Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
This artist’s first monograph brings together sketches, documentation and installation shots, as well as an in-depth analysis of her practice. It highlights her process of making art, from the conception of an idea to the finished work, and from the deconstruction and re-assembling of her characters’ identities to the relentless creation of new worlds.
Published on the occasion of the first exhibition in Italy by Jenna Gribbon, staged at the Collezione Maramotti, Mirages showcases a wealth of images that highlight the fluid, sensual output of this artist who, in repeatedly portraying her wife, the musician Mackenzie Scott (aka TORRES), explores the implications inherent in seeing and being seen.
The catalogue of this ambitious project, held at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2017, reflects on the centrality of writing in contemporary visual art practices. Documenting its slippages from printed matters to the digital realm, from voice modulations to its sculptural presence, this book celebrates the word in all its forms.
A book emerged from the need to try to tell the story of architecture in a way quite unlike how it’s usually told, in a continuous dialogue between the anthropological gaze of Armin Linke’s photos compared with the ideation process of two public works by the Carlana Mezzalira Pentimalli architecture office.
The book documents and brings together two exhibition projects by Nina Canell and Maria Hassabi. Essays, unpublished materials and a rich set of photographic materials form the driving force behind two visual narratives that offer new keys to understanding the research of the two artists.
Can art, literature, filmmaking, and music draw out, make visible, legible, audible, or even contestable the patterns in which our lives are held? Considering the work by Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Ingri Fiksdal, Åke Hodell, Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, Susan Philipsz, and Elizabeth Price, this publication entertains this question.
Edited by Giovanna Borasi, Albert Ferré, Francesco Garutti, Jayne Kelley
Texts by Sandrine Colard, Corinna Gardner, Oulimata Gueye, Claudio Gulli, Siliva Gutiérrez, Renato Leotta, Andrea Lissoni, Hannah Turner, Akram Zaatari
Designed by (Studio) Jonathan Hares / Amaury Hamon
Published with Canadian Centre for Architecture
2025, English, softcover, 224 pages, 24 x 31 cm
ISBN 979-12-80579-72-0
The CCA conceives The Museum Is Not Enough as a platform to reflect on some of the beliefs and concerns that define its curatorial activity—why and how it works—and, by extension, the role of cultural institutions in society. Stating that the museum is not enough means asking what a museum should be and do, and suggests that its entitlement to concentrate knowledge and meaning has dissolved.
As a follow-up of a first volume published in 2019 that built on years of thematic investigations, the book focuses on how the institution works out and on these questions by rethinking its tools and how it relates to others. The Museum Is Not Enough (no. 10–14) gathers conversations among curators, artists, academics, and architects on how institutions engage multiple contexts, objects, and perspectives: reflecting on strategies to unlearn and decentre established ways of seeing and doing; looking closely at how to describe and document archival sources while interrogating the stakes, and often the harm, in separating cultural objects from their context; questioning the relationship between institutions and “the public”; and discussing curatorial tools—and particularly film—that collapse research and display, observation and action, here and there.
Underlying these reflections is the realization that the museum’s activity can’t be constructed from a fixed position. Unless the questions it deals with are observed from another angle, it is hard not to perpetuate the thinking that created them. The book responds to an urgent need to equip the institution to understand how things around it are rapidly changing, and the importance of conveying and discussing this instability. Here, the museum gets outside its physical walls to explore on-site, to talk with people, to connect and activate collaborators, to design conditions for different forms of dialogue to happen on the ground.
Photos: Nicola Gnesi