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This book, the first by the design and research practice Material Cultures, assembles a series of short essays and conversations exploring the cultures, systems, and infrastructures that shape the architectural industry and the destructive ecologies it fosters. The building practices dominating contemporary architecture are rooted in the exploitation of people and the(...)
Material reform, material cultures
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This book, the first by the design and research practice Material Cultures, assembles a series of short essays and conversations exploring the cultures, systems, and infrastructures that shape the architectural industry and the destructive ecologies it fosters. The building practices dominating contemporary architecture are rooted in the exploitation of people and the degradation of our landscapes. Here, Paloma Gormley, Summer Islam, and George Massoud explore how this has come about and how alternative systems, with holistic approaches to the built environment, might be formulated. It presents a set of instructive and challenging perspectives drawing directly on the dialogues and tensions Material Cultures encounter in their day-to-day work. Texts centred around key concepts including labour, time, maintenance, language, land, and touch are interwoven with a visual essay reckoning with the processes that have transformed industrialised landscapes at different scales of experience and resolution.
Environment and environmental theory
Ian Strange: Disturbed home
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This is the first comprehensive survey of Ian Strange’s (born 1982) architectural interventions, including photographic and filmic interpretations of those works. Highlighting projects from the past 12 years and spanning geographies from Strange’s native Australia to New Zealand, Japan, Poland and the US, Strange’s provocative transformations of damaged or abandoned homes(...)
Ian Strange: Disturbed home
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This is the first comprehensive survey of Ian Strange’s (born 1982) architectural interventions, including photographic and filmic interpretations of those works. Highlighting projects from the past 12 years and spanning geographies from Strange’s native Australia to New Zealand, Japan, Poland and the US, Strange’s provocative transformations of damaged or abandoned homes unlock themes of social upheaval and geographic displacement caused by economic blight, environmental disaster and migration. Published on the occasion of exhibitions at the 2020 Perth Festival and the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, ''Disturbed home'' features lucid commentary and original documentation of numerous distinct projects. Also included are scholarly essays by FotoFocus artistic director and curator Kevin Moore and Britt Salvesen, curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints and Drawings Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Essays address Strange’s practice within traditions of street art, photography, film, public sculpture and dance.
Contemporary Art Monographs
In pursuit of color. From fungi to fossil fuels: Uncovering the origins of the world's famous dyes
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Over the centuries our manipulation of the natural world has resulted in an explosion of synthetic dye production and application globally. To gain insight into the history of how folk practices have been lost and technical processes found, anthropologist and textile artist Lauren MacDonald explores a practice that is both ancient and wholly modern: coloring cloth. The(...)
In pursuit of color. From fungi to fossil fuels: Uncovering the origins of the world's famous dyes
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Over the centuries our manipulation of the natural world has resulted in an explosion of synthetic dye production and application globally. To gain insight into the history of how folk practices have been lost and technical processes found, anthropologist and textile artist Lauren MacDonald explores a practice that is both ancient and wholly modern: coloring cloth. The pursuit of color has long spurred economic and social contest, and through this deeply researched volume we explore the stories that the materials used to dye cloth tell us about our complex relationship to nature, our troubling ideas about progress and our understanding of power and labor. In Pursuit of Color: From Fungi to Fossil Fuels: Uncovering the Origins of the World's Most Famous Dyes brings together historic techniques, archive photography, specimens and present-day events to tell the histories of some of the world’s most important dyestuffs.
Colour Theory and Design
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Reference monograph devoted to a radical pictorial work closer to the subject that is simultaneously a reflection on the photographic practice itself: all series of photographs of objects since 1989 (guitar amps, safes, tables listing, writing desks, lithographic stones, electrical panels, canvas versos...), with two essays. Monographie de référence sur un travail(...)
Philippe Gronon: L'objet de la photographie
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Reference monograph devoted to a radical pictorial work closer to the subject that is simultaneously a reflection on the photographic practice itself: all series of photographs of objects since 1989 (guitar amps, safes, tables listing, writing desks, lithographic stones, electrical panels, canvas versos...), with two essays. Monographie de référence sur un travail pictural au plus près des choses en même temps qu'une réflexion sur la photographie elle-même : les séries de photographies d'objets réalisées depuis 1989 (amplis, coffres-forts, tableaux de cotation, écritoires, pierres lithographiques, tableaux électriques, versos de peintures...), avec deux essais. Cet ouvrage amplement illustré montre dans son ensemble ce qui est une véritable entreprise de saisie – de capture – des objets. Deux essais situent l'importance de cet œuvre dans la création actuelle : Eric de Chassey propose un éclairage historique sur ses développements les plus récents tandis que Catherine Perret en relève toute la portée et la profondeur théoriques.
Photography monographs
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A collaboration between artist Sophie Warren, architect Jonathan Mosley and writer Robin Wilson, Beyond Utopia looks at the practicalities of utopian thinking in urban planning and administrative culture. Submitting a utopian architectural proposal for a real site in London to city officials, the trio enacted a form of playful provocation as a basis for exploring the(...)
Surface tension supplement no.5 : Beyond utopia
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A collaboration between artist Sophie Warren, architect Jonathan Mosley and writer Robin Wilson, Beyond Utopia looks at the practicalities of utopian thinking in urban planning and administrative culture. Submitting a utopian architectural proposal for a real site in London to city officials, the trio enacted a form of playful provocation as a basis for exploring the systems and languages of planning, architecture and city development. Though fictive, the utopian proposal gained credence as it was discussed and shared among planning officials and reviewers, ultimately becoming a springboard for dialogue about possibilities and even actualities in the sphere of public space. Centered on a screenplay for an unrealized film, which restages the process and exchanges of the original proposal, Surface Tension Supplement No. 5 also includes texts and projects by leading theorists, artists and academics who debate the roles of spatial practice and politics today.
