We imagine dust settling in the sun beams creeping through wooden Venetian blinds and over hundreds of fine books with illustrious drawings and laborious design, slightly smudged by print-stained fingers sore from browsing. Of course, the reality will look nothing like it but be just as beautiful. Ladies and gents, Index Art Book Fair at Museo Jumex will open this Friday.
the 50th edition of our esteemed mono.klub series coincides with the release of mono.kultur #43, featuring Kuwaiti producer and artist Fatima Al Qadiri. We will celebrate the occasion with an exhibition, for one night only, of Al Qadiri’s series Bored 1997 at Between Bridges on 20 April 2017.
Bored dates from 1997, when Fatima Al Qadiri, age 16, photographed her younger sister Monira, 14, in their father’s ‘hunting room’ performing various male personas in his clothes. What could be seen as simple kids’ role play, also marks a point in time to trace back to one of the central thematic concerns of Fatima Al Qadiri: ‘Gender performativity has been a link between my past and future, and throughout my career. It’s not an arbitrary element, it’s integral to my art and even music practice.’ The series is published for the first time in print with mono.kultur #43, featuring an extensive interview with Fatima Al Qadiri.
As ever, we look forward to seeing you there.
mono.kultur
PS. Fatima and Monira Al Qadiri will both be present.
Creative Time has recently announced the commission of Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, a 25 year long new public artwork by the internationally renowned French conceptual artist and current mono.kultur cover star, Sophie Calle co-presented with Green-Wood Cemetery. The project will debut with a two daylong inaugural event on April 29th and 30th, 2017. The artist will be present on April 29th and 30th from 12 – 5 PM. To inaugurate the project, the public is invited to Green-Wood Cemetery, a National Historic Landmark, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to privately unburden and inter their most intimate confessions. During the two-day opening, in a setting nestled among the mausoleums and monuments of Green-Wood’s verdant rolling hills, visitors will transcribe their secrets onto paper, and deposit them into the earth below, through a slot on a marble obelisk of Calle’s design. The artist will be on hand during the two-day event to receive some visitors’ secrets.
Austria and Germany have a beautiful tradition of the Kunstverein, or ‘art clubs’ – semi-independent art institutions that are state-funded but smaller and more flexible than large museums, closer to the local art scenes and focusing on lesser-known artists. Since 2013, the smallish Austrian city of Graz boasts its very own and very smart Künstlerhaus, named KM–, in the shadow of the famous Kunsthaus Graz. For their charming little bookstore, they teamed up with our friends at Motto to bring the finest of independent arts publishing to the Alps, and prost to that.
Künstlerhaus
Halle für Kunst & Medien
Burgring 2
8010 Graz
Austria
Among the range of all the different design philosophies and styles that have found their way into mono.kultur over the years, it’s the quiet, unobtrusive approach that we sometimes enjoy the most. Idem for our still current issue with and about Sophie Calle, designed by the wonderful Wuppertal-based designer Stephanie Passul.
Almost museal at first sight, the issue plays with the artist’s penchant for structure, divided between the public in a highly aesthetic display of selected works that borrows from Sophie Calle’s unusal style of arranging artworks on the wall, and the personal with a very frank conversation set in a different shade of grey. But of course, as with all things well thought through, the magic lies in the details, in the little interactions and references that occur between words and images, as well as the frictions they generate.
Take, for instance, the cover which boasts in large letters our title quote ‘It was not about discovering anything.’, when, of course, the fold-out cover just begs to be unfolded to reveal the full image underneath. Just a case in point for an issue that might appear serious and quiet at first in its shades of white and grey, when in fact, there is a whole world of play to be discovered. Not much unlike the work of Sophie Calle, in other words.
In resistance to the current U.S. of A. figurehead’s ban on Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Libya and Yemen, UK producer Four Tet has added music from those very same nations to his Spotify playlist. Musician include Rahim Al-Haj (Iraq), Omar Souleyman (Syria), Martik (Iran), Naji Barakat (Yemen)–musicians who are now barred from entering and performing in the US. The story behind the playlist is poignant: Four Tet, real name Kieran Hebden, was inspired by his experiences working with Souleyman a few years ago in Brooklyn–a partnership now prohibited.
Already reputed “the grossest movie” to grease the silver screen, Steven Ellison aka Flying Lotus’s first film Kuso is extreme. Perhaps only the basest images can accompany such a starry soundtrack–the film features music by Flying Lotus as well as Aphex Twin and Akira Yamaoka. While descriptions of the synopsis does repel, body horror and grotesquerie does have a storied history in art film, including filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Matthew Barney, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Sion Sono, and David Lynch. Whether Ellison’s film can withstand the test of time and the taste of the public is still up for debate.
You have arrived at mono.blog by mono.kultur magazine. mono.blog is a rather eclectic summary of the things that are currently on our collective minds.
