ROMA Autumn-Winter 2019

Autumn-Winter 2019

Geert Goiris Suki Seokyeong Kang Marinus Boezem Paulien Oltheten Batia Suter Arthur Ou Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen The Serving Library 2019/20 (Bruno Munari Obvious Code) Ariel Schlesinger Karel Martens Diego Tonus Experimental Jetset

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Roma Publications Nieuwe Herengracht 11a 1011 RK Amsterdam The Netherlands www.romapublications.org info@romapublications.org Distribution: www.ideabooks.nl

Prices are sometimes subject to change. No rights may be derived from the information found in this brochure.

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ROMA 357

Geert Goiris World Without Us

172 p, ills colour 21.3 × 25.5 cm, English ISBN 9789492811578 Euro 49.50 (incl. 9% VAT)

The downfall of the world is probably one of the oldest human conceptions.

Representations of the End are often embedded in religious narratives predicting an apocalyptic end in which only the righteous will survive the final judgment. Since the end of the Second World War, a major shift occurred. The apocalypse is no longer a punishment of the gods or of God, but it is man himself who has gained the expertise to exterminate himself. This book is the final piece of a practice based Ph.D research in the arts, conducted at the Royal academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, in collaboration with the University of Antwerp.

Design: Roger Willems

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ROMA 359

Suki Seokyeong Kang Black Mat Oriole

240 p, ills colour 22 × 29 cm, English/Korean ISBN 9789492811547 Euro 32.00 (incl. 9% VAT)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Black Mat Oriole’ curated

by Alex Klein and Kate Kraczon, presented at the ICA, Pennsylvania in 2018. This exhibition was the first occasion in the United States to experience Suki Seokyeong Kang’s ambitious and multilayered body of work, grounded by the rich histories of Korean painting, craft, and choreography.

Design: Sulki & Min

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ROMA 364

Marinus Boezem Into the Air

112 p, ills colour/bw 23 × 30 cm, English ISBN 9789492811615 Euro 39.50 (incl. 9% VAT)

Publication about the work of Marinus Boezem, named after the installation Boezem developed for the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam in 2016.

Boezem is considered to be one of the founders of Dutch conceptual art. A certain levity is quite typical of his work, for which he often makes use of intangible elements such as wind, air and transparency. He has a profound fascination with Gothic architecture, particularly cathedrals, which he sees as a metaphor for the human desire for spirituality.

Cathedrals embody our desire to fly, to rise up and leave all earthly things behind. One of Boezem’s most famous works is the Green Cathedral (1978-2016) in the Dutch province of Flevoland. Still visible today, this project consists of 178 poplars planted in the form of the full-size plan of Reims Cathedral. The result is a cathedral of trees, with the sky as a canopy. This plan has become Boezem’s personal logo. With text contributions by: Germano Celant, Nathalie Zonnenberg, Lorenzo Benedetti, Jacqueline Grandjean and Lorenzo Bruni.

Design: Louis Lüthi

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ROMA 365

Paulien Oltheten NON

84 p, ills colour 20 × 25 cm, English ISBN 9789492811585 Euro 20.00 (incl. 9% VAT)

NON is a work in book form by visual artist Paulien Oltheten, inspired by a graffito found in the Les Olympiades area (13th arrondisement) in Paris.

The book consists of a photo series and an audio transcript in which random passers-by give new meanings to the word ‘non’ (no). It playfully explores what happens when this compact statement is taken from a concrete wall to travel freely between the social and the political.

Design: Felix Salut

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ROMA 366

Batia Suter Hexamiles (Mont-Voisin)

256 p, ills colour/bw 24 × 30.4 cm, English ISBN 9789492811592 Euro 45.00 (incl. 9% VAT)

Hexamiles (Mont-Voisin) has been published on the occasion of Batia Suter’s exhibition at the Mauvoisin Dam in Switzerland (the highest in Europe). For this artist book, Suter focused on her ever-expanding archive of scanned landscape images, which had already started to play an important role in Parallel Encyclopedia #2 (Roma 284, 2016). Many of those images depict wastelands, alternating between romantic and menacing views which simultaneously create sensations of majesty and disorientation. By layering them over each other, a variety of disparate geological and biological environments merge into composite landscapes we might only recognise from dreams and fairy tales. In the book’s sequence, a kind of adventurous journey takes shape, pitched between an odyssey, a safari and paradise. The book’s title is derived from the term Hexameter, a poetic form of writing used in Homer’s Odyssey. MontVoisin, which also serves as the title for the exhibition, is inspired by different spellings used by 18th and 19th century travellers to describe Mauvoisin.

Design: Batia Suter, Roger Willems 7 / 16

ROMA 367

Arthur Ou The World Is All That Is The Case

56 p, ills colour 18.5 × 26.5 cm, English ISBN 9789492811608 Euro 25.00 (incl. 9% VAT)

Photographs by Arthur Ou of artists reading Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

With corresponding quotes from Wittgenstein and an essay by Walter Benn Michaels.

“Pictures of people reading aren’t simply (or necessarily or even usually) portraits. In fact, if the default setting of the portrait involves posing for the photographer, it would be more fitting to say that a picture of someone reading is a kind of antiportrait.” Walter Benn Michaels Design: Julie Peeters

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ROMA 369

Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen On Gestures of Doing Nothing

128 p, ills colour 24 Ă— 30.4 cm, English ISBN 9789492811639 Euro 25.00 (incl. 9% VAT)

On Gestures of Doing Nothing documents a performance staged

by Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen. The performance took place on April 15 and 16, 2019, in their exhibition The Floor is Lava in Marres in Maastricht. It consisted of eleven performers presenting a series of gestures. The performance - along with the exhibition itself - was photographed by Petra Stavast.

