MOTHER’S GENTLE NUDGE
I THINK THIS IS WHY I’M SCARED TO HAVE CHILDREN
A SNOW WHITE STORY
SPECTIES
INDIGESTION
BLACK CORD
THE SOUND OF CRUNCHING
I REMEMBER DENSE FOG
NEW YEAR POMELO
MY BELLY IS FULL OF SPIDERS

THIRD COURSE

BORBORYGMUS III
I LOOK FORWARD TO EATING FEARLESSLY
SPICE AND SORROW
THE CIRCLE
MY LITTLE MOTH
REDACTED
PEAS

Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biography
Staci Robinson
Crown

The authorized biography of the legendary artist, Tupac Shakur, a “touching, empathetic portrait” (The New York Times) of his life and powerful legacy, fully illustrated with photos, mementos, handwritten poetry, musings, and more.

In Tupac Shakur, author and screenwriter Staci Robinson—who knew Tupac from their shared circle of high school friends in Marin City, California, and who was entrusted by his mother, Afeni Shakur, to share his story—unravels the myths and unpacks the complexities that have shadowed Tupac’s existence. Decades in the making, this book pulls back the curtain to reveal a powerful story of a life defined by politics and art—a man driven by equal parts brilliance and impulsiveness, steeped in the rich intellectual tradition of Black empowerment, and unafraid to utter raw truths about race in America.

Passing By Beijing
Cai Dongdong

“The pictures in the book,” Cai writes in the afterword, “are a selection of color photos I took between 2002 and 2022.

They bear witness to my move from northwest China to Beijing

I have been living in Beijing for more than 20 years, but it has always been a strange city to me.”

Consequently, the photographs in Passing by Beijing are very heterogeneous.
They include landscapes and cityscapes, candid and posed portraits, spontaneously observed still lives, and much more.
Ordinarily, it’s a challenge to pull together a coherent and meaningful edit from such a heterogeneous set of photographs.

Casa Encantada: A Portrait of the Fight for Housing in Belo Horizonte Going Through the Pandemic
Renato Baruq

The book “A Portrait of the Fight for Housing in Belo Horizonte Going Through the Pandemic” brings together illustrations by Renato Baruq and photographs by Cadu Passos. During 2022 and 2023, two Brazilian artists and organizers documents almost 20 old abandoned houses in the central region of Belo Horizonte that became living social and cultural spaces for people in vulnerable situations during the pandemic. The work is accompanied by interviews conducted between 2022 and 2023, which tell the story of these properties and their inhabitants in their own voices.

Baruq is an illustrator, writer and editor. As organizer, lives at the squat Kasa Invisível, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He is also member as editor of the infoshop 1000contra and publishes in several anarchist outlets in Brazil and US.

Judy Zhu by Coca Dai
Coca Dai
Kinakaal Forlag

Shanghai artist Coca Dai’s series Judy Zhu 2008-2015 began as daily snapshots of his girlfriend. Over time, it developed into an intimate narrative on contemporary womanhood. Made through eight years and entirely using film cameras, the black and white and color photographs share an unadulterated directness, with each image inviting us into a private moment as it unfolds between two lovers confronting each other either side of a camera. In this way, Judy Zhui s an in-depth record of a maturing relationship, as this couple grows together from being young teenage lovers into adulthood, and then become parents in contemporary China.

The series, comprised almost exclusively of portraits of Judy Zhu – a picture space she shares only on occasion with their son and a friend or two – combines to an accumulation of intimacy, anger, happiness and boredom that come before us, one after another, as the emotions were lived and experienced in each moment captured. The series naturally contains glimpses of less “photographic” moments, such as Judy eating dinner, riding the elevator, sleeping, or returning from a night out. In each instance, where Coca Dai as the photographer is both participant and observer, his images follow a tradition of uncompromisingly honest photography, full of veracity and passion, and at times cruel in its authenticity, by artists such as Nan Goldin or Wolfgang Tillmans. Judy Zhu follows this close focus on an intimate subject, from the longing gaze of loving eyes, to the palor of sickness on the brow and the heat of frustration flushing cheeks. As such, the story of Judy Zhu poignantly reflects the trials, ecstasies, and melancholy experienced by women today, be that as individuals, as a family member, or through social interactions, and in terms of personality, sexuality and motherhood.

