Dear Friends,

the world has taken a darker turn since we last spoke, so we feel it’s a fitting time for our new issue mono.kultur #43 with Kuwaiti producer and visual artist Fatima Al Qadiri.

Bending and fusing different genres of music, Al Qadiri has released a handful of largely instrumental albums that often imply narratives wrapped in a dystopian atmosphere, evoking an uncanny imagery of our increasingly oversaturated and disorienting information age. It is a simple yet complicated sound that owes as much to electronic music and video game soundtracks as it does to Russian composers and Arab musical traditions.

It is music that draws not only from an eclectic range of contrasting influences, but from a layered personal background: Born in Senegal, Fatima Al Qadiri grew up in Kuwait, but was exposed to electronic music and club culture during frequent stays in London and studies in the USA. It is in New York where she soon established her own place within the art and music scenes, as comfortable producing music in her own name as she is conceiving art installations as a member of the artist collective GCC or providing sound to the fashion shows of labels such as Telfar and Hood by Air.

But regardless of the genre or medium, almost all of Al Qadiri’s work is defined by the thematic undercurrents that run throughout her records, installations, and collaborations, dealing with cultural stereotypes, notions of place and displacement, regional and global politics, and concepts of national but also gender and sexual identity. Hers is a sound very much of the here and now, channeling not only a multi-layered past, but a complicated present, processing a flux of input and information. Sound as a filtered reality, a kind of digital compression of personal obsessions and contemporary concerns.

With mono.kultur, Fatima Al Qadiri talked about the narratives within her music, the rhythm of history, and the soundtrack to burning oil fields.

Visually, the issue traces an arc from Fatima Al Qadiri’s youth to her current work. The main imagery comes from her series Bored 1997, for which, at 16, she took photographs of her younger sister Monira dressing up in their father’s clothes. The series is published here for the first time in print, interspersed with stills from a current video work on gender reversal and Kuwaiti rituals, inserted as static stickers.

Available as ever through our online store mono.konsum, or at the trusted book dealer of your choice very soon indeed.

Enjoy and all our best,
mono.kultur

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mono.kultur #43
FATIMA AL QADIRI: EMBEDDED NARRATIVES
“I want to be heard and not seen.”
Spring 2017 / English / 15 x 20 cm / 40 Pages / 4 Static Stickers

Interview by Daniel Berndt
Works by Fatima Al Qadiri
Design by Fuchs Borst

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Books with friends. Art with books. Coffee with croissants. Gossip with soul. Winter with sun. Christmas with presents. mono with kultur. Friends with books. Opening tomorrow night, until Sunday.

Friends with books
Art Book Fair Berlin
Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin
9–11 December 2016

Facebook Event

Congratulations to our friends at Lodown for their 100th (& final) issue. Over two decades of independent publishing… chapeau!

After decades of implied politics within his work, Wolfgang Tillmans has taken a refreshing and more outspoken position that addresses political issues head on: first turning his gallery space Between Bridges in Berlin into a temporary ‘meeting place’ to discuss the refugee crisis: ‘From this month Between Bridges wants to be a forum, however small; a platform, however powerless, to discuss and organize activity from within the art community.’

And now releasing a series of posters campaigning against the infamous Brexit that will be held to a vote in the UK this June. The posters are available as free downloads to share on- and offline on Tillmans’ site. Between Bridges is open extended hours during Gallery Weekend.

Marsha P. Johnson (L) and Sylvia Rivera (R)

The German blockbuster-directer Roland Emmerich has just released a trailer for his new movie Stonewall, and it’s been already discussed controversially, particularly about its lack of authenticity. Just to quickly recap: The Stonewall Riots were a series of protests in 1969 against the police by the LGBT community in New York after a police raid in Greenwhich’s Stonewall Inn sparked a violent backlash. Stonewall is now referred to as the most significant event in the history of LGBT liberation. People critcize the movie as another example of whitewashing. Even though the film is billed as a “true story”, it appears to be told from the point of view of a corn-fed, white, cisgender boy called Danny who is kicked out of his house because of his homosexuality and retaliates by hitting the big city. In reality, Stonewall was started by black trans drag queen Marsha P. Johnson. While Marsha P. Johnson has been given a role in the Hollywood narrative, she is played by a cisgender male. She is only listed two places higher in the credits on imdb.com than “Woman with Poodle”, played by Nathaly Thibault. Fortunately people reacted promptly. Two days after the trailer’s release, a petition to boycott the movie popped up; by now it has been signed by over 23,000 people. Boycotters claimed that the film had “white-washed” and “cis-washed” history, erasing the significant contribution made by trans and queer women of colour and drag queens in the Stonewall uprising. The petition was created by Pat Cordova-Goff, a trans activist feminine person of colour. She wrote on the page:

“OUR HISTORY WILL NOT BE WHITE/CIS-WASHED. History classes throughout our nation have built a reputation of instructing young generations that white, straight, cis folks are the saviors and founders of this land. Wrong. We were taught that light-skinned people are the goal; the goal to assimilate to. Wrong. We were also rarely taught about queer history, but when we were, it probably revolved around white cis gay men. Wrong.”

