This ultimate picture book packed with wonderful, quirky, amusing and delightful images from the British Museum. There is no text at all: the pictures, and combinations of pictures, speak for themselves. This makes the book accessible to all ages. Quite young children will enjoy examining and talking about the pictures; even adult visitors familiar with the museums galleries will find much to surprise and entertain them. Every reader is likely to be surprised at the breadth and variety of images, all of which come from the British Museum.

The artist Dan Graham (b. 1942) has a wide-ranging practice that encompasses writing, performance art, installation, video, photography, and architecture. Throughout his career, Graham has examined the symbiosis between architectural environments and their inhabitants, particularly in his pavilions made of glass and mirrors. His new installation, created for the roof garden of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, addresses current issues about suburban psychology and political surveillance. Graham's work combines landscaping, hedges, and two-way mirrors to create a provocative, immersive experience for viewers. This creatively designed publication includes an insightful interview between the artist and Sheena Wagstaff and focuses not only on Graham's latest commission but also on his previous landscape-oriented installations, providing a focused, fascinating study of one of today's leading contemporary artists. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (04/28/14-11/02/14)

With his new artist's book The Fabric of Reality, Beat Streuli for the first time lays a trail leading through his oeuvre. Following Public Works (JRP Ringier, 2012), which delivered an overview of Streuli's installations from 1996-2011, the artist now links projects, photographs, and video stills from the past seven years with early black-and-white works. Arranged in close succession and with frequent superimposition, the works create a visual rhythm that conveys an impression of an oeuvre marked by sober conceptual observation verging on documentary status. Essays on the themes of urbanism and sociology, as well as on media theory and the theory of perception, embed Streuli's work in a discursive context.

Film and video create an illusory world, a reality elsewhere, and a material presence that both dramatizes and demystifies the magic trick of moving pictures. Beginning in the 1960s, artists have explored filmic and televisual phenomena in the controlled environments of galleries and museums, drawing on multiple antecedents in cinema, television, and the visual arts. This volume traces the lineage of moving-image installation through architecture, painting, sculpture, performance, expanded cinema, film history, and countercultural film and video from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Sound is given due attention, along with the shift from analogue to digital, issues of spectatorship, and the insights of cognitive science. Woven into this genealogy is a discussion of the procedural, political, theoretical, and ideological positions espoused by artists from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Historical constructs such as Peter Gidal's structural materialism, Maya Deren's notion of vertical and horizontal time, and identity politics are reconsidered in a contemporary context and intersect with more recent thinking on representation, subjectivity, and installation art. The book is written by a critic, curator, and practitioner who was a pioneer of British video and feminist art politics in the late 1970s. Elwes writes engagingly of her encounters with works by Anthony McCall, Gillian Wearing, David Hall, and Janet Cardiff, and her narrative is informed by exchanges with other practitioners. While the book addresses the key formal, theoretical, and historical parameters of moving-image installation, it ends with a question: "What's in it for the artist?"

Originally published in 1970, The Urban Revolution marked Henri Lefebvre's first sustained critique of urban society, a work in which he pioneered the use of semiotic, structuralist, and poststructuralist methodologies in analyzing the development of the urban environment. Although it is widely considered a foundational book in contemporary thinking about the city, The Urban Revolution has never been translated into English-until now. This first English edition, deftly translated by Robert Bononno, makes available to a broad audience Lefebvre's sophisticated insights into the urban dimensions of modern life.Lefebvre begins with the premise that the total urbanization of society is an inevitable process that demands of its critics new interpretive and perceptual approaches that recognize the urban as a complex field of inquiry. Dismissive of cold, modernist visions of the city, particularly those embodied by rationalist architects and urban planners like Le Corbusier, Lefebvre instead articulates the lived experiences of individual inhabitants of the city. In contrast to the ideology of urbanism and its reliance on commodification and bureaucratization-the capitalist logic of market and state-Lefebvre conceives of an urban utopia characterized by self-determination, individual creativity, and authentic social relationships.A brilliantly conceived and theoretically rigorous investigation into the realities and possibilities of urban space, The Urban Revolution remains an essential analysis of and guide to the nature of the city.Henri Lefebvre (d. 1991) was one of the most significant European thinkers of the twentieth century. His many books include The Production of Space (1991), Everyday Life in the Modern World (1994), Introduction to Modernity (1995), and Writings on Cities (1995).Robert Bononno is a full-time translator who lives in New York. His recent translations include The Singular Objects of Architecture by Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel (Minnesota, 2002) and Cyberculture by Pierre Levy (Minnesota, 2001).