ARTMargins Vol. 13.1 ; Socialism In Contemporary African Art

February 2024.

Introduction
Socialism in Contemporary African Art: Butchering the End of Time
Álvaro Luís Lima

Articles
“We Need a Lighthouse Philosopher”: Filipa César and Louis Henderson’s Sunstone (2018) and the Portuguese Genealogy of Lens-Based Media
Delinda Collier

Make Me a Picture of the Future: Massinissa Selmani’s 1000 Socialist Villages (2015)
Natasha Marie Llorens

The Mythography of Socialism in Contemporary Angolan Art
Nadine Siegert

The Politics and Aesthetics of Liberation: Revolution and Its Aftermath in Contemporary Artistic Practice from and about Lusophone Africa
Ana Balona de Oliveira

Abstract States: Modernism in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey
Gemma Sharpe

Artist Project
As the Nile Flows or the Camel Walks
Dawit L. Petros, Black Athena Collective

Document
Introduction to “Cultural Offensive of the Working Classes” (1977)
Polly Savage

Cultural Offensive of the Working Classes
Tempo, Polly Savage

Becoming Fossil
Nicole Urban

Leporello instruction booklet / field guide

Risograph and UV print on Munken, cardboard and transfer paper
Numbered edition of 45

This instruction booklet includes drawings, photographs and text. It is meant to
be used as an intimate field guide to open up one’s mind to more-than-human
processes and temporalities, in this case, fossilization. The typography
becomes increasingly flattened as the text proceeds, dreaming of a great weight.
Questions that lead to the making of this guide: How to imagine timescales that
differ greatly from our own? How can we approach an overwhelming, distant topic
and foster a more intimate, gentle understanding? How might we think ahead by
stretching our minds and bodies into the distant past.

Developed during AIR at Frans Masereel Centrum

DATA METAMORPHOSIS
Annika Schönfeldt

How does image content behave to text, how can AI extend or reinterpret data?
The project shows a variation of how imagesand text can be combined and transformed through various AI tools, machine learningalgorithms and experimentation through editing and reprasentation techniques same as analysis of the data core.Manipulation and analysation, in order to create new works that blur the boundaries between the different approaches with data.
The intention is to create a body of work that reflects the process of data metamorphosis.Each work is seen as a fragment that is deformed and transformed through the process, leadingto new levels and questioning the finality of the work itself.

The Observable Universe
Heather McCalden
Fitzcarraldo Editions

A moving memoir of a young woman’s reckoning with her parents’ absence, the virus that took them, and what it means to search for meaning in a hyper-connected world

In the early 1990s, Heather McCalden lost her parents to AIDS. Orphaned by age ten, she was raised by her grandmother in Los Angeles, a fragmented city, also known as ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, unmoored by grief, she begins exploring the history of HIV as a way to deal with her loss. This leads her to discover that AIDS and the internet developed along parallel timelines, lending truth to the saying “going viral.” Chasing this idea through anecdotes, TV shows, scientific papers, Wikipedia entries, and internet history, McCalden forms a synaptic experience of what happened to her family, one that leads to an unexpected discovery about who her parents might have been.

Heather McCalden is a multidisciplinary artist working with text, image and movement. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art (2015) and has exhibited at Roulette Intermedium, Pierogi Gallery, National Sawdust, Testbed 1, and Seattle Symphony. In 2021 she won the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize. The Observable Universe is her first book.

Path To Insurrection
Chris Suspect
King Koala

On January 6, 2021, thousands of Trump Supporters descended on Washington, DC, for a rally promoted by President Donald Trump. The prophetic words above tweeted by the president seem like an understatement in hindsight. It was on this day, fueled by months of misinformation, lies, and falsehoods about the 2020 election results, that Democracy’s foundation was shaken to its core. As I marched towards the Capitol with the rally’s attendees, I never expected the vitriol and aggression that met me at the Capitol steps. Hundreds of Trump supporters were storming the police barricades while shouting Vice President Mike Pence and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi were traitors. Many came prepared for battle with their own bear spray, mace, tasers, and baseball bats. Some carried nooses and others freely exhibited symbols and flags of white supremacy. I focused most of my attention on the west side of the Capitol. Trump supporters first breached the stands that were set up for Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20th. To my left, they started scaling the walls of the building with their hands and rope systems. Within 30 minutes, barricades were torn from the Capitol Police’s hands and they were forced to retreat inside. Rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, and flash-bang grenades did little to deter the mob which had now grown to thousands participating in the assault. Cell phone service was down, but word trickled out that some Trump supporters gained access to the building and a woman had been shot. This news further inflamed the people outside and they doubled down on their attacks on police and attempts to enter through other doors and windows. It wasn’ t until later that night that news emerged that 4 others had died. The scene from that day was surreal like you were on the set of an apocalyptic movie about the end of America. And in a way it was, the United States will never be the same.

