Dear Friends,

we’re not quite sure what happened with that last year, and if anybody has seen it, please let us know. In the meantime, we are proud to return from our involuntary hiatus with a splendid new issue – mono.kultur #40, no less – with the wonderful British ceramicist, artist and writer Edmund de Waal.

Edmund de Waal is a potter. His pots, plates, and vessels are the result of craft and mastership, but they are also so much more than that: they are experiments in form and function, abstractions of thoughts on silence and space, on repetition and failure, on substance and fragility, on memory contained.

Edmund de Waal is an artist. He arranges his objects in complex choreographies that are as mysterious as they are mesmerizing. Displayed in galleries and institutions worldwide, his considered installations play with architectural concerns, integrating ideas of space, light and obscurity.

Edmund de Waal is a writer. In 2010, his intimate memoir of a kind, The Hare With Amber Eyes, intertwined the biography of a collection of netsuke figures with the biography of his family and became a surprise bestseller, winning several awards. His latest book, The White Road, presents a highly personal and engaging research into the history of porcelain.

Whether he sculpts with words or with clay, what Edmund de Waal works with are concepts, ideas, and desires. In a body of work that is at odds with our times and yet oddly successful, his writings and objects overlap and integrate each other in an attempt to understand and transcend our complex relationship with objects and our surroundings.

In an interview with mono.kultur structured like an A-Z of notes and ideas, Edmund de Waal talked about his rules of attachment, the impossibility of repetition, and why ‘doubt’ is the most beautiful word.

Visually, the issue takes inspiration from that most perfect of materials: porcelain. Printed entirely in double-sided splendour, the two finishings of the paper – shiny gloss and smooth matt – evoke the texture of ceramics before and after glazing.

All in all, a wonderfully white and considered issue for our next decade and available as usual 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 #40
EDMUND DE WAAL: W IS FOR WHITE
“White has this extraordinary possibility, and it’s also profoundly about being at ends.”

Spring 2016 / English / 15 x 20 cm / 44 Pages

Interview by Mareike Dittmer
Artwork by Edmund de Waal
Design by Designbolaget

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As the holiday season is coming to an end, we are still looking for reasons to stay or even to go back to some of our favorite spots this summer. Cyprus for instance has not only a multilayered history, but also an eclectic contemporary art scene. Part of it is Neoterismoi Toumazou, a former novelty shop turned into an artist-run space in 2013 by artist and curator Maria Toumazou. Besides the curation of a diverse exhibition programme, she also produces artist editions and multiples. We are not surprised that the upcoming solo presentation of New York based artist Marysia Gacek looks just as promising!

Marysia Gacek’s work is known for its suggestive personal symbolism, using memory and arcane cultural references that assert the transcendent possibilities of the banal. Gacek works in a variety of materials from painting, clay, to textiles and video. By starting with a place, an image, a specific memory, or an object, she creates structures and narratives using personal symbolism and different modes of representation. For her exhibition, titled Same Goals, Gacek will display a collection of sculptures and assemblages testing the elusive nature of the forms depicted and the retraining of narratives. Elements of the exhibition allude to display strategies encountered during the artist’s stay in Cyprus.

Marysia Gacek – Same Goals
03 Septmeber – 25 September 2015
Neoterismoi Toumazou
69A Odos Aischylou
1011 Nicosia / Cyprus

SINGLE FLAT will be inaugurated tomorrow, August 5, 2015, from 6–9 pm, with a concert by John Miller, Aura Rosenberg, and Franz Lutz (Dirty Mirrors).

Erik Steinbrecher
SINGLE FLAT
Accessible platform
5.8.15–1.5.16
Courtyard of KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststrasse 69, 10117 Berlin

Opening with concert by John Miller, Aura Rosenberg, and Frank Lutz (Dirty Mirrors):
Wednesday, 5.8.15, 18–21 h, free entrance

Photo: © Erik Steinbrecher

Chains in porcelain, brains in paraffin, bones in clay. French artist Rachel Labastie skillfully uses material to comment on the tension between body, violence, human nature and aspiration. See her talk about the importance of fire and the appearance of things here.