The KfW Foundation and the cultural centre Kunstlerhaus Bethanien are collaborating on a studio programme offering a twelve month residency in Berlin to young artists from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Verlag Kettler presents the artistic work of the grant holders in an on-going book series. Matheus Rocha Pitta (born 1980 in Tiradentes, Brazil, lives and works in Rio de Janeiro) has created a new group of works entitled For the Winners the Potatoes. At the time of publication, this work an be found at the exhibition room of Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, as well as in two of Berlin's underground stations, Hermannplatz and Gesundbrunnen, and in a showcase at SOX in Berlin's Oranienstrasse. Rocha Pitta's performative installations at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien and in the underground stations allow him to interact with the public. He presents trophies that are made of plastic bags or concrete instead of gold, silver or bronze, and invites visitors to take along potatoes as victory trophies. His work deconstructs the concept of victory and the hierarchy of winners and losers, creating a dense network of historical references going back to Ancient Greece and asking fundamental questions about the meaning of gestures, the community and its value. Rocha Pitta portrays his trophies with a mocking sense of humour. By connecting glory with mundane, everyday objects, he aims to subvert the hierarchy of winners and losers and invites the spectator to rethink the meaning of victory and defeat.

Thomas Hirschhorn is a leading installation artist whose work is owned and exhibited by modern art museums throughout Europe and the United States. Known for his compelling, often site-specific and activated environments which tackle issues of critical theory, global politics, and consumerism, his work initially engages the viewer through sheer superabundance. Combining found images and texts, bound up in handcrafted constructions of cardboard, foil, and packing tape, they correlate to the intellectual scavenging and sensory overload that characterize our own grapplings with the excess of information in daily life. Christina Braun is the first to compile and systematically analyze the extensive source material on this artist's theoretical principles. Now translated into English, her study sheds light on the complicated yet constitutive relations between Hirschhorn's work and theory, providing a major contribution to the study of contemporary art.

This book is dedicated to Godai, an installation by Japanese artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV, who represents the fourth generation of a prestigious line of kagoshi (master wickerwork weavers) in Japan. Godai is a homage to nature and to a tradition of handcraftsmanship. This monumental work, six meters high and nearly as broad at its base, was installed in 2016 in the Rotunda of the Musee des Arts Asiatiques Guimet in Paris and presented to the public from April 12th through September 19th, when the artist still presented himself under the name of Tanabe Shouchiku III. The structure, composed of 8,000 small pieces of bamboo prepared in Japan, was extremely well received. It represents a world in which the five elements, godoi, that make up our world (wind, water, earth, void and fire, according to Japanese tradition) intertwine. Tanabe couldn't find a more suitable material. Tough yet flexible, bamboo has been part of the lives of people in Asia since ancient times and used for numerous purposes. Because of its great significance (it represents 'principles, integrity and constancy'), it has also been represented in many historic paintings and used as a design motif in stationery and furniture. Tanabe's works are both historic and modern and invite a response from the viewer. His bamboo installations, presented in a form adapted to the space in which they are displayed, induce viewers to be aware of and appreciate that space. Each work is dismantled at the end of the exhibition to leave just its memory. And the same bamboo is used for new installations, giving a tangible sense to the concepts of 'continuity' and 'rebirth' and providing a sense of connection with space that transcends time. Godai is no exception: a monumental and ephemeral work, like a piece of organic architecture, it transmits positive energy. Text in English and French.

Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, Kara Walker's A Subtlety, Patty Chang's In Love and Nao Bustamante's Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.

Portuguese artist Andre Romao has developed his practice over the past years to include a diversity of media, from poetry and sculpture to installations and video works. His work explores notions of violence, resistance, and eroticism, having the human body and its often problematic interaction with historical, environmental, and economical macrostructures at its core. Romao draws on a broad range of references, from classical antiquity to Surrealism, from modern literature to the Baroque. The richly illustrated catalogue accompanies Romao's solo exhibition at Museu Colecao Berardo, in Lisbon, and includes an in-depth essay on the artist's work by the curator, Pedro Lapa.

Experience spans Eliasson's career to date via images of his installations, sculptures, paintings, photographs, films, architectural projects, and interventions in public space - each with an extended caption to guide readers through the work

With her unique artistic installations, Madame Tricot - real name Dominique Kaehler Schweizer - displaces the viewer into an illusory world of knitted delicacies. Her smokehouses, refrigerators, counters of sausage and cheese, and platters of vegetables and desserts are full of wit and irony. The knitted human heads and anthropomorphic specimens, on the other hand, confront the viewer with the breaking of taboos and surreal allusions. The installation-like staging represents a balancing act of fine art and virtuosic craftsmanship, and draws on the Eat Art movement of the 1960s. The work of the Swiss artist thus repeatedly awakens associations with the work of Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth and Fischli/Weiss. Text in English and German.