This publication was conceived and developed in collaboration with art historian and curator Arnisa Zeqo.

Design: Elisabeth Klement

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ROMA 370

The Serving Library 2019/20 (Bruno Munari Obvious Code)

144 p, ills colour 21 × 29.7 cm, English ISBN 9789492811653 Euro 29.50 (incl. 9% VAT)

The 2019/20 issue of The Serving Library Annual is entirely devoted to the late Italian designer, artist, inventor and polymath Bruno Munari.

The core of the annual is the first English translation of Obvious Code, the 1971 collection of Munari’s own writings, sketches and poems about his own work, published by arrangement with Corraini, who issued the book’s anastatic edition in 2017. It includes iconic design objects such as the Abitacolo, ground-breaking artworks such as his 1952 series of hand-made projection slides, and little known rhymes about the art market, as well as an original piece from his “unreadable books” series. In the margins, dozens of artists, designers, writers and curators have been invited to annotate Munari’s texts as a testament to the depth of the influence exerted on international art by an often underacknowledged pioneer, whose visual experiments were so iconic as to become a selfevident part of visual culture, an anonymous invention: an obvious code.

Edited by Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Vincenzo Latronico, and David Reinfurt.

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ROMA 371

Ariel Schlesinger Hands Make Mistakes

136 p, ills colour 19 × 25 cm, English ISBN 9789492811479 Euro 28.00 (incl. 9% VAT)

Hands Make Mistakes provides a kaleidoscopic insight into the making and individual voice of Ariel Schlesinger. Edited by Rivet, this book provides context and covers a broad range of Schlesinger’s projects, from adolescent doodles to complex collaborations. Two new essays (by Barbara Casavecchia and Adam Kleinman), a conversationin-anexhibition between Abraham Cruzvillegas and Catalina Lozano, an introspective text about the reconstruction of a Japanese temple, a reprint of Vilém Flusser’s essay “The Gesture of Making” and reproductions of dreamy gallery texts written by Sarah Demeuse are set in 54 full color reproductions of past and recent exhibitions.

Design: Roger Willems and Dongyoung Lee

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ROMA 372

Karel Martens Re-Printed Matter

280 p, ills colour 17.3 Ă— 23.2 cm, English/Dutch ISBN 9789492811646 Euro 35.00 (incl. 9% VAT)

The work of Karel Martens occupies an intriguing place in the present European art-and-design landscape.

His work is both personal and experimental. At the same time, it is publicly answerable. Over the decades of his practice, Martens has been prolific as a designer of books.

He has also made contributions in a wide range of design commissions: including stamps, coins, signs on buildings. Intimately connected with this design work has been his practice as an artist. This started with geometric and kinetic constructions, and developed in work with the very material of paper. Over a long period he has been making monoprints. This book looks for new ways to show and discuss the work of a designer and artist, and is offered in the same spirit of experiment and dialogue that characterizes the work it presents.

Its first edition was published on the occasion of the award to Karel Martens of the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art. In response to continued demand, the book has been extended to 2019 and appears now in this fourth edition presenting almost sixty years of practice.

Design: Jaap van Triest, Karel Martens

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ROMA 373

Experimental Jetset Interne Correspondentie 2

no ISBN Euro 45.00 (incl. 9% VAT)

Second issue of an irregularly published archive of documents related to Experimental Jetset.

Limited edition of 100 copies.

Design: Experimental Jetset

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ROMA 374

Diego Tonus and Anonymous Fragments of a Conversation with a Counterfeiter

160 p, ills colour/bw 16 × 24 cm, English ISBN 9789492811660 Euro 28.00 (incl. 9% VAT)

Diego Tonus translated informal encounters he had with an alleged counterfeiter into separate artworks.

Each holds a secret within. A work so simple in its conception but complex in what it does. It follows meticulously a trajectory or narrative of suspicion that gradually unfolds to its audience, and at the same time carries an air of mystery.

The publication itself serves as legal document and body of proof that Diego Tonus has registered the practices and strategies of Anonymous as his ideas in the register of the Benelux Office for Intellectual Property in order to make them available to an international audience.

Design: Roger Willems, Dongyoung Lee

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ROMA 375

Experimental Jetset Full Scale False Scale

280 p, ills colour/bw 11 × 18 cm, English ISBN 9789492811677 Euro 22.00 (incl. 9% VAT)

Four years after Statement and Counter-Statement (2015), Experimental Jetset returns with their second paperback for Roma Publications. Whereas the previous publication had a more overall monographic scope, Full Scale False Scale focuses on a single project: the large, site-specific installation that the studio recently created for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, commissioned to coincide with the museum’s reopening in October 2019. Part reader, part collage, the book forms a subjective archive of documentary material, just as constructed as the installation itself – a research project that took them from esoteric colour theories to dark political alliances, and from modernist diagonals to postmodern arches.

Design: Experimental Jetset

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Upcoming: Giorgio Andreotta Calò Mark Manders Marc Nagtzaam Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky Jßrgen Bergbauer Navid Nuur Ari Marcopoulos among others

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