Martin Heidegger, Glenn Gould, Jacques-Louis David, Cy Twombly, Paul Engelmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein: characters that Francesco Arena has chosen or rediscovered in multiple contexts over the time recur in this book. Ranging from philosophy, to music, to visual arts, they embrace the whole world of knowledge.
This first institutional monograph on the multimedia practice of artist and director Ali Cherri aims to highlight the themes and formal concerns running through his most recent, highly significant projects at GAMeC, Bergamo; Frac Bretagne, Rennes; Swiss Institute, New York; Biennale Arte 2022, Venice; and the National Gallery, London.
The book highlights the main characteristics of the collective trauma that gave rise to Rachel Whiteread’s project for GAMeC. The psychoanalysts Angelo Antonio Moroni and Pietro Roberto Goisis map out a composite picture, starting from the sense of vulnerability and collective loss associated with the Covid-19 pandemic.
This book, with follows the eponymous exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg, is constructed as a story, with a prologue, four acts, and an epilogue: an intuitive journey through the voices of thirty-four artists from different generations who are experimenting with the idea of the performative.
Dreaming Alcestis is an artist’s book by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, conceived as an accompaniment to her holographic film installation of the same name. It features a commissioned essay by poet and translator Allison Grimaldi Donahue, as well as a reprint of the American poet Alice Notley’s 1991 essay What Can Be Learned From Dreams?
What if clay is the future and the future is clay? Curators Chus Martínez and Filipa Ramos brought together a group of artists to think and create through this old, maleable and fascinating matter. The result was materialized in an exhibition and book format entitled Feet of Clay.
Edited by Ibrahim Mahama and Eva Brioschi
Texts by Bernard Akoi-Jackson and Ibrahim Mahama; Eva Brioschi; karî’kachä seid’ou and Selom Kudjie
Design: Studio Temp
Softcover, 272 pages, 21 x 28.5 cm
English / Italian
ISBN 979-12-80579-20-1
Ibrahim Mahama was born in 1987 in Tamale, a city in northern Ghana where he lives and works. He studied painting and sculpture at Kwame Nkurumah University in Kumasi, Ghana, earning a master’s degree in painting and sculpture in 2013. During his university years, he began working on installations reflecting on the theme of globalization, labor, and the movement of goods, with works made in collaboration with local communities. In 2019, Mahama opened the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), a foundation run by a group of artists and curators active in Ghana, which was followed by the establishment of Redclay in the suburbs of Tamale. This large facility incorporates artist studios (including his own), research spaces, an artist residency, a permanent collection of artworks, workshop rooms (some set up inside old decommissioned airplanes), and large plots of land dedicated to various types of cultivation. All of this contributes to this visionary artist’s desire to take an active part in the economic, social, and cultural development of his country, providing powerful incentives and teachings to new generations, to make the local population as participatory and economically self-sufficient as possible.
This volume, published to accompany Mahama’s inaugural exhibition at Eataly Art House, in Verona, is constructed as visual diary of artist’s impressive work in his native Tamale, a community-based project founded on the understanding of art as totalizing, reparatory experience: a catalyzer of energies directed for change and social progress. It features texts by the curator Eva Brioschi, Mahama’s professor and mentor karî’kachä seid’ou with Selom Kudjie, and Mahama himself with Bernard Akoi-Jackson.
Voli-ni, which literally means “inside the hole,” is composed of individual particles with their own meaning: Vo, “to pull out,” “extract”; li, “to transfer,” “teleport”; and ni, “here and now.”
Voli-ni therefore indicates an emersion from darkness, from a failed past of defeat, towards the possibility of redemption, regeneration, through a portal that is real (recovered architecture) or imaginary (art).