Emmerich responded to the controversy stating, “I think we represented it very well[...] We have drag queens, lesbians, we have everything in the film because we wanted to portray a broader image of what ‘gay’ means.” His responds fail even more spectacularly when saying in a Facebook comment “We are all the same in our struggle for acceptance.”

No. We are not all equal in our struggle. People like Emmerich – cisgender, white people – are born into a world that gives them unqualified power. If you, Emmerich, cannot recognise that, you definitely should not be doing a movie about the most significant moments for transgender people of colour.

A photojoournalist Brandley Secker, has been documenting gay and transgender asylum seekers residing in Turkey. The series Kütmaan, meaning hidden or concealed in Arabic, depicts the lives whilst waiting to be approved and welcomed by the West.

Not only from Iran, but also from other parts of Middle East, thousands try to escape from the war supported by US with the guns produced in US and EU… Meanwhile, they are trying to live in the camps that are provided for them. The spokeswoman of refugees in Berlin, Napuli Paul Langa, is an important figure to learn more about the burden.

Support our favorite local radio station Berlin Community Radio and help them win funding to sustain their amazing project! The voting for the ‘Crowd for Berlin Media’ is on until 12 March. BCR is all about the community, so hurry up and click the heart button!

This Winter Edition has a special focus on France with 25 invited French artists.

This year’s headliners include Jim Avignon, Lars P. Krause, Bender, Stab, Agrume, Annabelle Tattu, Khwezis, Romain Froquet, Mister X, Leyto, Hannah The Random, Djalouz, Resoner, Pablito Zago, Marco Wildner, Flocke//Art, Nikkifaktur, Anka Büchler, Robert Richter and many more artists.

Berlin Graphic Days #5
Saturday 31.01.15, 1-10 pm
Sunday 01.02.15, 1-8 pm
Urban Spree, Revaler Straße 99, 10245 Berlin

Opening party:
Tonight at 9 pm at Konzulát, Leipziger Straße 60, 10117 Berlin – more information here.

Poster design by Jim Avignon

DRUCKEN HEFTEN LADEN
Reflections on Theory and Practice of Independent Publishing
Exhibition, Workshop, Events
January 8–18, 2015
neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), Berlin, Oranienstraße 25, 10999 Berlin

adocs, Hamburg; Architektur in Gebrauch, Berlin; Archive Books, Berlin; Michael J. Baers, Berlin; Books People Places, Berlin; Botopress, Berlin; Edition Bernward Reul, Berlin; Ernst und Mund, Leipzig; Errant Bodies, Berlin/Los Angeles; form und sinn, Berlin; Fulcrum, London; image-shift, Berlin; Wolfgang Kil, Berlin; Metabook, Amsterdam/Berlin; metroZones, Berlin; nGbK, Berlin; Revolver Publishing, Berlin; Scriptings/Achim Lengerer, Berlin; Spector Books, Leipzig; Temporary Services/Half Letter Press, Chicago/copenhagen; The Green Box, Berlin; von hundert, Berlin; ztscrpt, Viennal/Berlin

Self-publishing with simple means is a common endeavor, and the less money is available, the greater the enthusiasm seems to be. But the distribution and perception of small print publications can quickly reach limits. The relevant know-how about the intricacies of book publishing is not something to be taken for granted. So Drucken Heften Laden will analyze and discuss the conditions and possibilities for independent publishing in the context of art and city (politics). The exhibition presents a temporary archive, with selected nGbK titles published since 1969 and contemporary books and journals. Running parallel to this is a three-day closed workshop, the themes and results of which will be integrated in the public series of events.

All events in English language

Wednesday, January 7, 2015, 7 pm:
Exhibition opening
The Inside and the Outside of a Book
A presentation by Brandon LaBelle
www.errantbodies.org

Friday, January 9, 2015, 7 pm:
Publishing in the Realm of Plant Fibres and Electrons
A lecture by Brett Bloom
www.temporaryservices.org, www.halfletterpress.com

Thursday, January 15, 2015, 7 pm:
Self-Publishing – The New Economy of the Book
A lecture by Delphine Bedel
www.delphinebedel.com

nGbK project group:
Erik Göngrich, Heimo Lattner, Katja Reichard, Ines Schaber, Peter Schmidt, Florian Wüst

It is interesting – scary, as well – how power interprets certain things and engenders the ‘truth’(!). Recently, London police arrested street artist Banksy on the charge of ‘graffiti, public vandalism, criminal mischief, public indecency, resisting arrest, money laundering, criminal conspiracy and racketeering’. Beyond that, the police department revealed the artist’s identity with photos of him that had been kept secret for years.

Here comes the shocking part: it was just a hoax according to the artist’s publicist Jo Brooks. ‘Fear not, the street artist is still roaming free, spray can in hand,’ says the newspaper The Independent. Isn’t it a perfect example of how the media can manipulate?

We still don’t know who Banksy really is…