Art Theory
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The Middle Eastern bazaar is much more than a context for commerce: the studies in this book illustrate that markets, regardless of their location, scale, and permanency, have also played important cultural roles within their societies, reflecting historical evolution, industrial development, social and political conditions, urban morphology, and architectural functions.(...)
The bazaar in the Islamic city : design, culture, and history
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The Middle Eastern bazaar is much more than a context for commerce: the studies in this book illustrate that markets, regardless of their location, scale, and permanency, have also played important cultural roles within their societies, reflecting historical evolution, industrial development, social and political conditions, urban morphology, and architectural functions. This interdisciplinary volume explores the dynamics of the bazaar with a number of case studies from Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Nablus, Bursa, Istanbul, Sanaa, Kabul, Tehran, and Yazd. Although they share some contextual and functional characteristics, each bazaar has its own unique and fascinating history, traditions, cultural practices, and structure. One of the most intriguing aspects revealed in this volume is the thread of continuity from past to present exhibited by the bazaar as a forum where a society meets and intermingles in the practice of goods exchange—a social and cultural ritual that is as old as human history.
History until 1900, Middle East
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Why did British industrial cities build art museums? By exploring the histories of the municipal art museums in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, Transformative Beauty examines the underlying logic of the Victorian art museum movement. These museums attempted to create a space free from the moral and physical ugliness of industrial capitalism. Deeply engaged with(...)
Transformative beauty: art museums in industrial Britain
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Why did British industrial cities build art museums? By exploring the histories of the municipal art museums in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, Transformative Beauty examines the underlying logic of the Victorian art museum movement. These museums attempted to create a space free from the moral and physical ugliness of industrial capitalism. Deeply engaged with the social criticism of John Ruskin, reformers created a new, prominent urban institution, a domesticated public space that not only aimed to provide refuge from the corrosive effects of industrial society but also provided a remarkably unified secular alternative to traditional religion. Woodson-Boulton raises provocative questions about the meaning and use of art in relation to artistic practice, urban development, social justice, education, and class. In today's context of global austerity and shrinking government support of public cultural institutions, this book is a timely consideration of arts policy and purposes in modern society.
Museology
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This groundbreaking project summarizes how contemporary Indigenous photographers have taken over the conversation about how their cultures and lives are depicted through their dynamic embrace of three interwoven themes: Survivance, Nation and Indigenous Visuality. These photographers enact a key shift away from privileging settler-colonialism, foregrounding instead an(...)
Speaking with light: contemporary indigenous photography
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This groundbreaking project summarizes how contemporary Indigenous photographers have taken over the conversation about how their cultures and lives are depicted through their dynamic embrace of three interwoven themes: Survivance, Nation and Indigenous Visuality. These photographers enact a key shift away from privileging settler-colonialism, foregrounding instead an Indigenous sense of community and visuality. ''Speaking with Light'' reveals and examines these Indigenous artists’ explorations of themes such as identity, the contribution of customary practice to contemporary life, belonging and the assistance that Indigenous worldviews can provide to building healthier relationships with each other and the earth. The book comprises four sections bridged by transitions and ending with a globalization of the discussion. Texts by key Indigenous scholars are followed by a series of plates illustrating many of the exhibition works. ''Speaking with Light'' is a summary statement about the preoccupations and dynamism of Indigenous photography today.
Photography Collections
Among a sea of influences
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This publication documents a series of workshops and conversations hosted by Wendy’s Subway and organized by English-Arabic bilingual magazine Makzhin editor Mirene Arsanios on questions of formative literary influences. Three female Arab writers were invited to choose and discuss ten books that shaped their understanding of poetry and translation. Notwithstanding the(...)
Among a sea of influences
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This publication documents a series of workshops and conversations hosted by Wendy’s Subway and organized by English-Arabic bilingual magazine Makzhin editor Mirene Arsanios on questions of formative literary influences. Three female Arab writers were invited to choose and discuss ten books that shaped their understanding of poetry and translation. Notwithstanding the difficulty of the task, Marwa Helal, Mona Kareem, and Iman Mersal played along, selecting—among a sea of influences—authors and/or translators whose works were key to their own practice, and to their embodied understanding of what it means to write in Arabic from a female perspective. Asking what kind of writings are/were available to them, and which books or translations unseated their understanding of the world, Helal, Kareem, and Mersal discuss writing within the diaspora and across borders, radical publishing and translation networks, cultural and linguistic translation, vernacular language as resistance, and more.
Literature and poetry
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The art of networked thinking consists in making complexity easier to handle and creating scope for new ideas. The approach, which is now applied in all spheres of knowledge, is one which also defines artistic practice. The subject of this book is some two dozen atlases, charts, and diagrams of Russian history and the history of art from antiquity to postmodernism that(...)
Maciunas' learning machines: from art history to a chronology of Fluxus, second revised and enlarged edition
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The art of networked thinking consists in making complexity easier to handle and creating scope for new ideas. The approach, which is now applied in all spheres of knowledge, is one which also defines artistic practice. The subject of this book is some two dozen atlases, charts, and diagrams of Russian history and the history of art from antiquity to postmodernism that were designed between 1953 and 1973 by Fluxus initiator George Maciunas. Without such visualization of the past, so Maciunas believed, there could be no real understanding of how art and politics have evolved. His maps, charts, and diagrams, more than half of which are published for the first time here in this second edition, attempt in various ways to draw a picture of history made up of dates and facts, and lines and arrows. The result is fascinating, for both science and art.
books
November 2005
Contemporary Art Monographs