Doris Salcedo, a Colombian-born artist, addresses the politics of memory and forgetting in work that embraces fraught situations in dangerous places. Noted critic and theorist Mieke Bal narrates between the disciplines of contemporary culture in order to boldly reimagine the role of the visual arts. Both women are pathbreaking figures, globally renowned and widely respected. Doris Salcedo, meet Mieke Bal. In "Of What One Cannot Speak", Bal leads us into intimate encounters with Salcedo's art, encouraging us to consider each work as a 'theoretical object' that invites - and demands - certain kinds of considerations about history, death, erasure, and grief. Bal ranges widely through Salcedo's work, from "Salcedo's Atrabiliarios" series - in which the artist uses worn shoes to retrace los desaparecidos ('the disappeared') from nations like Argentina, Chile, and Colombia - to Shibboleth, Salcedo's once-in-a-lifetime commission by the Tate Modern, for which she created a rupture, as if by earthquake, that stretched the length of the museum hall's concrete floor. In each instance, Salcedo's installations speak for themselves, utilizing household items, human bones, and common domestic architecture to explore the silent spaces between violence, trauma, and identity. Yet Bal draws out even deeper responses to the work, questioning the nature of political art altogether and introducing concepts of metaphor, time, and space in order to contend with Salcedo's powerful sculptures and installations. An unforgettable fusion of art and essay, "Of What One Cannot Speak" takes us to the very core of events we are capable of remembering - yet still uncomfortably cannot speak aloud.

An insightful look in to the multifaceted work of rising Belgian painter and sculptor, Stief Desmet Desmet's works are endowed with an unique and fascinating imagery that tell stories Stief Desmet (1973) is one of the new names in the Belgian art world. His unusual painting technique sets him apart from the many followers of artists such as Luc Tuymans and Michael Borremans. He has developed his own visual language, in which he draws on all the resources available to him. Painting is just one of the disciplines he practices; he also creates installations and sculptures and is renowned for his videos. Desmet questions his own position as a contemporary artist alongside the "golden river" landscape painters (Leieschilders) from his youth, who immortalized the landscape in their pastoral works. Typical characteristics of his work include its escapism, in which the artist withdraws into nature, and the humor that is evident in many of his works. Text in English and Dutch."

Throughout her career, the photographer and installation artist Sophie Calle has been creating tableaux that recreate her personal journeys. Projects from the past 10 years are explored in this magnificently illustrated volume. Following on the heels of Calle's highly acclaimed Did You See Me? this new book offers numerous images of Calle's most recent works. Among the projects included are "The Phone Booth, Garigiliano Bridge," which involved a public phone that Calle called at random to initiate conversations with strangers; "Take Care of Yourself," which documents the interpretations of more than 100 women of a breakup note Calle received from a former lover; "The North Pole," a touching tribute to the artist's mother that imagines her realizing a lifelong dream; and the latest iteration of "What do You See," which was created in response to one of the most brazen art heists of all time, at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Many ongoing series are also illustrated here, including "Unfinished," "Herein Lie Secrets," and "Photos without Stories." Calle's many fans will discover how the artist continues to examine the boundaries of public and private life in ways that surprise, engage, and inspire.

British artist Michael Landy (b. 1963) is known primarily as an installation artist. His work, along with others associated with the Young British Artists (YBAs), was first catapulted to the world spotlight when it was featured in the notorious Sensation exhibition (1997). His sculptural installations and performances explore political and social themes, such as the nature of consumerism and commodity. In 2009, Landy began a three-year artist residency at the National Gallery, London. He chose to focus his project on representations of saints and their accompanying stories, often gruesome, which were once part of common culture but are now largely unknown. Landy's preoccupation with recycling narratives and repurposing imagery results in Saints Alive, the subject of this book, conceived to include drawings, collages, and a series of kinetic, interactive sculptures with moving parts and sounds.

Just like the first theories in physics viewed atoms as independent and surrounded by a void, our bodies' microscopic constituents are often portrayed as disconnected from the body as a unified organism, and from its cultural and social contexts. In this book the authors examine the relations between culture, society and bioscientific research and show how our bodies' singularised particles indeed still are socially and culturally embedded. In today's medicine, the biosciences are entangled with state power, commercialism, and cultural ideas and expectations, as well as with the hopes and fears of individuals. Therefore, biomedicine and biotechnology also reshape our perceptions of selfhood and life. From multidisciplinary perspectives, including visual studies, theology, and ethnology, this volume discusses the biosciences and the atomised body in their social, cultural and philosophical contexts.