Eckhaus Latta once again proved their inventive and avant garde take on fashion at this years New York Fashion Week FW 2015. Being reminiscent of a certain nostalgia paired with the flair of contemporary twenty-somethings, the runway show merged into an artistic performance. The FW collection was also presented with the musical support of Devonté Hynes aka Blood Orange. Some of the highlights…

Although his oeuvre spans little more than 15 years, British artist Mark Leckey (born in 1964) is already considered a reference for a young generation of artists. After his studies he withdrew from the art world for nearly a decade. In 1999, with the video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, compiled from found footage, he found his way back to art. This ode to British dance culture from northern soul to rave is considered one of the most iconic works on the intersection of visual art and popular culture – a field of interest that Leckey has addressed in much of his subsequent work. Today, Leckey’s interest lies in the exploration of digital technologies and their impact on the relationships between people, objects, and environments.

The exhibition’s layout at Haus der Kunst is structured according to four chapters: The show opens with autobiographical works – from “Are You Waiting” (1996), a precursor to “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore”, to “MyAlbum: A Rough-Demo” Video,” (2014-15) a filmed autobiography, which is premiered as a demo version. Mark Says Leckey: “‘MyAlbum’ is a record of all the events in my life during the twentieth century that I feel were significant. It is a memoir from 1954 until 1999.” In the central space, all five of the artist’s “Sound Systems” (2001–12) are presented for the first time as an ensemble. The speaker towers have their origins in mobile discotheques and have been a recurring element in Leckey’s work since the early 2000s. Leckey understands music in general, and his “Sound Systems” in particular, as alternative communication channels. The “Sound Systems” form the exhibition’s control center; they are linked to the other works and rooms in the exhibition through an electronic circuit, and connect them as if they were a quasi-living organism. In the third space the exhibition continues with the installation “GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction” (2010) – a speaking refrigerator that shares its thoughts and living environment with viewers. In the videos and films of the fourth section, “ZooVidTek”, sculptural objects – in the shape of a cat, a rabbit, a duck, and a dog – are brought to life by means of digital slideshows or computer animations. In doing so, Leckey casually illustrates groundbreaking episodes of twentieth-century media history. As in other instances in the exhibition, the titular “as if” also defines these works: The (filmed) objects and sculptures that the visitor encounters here are not what they seem to be; they are duplicates and fakes that Leckey treats as if they were the real thing.

The starting point of all his works is the attraction that brands and products, as well as images and works of art, exercise upon us. The artist translates this pull into formative and entertaining reflections on our time.

A must see!

Mark Leckey: As If
30.01.-31.05.2015
Haus der Kunst
Prinzregentenstrasse 1
80538 München

As with many, I sometimes find The Art to be indistinguishable from fashion, design, or decorative art, which is completely fine. However, the trend towards their sugary, whimsical ilk sometimes gives me one too many (hot)flashbacks of semi-reluctant jaunts around Anthropologie and its twee brethren.

When I first saw a feature praising Juan Fontanive, I spotted the Merian hummingbirds nested under the alliterative heading “Beautiful Flip-Books Made From Recycled Bike Parts,” I was skeptical. But less novelty wall art and more an almost holographic zoetrope, the pieces in action reveal a frantic corporeality unable to be contained by the  frames: the animated images hover suspended in margins of air. The rustling slaps emitted by the paper resembles the sound of wings–which in essence, if not in form, the paper is. In some ways then, the image of birds and butterflies act as a visual proxy, the projected spirit, of the actual sculptural work.

Ray King

Ray King

Since relocating back to sunny Philadelphia (guys, the sunny part is a joke), I’ve been wanting to shed some love on one of Anerica’s most underrated art-poli. Because it’s been so gloomy recently, I feel particularly drawn to the work of Ray King–no pun intended–whose iridescent, delicate structures have been exhibited in multiple countries.  Their precise geometric forms are maps of the photo spectrum of their locales, translating shifts in light into color and value.

Coincidentally enough I ran into him when I got knocked on the wrong door–he’s also a nice guy!  This leads me to conclude: it’s always funny in Philadelphia.

It’s the one Tumblr to end all Tumblrs: B4XVI, a blog established to document “an invisible conversation between hip hop and art before the 16th century” – happy Easter!

Indeed, we can never beat nature. But we can try to learn from its elaborate ways of designing & engineering and digitally translate it to our genious invention the 3-D printer to let him create what we wouldn´t be able to.
Just to come close to nature. So does Israelian architect and designer beauty Neri Oxman who won the Earth Award for Future Crucial Design in 2009. British science and technology magazine Wired interviewed her a few years ago after New York’s MoMA bought a series of her Natural Artifice sculptures and according to wikipedia Shalom Life ranked her #1 in 2012 on its list of  “the 50 most talented, intelligent, funny, and gorgeous Jewish women in the world”.

Definitely a woman who would be interesting to talk to, don’t you think?