– Chris Suspect

Ilya Kabakov: On Art
Matthew Jesse Jackson (Ed.)
Chicago University Press

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov was a galvanizing figure in Moscow’s underground art community, ultimately gaining international prominence as the “leader” of a band of artists known as the Moscow Conceptual Circle. Throughout this time, he created texts that he would distribute among his friends, and by the late 1990s his written production amounted to hundreds of pages.
Devoted to themes that range from the “cosmism” of pre-Revolutionary Russian modernism to the philosophical implications of Moscow’s garbage, Kabakov’s handmade booklets were typed out on paper, then stapled or sewn together using rough butcher paper for their covers. Among these writings are faux Socialist Realist verses, theoretical explorations, art historical analyses, accompaniments to installation projects, and transcripts of dialogues between the artist and literary theorists, critics, journalists, and other artists.
This volume offers for the first time in English the most significant texts written by Kabakov. The writings have been expressly selected for this English-language volume and there exists no equivalent work in any language.

Gopf
Erik Steinbrecher
jb libros y proyectos

WARREN NEIDICH BOOK PRESENTATION @ MOTTO BERLIN, SUNDAY AUGUST 25th 2024

We have the pleasure to invite you to an improvisational performative reading event in which the audience chooses what is read and discussed.

Please join us from 4 to 7pm, food and drinks will be served.

(This is a kids friendly event)


—

GLOSSARY OF COGNITIVE ACTIVISM (For a Not So-Distant Future)
By Warren Neidich
Eris Press; Columbia University Press (4th revised edition, February 2024)
 
A repository of vital knowledge and conceptual therapeutics, a toolbox
for the willing and the needy
—Anders Dunker, Los Angeles Review of Books
 
We are at one of those turning points that divide history into a ‘before’ and an ‘after.’ The ongoing transition from an information economy to an economy based in the workings of the brain and the mind has radical implications for human freedom and creativity, both of which are under threat from a rapacious, neurologically-oriented form of capitalism. Such moments require new languages in order for the unnamed, the unsayable, and the misunderstood to become known.
 
This is the task taken on by Warren Neidich’s Glossary of Cognitive Activism, now appearing in an expanded and fully revised fourth edition. Each of its entries—which range in topic from the central nervous system and brain-computer interfaces to ChatGPT and conceptual art—explicates a key term in contemporary culture. The cumulative effect is astonishing: while every entry can profitably be read in isolation, the Glossary as a whole amounts to a brilliant account of the material brain’s entanglement with its surrounding environment.
 
For Neidich the human brain is far more than grey matter encased in a skull: it is profoundly integrated with the social, political, and cultural phenomena that constitute the world in which we live. For this reason, human cognition is profoundly vulnerable to the new despotism that is seeking in various ways to reshape it, but it also has the capacity to serve as the site of potent acts of resistance.

Ocean of Sound
David Toop
Serpent’s Tail

The classic account of ambient music, with a new foreword by Michel Faber.

David Toop’s extraordinary work of sonic history travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to the megalopolis of Tokyo via the work of artists as diverse as Brian Eno, Sun Ra, Erik Satie, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk and Brian Wilson.

Beginning in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed, Ocean of Sound channels the competing instincts of 20th century music into an exhilarating, path-breaking account of ambient sound.

‘A meditation on the development of modern music, there’s no single term that is adequate to describe what Toop has accomplished here ... mixing interviews, criticism, history, and memory, Toop moves seamlessly between sounds, styles, genres, and eras’ Pitchfork’s ‘60 Favourite Music Books’