Nicoline van Harskamp

My Name is Language

Edited by Achim Lengerer

Published by SCRIPTINGS
and Archive Books

The publication My Name Is Language (2020) explores the key tenets of artist Nicoline van Harskamp’s research and practice, such as the contemporary use and modification of languages, a treatment of names as spoken language rather than spelled identity markers, and the practice of self-naming. In the fictive worlds represented in this book, society is not centralized, not oversized, and self-naming is brought forward as a form of self-empowerment and resistance.

Central to this book are scripts by Nicoline van Harskamp, for the video work PDGN and a series of staged works titled My Name Is Language. A scholar of literary arts and performance culture, Avishek Ganguly reflects in his essay “Global Englishes, Rough Futures” on questions of translation, incomprehension, and untranslatability in van Harskamp’s work. The book also includes a list of text-change algorithms that van Harskamp calls “distorters” and an excerpt from Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) by Marge Piercy.

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Boris Buden

Transition to Nowhere

Art in History
after 1989

The series Perspectives brings together practitioners and theorists from different regions on complex and multifaceted subjects allowing them to engage with each other’s arguments and fields of research. Each volume hosts a body of texts providing the perspectives of one author on pivotal issues.

Listen to Boris Buden in conversation with Archive Books’ editor Paolo Caffoni as they discuss art in history and language in history; language as a means of production as well as a commodity; the notions of native speaker and native informant. They also talk about childhood and history; Orientalism and temporalities; the role of the art and the intellectual, on the backdrop of the war in former Yugoslavia.

Today, after Post-Communism has ended in chaos and confusion, we are entitled to ask: was it a condition, or a transition; a rise or a decline; progression, regression or simply a time-lag?
Has it ever shaped its own form of social being, a unique mode of economic production, a politics of its own, a culture? Or was it just another interregnum of history, full of morbid symptoms we cannot get rid of?

Most of the essays in this book search for answers to these questions in works of art. Not because art possesses a superior knowledge on history, but because the knowledge on history we posses has failed in providing those answers. This is a new experience made possible by both art and history, which, in simultaneously facing their end, have come closer to one another than ever before. It is an experience we might possibly learn from.

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^{IN THE SAME SERIES}

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

In a While
or Two
We Will Find
the Tone

Essays and Proposals,
Curatorial Concepts,
and Critiques

In a While Two We Will Find the Tone by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung presents, for the first time in one volume, essays and proposals edited anew. Ndikung’s expanded curatorial practice delineates the space of exhibition making as a space of critical thinking and of experimentation. By proximity, these texts echo each other, resonate with each other, interfere with each other, and present perspectives on the political, poetic, and philoso-phical potentials of exhibition making, beyond the tight corset of the discipline itself.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, PhD (born in 1977 in Yaoundé, Cameroon), is an independent curator, author and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin and editor-in-chief of SAVVY Journal for critical texts on contemporary African art. He was curator-at-large for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel 2017, artistic director of the 12th Rencontres de Bamako 2019, a biennale for African photography in Mali, as well as guest curator of the 2018 Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal.

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Japanese Expanded

Cinema and Intermedia:
Critical Texts of the 1960s

Edited by Ann Adachi-Tasch,
Go Hirasawa, Julian Ross

Produced by
Collaborative Cataloging Japan

Intermedia and Expanded Cinema, both as critical approach and artistic practice, left an indelible mark in a period of Japanese art history that is broadly considered to be one of its most dynamic moments in the wake of its postwar reemergence.

Despite the burgeoning interest in academic and curatorial circles in this segment of Japanese art history, the paucity of readily available material in a language other that Japanese has meant the local context, particularly the ways in which the terms were critically debated, was relatively neglected.

Through these translations, our hope is that Japanese debates on intermedia can contribute to international discourse, and that works of Japanese Expanded cinema can be preserved, reenacted and analyzed with these discussions.

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Jane Jin Kaisen

Community of Parting

Edited by Anne Kølbæk Iversen
and Jane Jin Kaisen

Published with
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts,
in collaboration with
Kunsthal Charlottenborg

Community of Parting is an extension and continuation of Jane Jin Kaisen artistic practice. Kaisen brings past and present, the eternal and the temporal into play through layered, performative and multi-voiced, feminist works that explore topics such as memory, war, migration, and borders in a field where individual experiences and collective stories intersect. Her works negotiate and mediate the means of representation, resistance and reconciliation, thus forming alternative genealogies and sites of collective emergence.
Presenting a selection of artworks realized between 2010 and 2020 through installation views and film stills together with a vast array of research material and archival documents, this monograph is the hitherto most comprehensive introduction to the artist’s work. The book is composed of several interwoven voices: Community of Parting’s film script that integrates oral testimonies with poetics by Kim Hyesoon, poetry by Mara Lee, and shamanic ritual chants by Koh Sunahn, accompanied by essay contributions by Heidi Ballet, Anselm Franke, Pujita Guha and Abhijan Toto for the Forest Curriculum, Anne Kølbæk Iversen, Jane Jin Kaisen, Hyunjin Kim, Soyi Kim, Yongwoo Lee, and conversations with Mary Kelly and Kim Seongnae.

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Beyond Repair

Edited by Natascha Sadr Haghighian
and Ernest Ah

The publication beyond repair is comprised by an assembly of materials from an eponymous study gathering in Venice in 2019. The study gathering traced and linked irreversibly damaged and damaging conditions and spaces shaped by extractivism and accumulation. Taking the awareness of irreparability as its point of departure, it focused on the tumultuous resonances generated by flight, resistance and self-organization—and the aesthetic and social processes they set in motion. The publication comprises contributions by some of those who spoke, performed, and shared their research at the public program of the beyond repair study gathering. The gathering took place on Lido and Le Vignole, two islands in the Venetian Lagoon, June 12–28, 2019 as part of the public program of Ankersentrum (surviving in the ruinous ruin), Natascha Süder Happelmann’s contribution for the German Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. Ankersentrum (surviving in the ruinous ruin) spanned various activities and formats including videos, performances, print and online publications, parallel to a large-scale installation at the pavilion.

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_{COMPANION PUBLICATION}

Ankersentrum
(surviving in the ruinous ruin)

Edited by Natascha Süder Happelmann and Franciska Zólyom

Ankersentrum (surviving in the ruinous ruin) houses the several voices that were instrumental to the creation and articulation of the work. It is simultaneously a trace of the process of witnessing and an autonomous space to follow the different trajectories the work engages with.

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