“18 PARIS IV.70” was an exhibition organized by Michel Claura in Paris in 1970. Held at a temporary space on Rue Mouffetard that April, it was accompanied by this trilingual publication (in English, French, and German), edited by Claura and published and distributed by Seth Siegelaub. Claura invited a group of artists to each contribute a work to the exhibition. Having collected a series of artist proposals, Claura then sent this collection to each of the participants, after which they were allowed to change their initial plans. This publication includes a preface and a postface by Claura and a two-part entry ...

74 million million million tons is an exhibition about the types of evidence that artworks can produce. Employing different methodologies to investigate, intervene, and assemble, the artists in the exhibition reveal subjects on the threshold of politics and the outskirts of legality: the robot, the refugee, the environment, the startup, and others. While their subject matter is divergent, the exhibition’s artists push against narratives put forth by corporate and government industries by producing specific knowledge and corroborative objects around un-mapped historical and political events. Directly intervening in the moments before such events coalesce into widely accepted narratives, they anticipate and ...

A Disagreeable Object brings together 20 artists who employ and borrow from the methods and artistic practices that the Surrealists developed in the first half of the century. This is not an exhaustive survey, nor an attempt to re-consider our understanding of Surrealism as an historical movement. Rather, the exhibition offers a view of contemporary sculpture identifying influences and attitudes that have filtered through decades of cultural production. The works in A Disagreeable Object respond to a decidedly contemporary context…

What does it mean to possess a deep understanding of the material world around us? When so many of us spend countless waking hours engrossed in screens, “material intelligence” feels hard to come by these days. The most recent champion of the term, craft scholar Glenn Adamson, demands nothing short of a literal call to arms to “recover our literacy in the ways of the physical world”: do things with your hands, farm, weave, build furniture, construct a house! In Adamson’s historical thinking, our practical detachment from the environment is implicated in an ongoing denigration of manual skills and trades ...

“In pandemic times there is room for reflection: reflection on what is being done and why, what has already been created, and how the artistic work can be recorded, shared and made available to a wider audience,” maintains Isabelle Schad, describing the multiple range of activities of revisiting and rearranging material from past works that has been keeping her busy during the heyday of the pandemic. But is it possible to challenge the solitary act of reflection on the own artistic work by acknowledging its strong collective foundation? A Room Full of Particles: A Living Archive for Isabelle Schad is a collection ...

The mediality of transmission and the materiality of communication result today more than ever in “acting at a distance” – an action whose agency lies in a medium. This book provides an overview into this crucial phenomenon, thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial. Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality.

Active Ingredient brings together 22 artists working across a variety of media and disciplines to explore art’s tendency towards transformation, be it material, perceptual, or institutional. Taken from the language and practices of modern pharmacology, in which natural substances are decomposed to isolate useful properties that are then labeled and regulated once synthesized and mass-produced, Active Ingredient tests the conditions of artistic performativity, what it is that makes the work work. Insisting that spatial and institutional arrangements are at the heart of artistic meaning, artist and curator Alex Fleming takes his cue from Adrian Piper’s concept of catalysis, the insight ...

For this outing of BDP’s Empathy When, we were delighted to be joined on the terrace of Tropez by Adam Fearon. Get ready to travel from Berlin to Frankfurt, Cairo to Baghdad, Adam reads his incredible essay that goes below the surface of the Fayum mummy portraits that date from the 1st century BC onwards, and how our contemporary self-expression is more tactile that our flat screens may suggest.

Material circulation encompasses architectural production and de-production when considered within geological time. Architecture is a fleeting construct—a temporary, unstable container of increasingly-valued minerals that is always in a state of settling. You say to brick, “what do you want, brick?” Brick says to you,”I want to be mud.” Aggregates, especially with the rise of modern concrete, have become our second most-used resource. While sand, gravel, and small rocks account for up to 75% of concrete’s composition, sand alone accounts for over 85% of global mining activity. As a finite resource, aggregates on the market wield consequences from land-reclamation driven conflicts to ...

In 2017 I wrote a piece called Constructed Objects. The piece was the first in an ongoing project of imagining composing or making music as a sort of non-linear sculptural/conceptual project. I wanted to envision sounds as if they were material concepts (even found objects) in space that interrelate, resonate, and co-mingle in rooms. I have both ideas of assemblage or montage here as well as modular constructions. I then revisited this idea in 2020 with Correspondences. In that project, I wrote a very simple text score based on the concepts I was thinking about in photographic assemblage sculptures I was creating. Each ...

As a bar of soap, ARCHITECTURE is a communal resource for the Triennale visitors to clean themselves. It also stands in as a symbol for architecture; a coming together of materials in concrete form that facilitates social processes. As it is used, ARCHITECTURE loses its rigid form. Its fixed appearance erodes through use and it is molded by the hands that touch it; a record of the material sociability inherent in its structure and function. ARCHITECTURE pays attention to the material flows that sustain a collective hygiene, while thinking through architecture as a social entity that evolves beyond its original form.

Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn. This book sets out to show how expanded archival practices can challenge contemporary conceptions and inform the redistribution of power and resources. Calling for the necessity to reimagine the potentials of archives in practice, the three contributions ask: Can archives fulfill their paradoxical potential as utopian sites in which the analog and the digital, the past and future, and remembrance and forgetting commingle?