Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
This new major monographic publication on the Ghanian artist documents the work that transformed sites and repurposed buildings in his native town of Tamale to transformative outcomes rooted into the idea of art as a tool of understanding, rebalancing, and advancement.
For life and limbs, Austrian artist and curator Anna-Sophie Berger has assembled a group of works, from Arakawa and Gins to Lyle Ashton Harris, that register the body as a habitat that can be imaginatively stretched, altered, modified, adorned, replicated or destroyed.
This two-volume catalog, curated by Andrea Bellini and the New York-based collective DIS, is the outcome of the 2021 edition of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (BIM’21), presented at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève.
Christian Frosi was long considered one of the most inspiring and promising Italian artists debuting in the early 2000s. That is until just over ten years into his career, when he decided to make himself unreachable and remove himself from art history, its customs and figures.
Featuring new contributions by Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi and a wealth of commissioned texts and writings, this book is conceived as a continuation of the exhibition held at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich and, in a modified form, at Swiss Institute, New York.
In a context in which institutions are facing a surge of public scrutiny, the publication revisits the artistic practice of institutional critique to ask what it means today, and to consider its ability to respond to the urgent social, political, and economic issues of our time.
Edited by Béatrice Grenier
Texts by Philippe Azoury, Alenda Y. Chang, Béatrice Grenier, Ingrid Luquet-gad,
Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel
Co-published by Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2024, English, 16.8 x 24 cm, 274 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-66-9
The book is the first monograph of the work of Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel, published in conjunction with the release of the duo’s second feature-length film, titled Eat the Night . Formal experimentation characterises the work of emerging French film-making duo Poggi & Vinel, who employ the languages of video games, archives, and film-making to hybridise genres and break aesthetic conventions. There is ambiguity over the register within which the duo’s work should be situated: is it film, musical score, game or animation?
Edited by Béatrice Grenier, considered as an object the book is a formulation of an archive or a record of the duo’s work, encompassing the variety of mediums with which Poggi & Vinel engage, in addition to the overarching question of memory as explored in their practice. Three essays by Alenda Y. Chang, Béatrice Grenier and Ingrid Luquet-gad offer in-depth analyses of the ways in which the work of the duo constitutes a form of preservation through the use and reuse of video-game imagery. Identifying key works and turning points, the book provides a commentary on their particular, ambiguous positioning, somewhere between cinema-video and practice-gaming, and helps to explain why this positioning is critical vis-à-vis contemporary art today. In an interview with Philippe Azoury, the film-makers reflect on the role of community-building both within and outside their films, considering specifically the relationship between the digital characters and the ’real’ characters, and the importance of gaming in acknowledging and understanding other subjectivities.
Each film selected for the book is transformed into a photo essay, calling into question the nature of the image—the significance it has when moving or still. Spiral-bound, the book is punctuated by an infinity of potential covers: the object itself has no beginning or end. One can pick off where one left off, or enter the narrative at any point—a formal attempt to transcend the nature of the age-old medium.
Photos: Lorenzo Mason Studio