Sturm

Erik Steinbrecher

STURM reveals the spontaneous one-day-mission of Berlin-based photographer Erik Steinbrecher: to ‘sightsee’ the lake of Zurich.
Like Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Man and the Sea’ waiting for the big fish to appear, Steinbrecher, on a steamboat for hours, was hoping for wind that would set the water in motion so he could catch the emerging movements with his camera. But the lake was calm that day. A bottle of KÄPTEN’S WY helped the artist to pass the hours and eventually find a solution to this unfavorable situation. The same evening, Steinbrecher returned to Berlin, content with the result, and a little drunk, too. The photographs of this adventure are assembled in a booklet and appear as frames of a film, hence creating an emulation of Steinbrecher’s experience on the lake this very day.

Steinbrecher (*1963 in Basel) has released numerous books and printed matter, which always expose a strong conceptual idea and function as independent art works. STURM is the second publication in the series of Kodoji Press artist books.

The Daily Exhaustion

Anouk Kruithof

THE DAILY EXHAUSTION is a small newspaper, which contains 23 self-portraits of an obsessed workaholic artist, who has reached the sweaty emotional state of exhaustion. When you browse through the publication, you will pass a gradual color spectrum, which Kruithof considers the stratification of human energy. THE DAILY EXHAUSTION confirms quite clearly that a photo or a photo series is invented as a conscious construction, but simultaneously questions/challenges that statement, because the pictures are credible and honest. This causes confusion and raises the question of what THE DAILY EXHAUSTION actually is. In her current and future exhibitions Anouk Kruithof displays THE DAILY EXHAUSTION newspapers as a large pile.

Anouk Kruithof (1981) was born in Dordrecht, the Netherlands. She attended the Berlin artist in residence program Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 2008/2009 and lives in Berlin since. Recently her work was shown in the group exhibition Quickscan #01 at the Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam in 2010.
www.anoukkruithof.nl

A Very Wobble Unstable Drop

28.5 X 40 CM, 8 PAGES, 26 B/W AND COLOR PLATES, NEWSPRINT, ENGLISH
TEXTS BY PHILIPPE PIROTTE, MARCO POLONI, SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
KODOJI PRESS, Baden, 2010, FIRST EDITION, ISBN 978–3–03747–038–1
IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE KUNSTHALLE BERN

Furniture Bondage

Melanie Bonajo

In order to illustrate the complex and often oppressive relationship that exists human beings and our material things, Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo contorts, binds, balances, and burdens her female models with the objects of everyday life: chairs, bookshelves, aerosol cans, food, empty containers, and cleaning supplies. Her living sculptures evoke a visceral response; as a viewer, you can't help but identify with the human body laden with a weighty suitcase or struggling to balance a tray full of objects and garbage that might be needed again someday. Furniture Bondage presents 22 full-page photographs of such pieces, followed by a list of participating models and an essay by the artist entitled "Floccinaucinihilipilification."

Melanie Bonajo. As Thrown Down from Heaven, is a photo series that focuses on a theme that Bonajo continually explores; the relationships that human beings have with the environment, both private and public, and the desire to create harmony within this. The images in this series combine seemingly opposing elements, nude figures with disposable objects, but when combined these figures become a fusion of the individual and the material, becoming a hybrid that expresses our modern age. This series comes from elementary questions: what do we need to add to ourselves until we become complete, happy, satisfied or safe? Bonajo believes that our identification with material obsession blocks the abilit y for a deeper sensibility; this includes not only objects but also immaterial elements such as facts, informat ion, data, and visual input. This fixat ion inevitably burdens the health of our spirit.

These photographs are Bonajo's exercises in confronting the impositions placed on material possession and the self. Through the photographs she is trying to sculpt a mental life, creating a space where silence can exist between us and objects. This space connects the logical wit h the intuit ive, and allows us to retain a balance of our perceptions. Bonajo states, "We live in the human era...We are the architects of the human universe ... We think that being able to reflect by reason sets us apart or above nature. But being a symptom of the earth, human beings are therefore bounded to the laws of Nature ... Our psychic landscape is a reflection of our inside and shapes our external surroundings. This evidence in matter is a consequence of our thought system and a symbolic expression of our time." P·P·O·W Gallery, NY

Karaoke - Photographic Quotes

Edited by Thomas Seelg

121 shuffled visual and textual quotes from Ansel Adams to Slavoj Žižek, from Becky Beasley to Oliver Sieber and from William Shakespeare to Marilyn Monroe.

Seems familiar? We are constantly bombarded by images and information – at school, at work, in newspapers and on the web. All of these stimuli carry a multitude of underlying codes. Day in and day out, we navigate our way, more or less successfully, through a torrent of texts and images, subtle advertising messages and hard facts, official instructions and personal messages. New and long-established media alike vie for our undivided attention. What we tend to overlook is the fact that we are increasingly subject to a second, media-dominated reality in which we are no longer directly involved.

The exhibition featured works by Becky Beasley (GB), Thomas Galler (CH), Aneta Grzeszykowska (PL), Thomas Julier (CH), Anja Manfredi (A), Ryan McGinley (USA), Taiyo Onorato / Nico Krebs (CH/CH), Clunie Reid (GB) and Oliver Sieber (D) explored this densely woven tapestry of direct and indirect experience, of immediate and mediated seeing. It quietly flags up the relationships and juxtapositions that permeate our casual, everyday navigation of parallel worlds. The young generation of artists presented here draw their inspiration from found images and their own creative originality, mapping out new territory in contemporary art photography. In this context, the term Karaoke symbolises a certain pleasure in citing and trying out familiar patterns and styles. The karaoke machine invented in 1971 by Daisuke Inoue presents melodies and lyrics hesitantly at first and then with increasing confidence. In this popular, non-hierarchical form of entertainment, the serious and the light-hearted are never far apart. Singing along develops into individual interpretation and imitation develops into innovation.

The End of the Remake Trilogy

Christoph Draeger

BOOK INCLUDING 3 FILMS ON DVD, TEXT JOSE SPRINGER, ENGLISH/POLISH

Siedlung

Peter Piller

The first page of Siedlung (which translates into English as "Settlement"), depicts the cover of Peter Piller's 2004 book "Von Erde Schöner," in which the artist collected 313 aerial photographs of houses built as part of a failed business venture and classified them according to visual similarities. Within the following pages of this much smaller edition, Piller presents eight wispy pencil memory drawings of his walks through the same kind of settlements as shown in the book "Von Erde Schöner" depicting houses, trees, swimming pools as tiny flattened shapes seen from above. He created the drawings during a booksigning after a two year abstinence from drawing. The original drawings are available as a separate Collector's Edition.

Zero Tolerance

Marco Müller, Nicolas Sourvinos

This version of Marco Müller and Nicolas Sourvinos's documentation of European graffiti art (first published as a black-and-white artists' book by Rollo Press) collects the artists' photographs into a stack of rainbow-colored prints made from black and white plates. These are folded and loosely bound by a paper band, which can be removed to allow for the display of these images, whose strange colorations suggest the urban landscape of another planet. Each book includes a cardboard insert printed with texts taken from a website discussing the many ways in which graffiti damages the community.