"The written word is the most basic element of human culture. To touch the written word is to touch the essence of culture." - Xu Bing Book from the Sky certainly seemed to have fallen from the heavens: the text of this installation piece was written in a new language that resembled traditional Chinese. No matter who scours Xu Bing's book for 'meaning', they will only discover a semblance of it: mutated characters that resist interpretation. Carving out approximately four thousand wood blocks by hand, Xu Bing spent four years, from 1987 to 1991, making (in his own words) "something that said nothing". After creating a book no one could read, it only made sense for Xu Bing to develop his next project: a book that transcended barriers of language: Book from the Ground. Composed entirely of pictographs, Book from the Ground is a groundbreaking study into the concept of universal communication. Whether his goal is total comprehension or confusion, Xu Bing's masterful exploration of language challenges the way we think about the written word.

"Sources in the Air" accompanies David Maljkovic's three-part exhibition of the same name at the Van Abbemusem, Eindhoven, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and GAMeC, Bergamo. Including films, sculpture, collage and installations from the past ten years, "Sources in the Air" is the artist's most comprehensive survey to date.

On the leading edge of trauma and archival studies, this timely book engages with the recent growth in visual projects that respond to the archive, focusing in particular on installation art. It traces a line of argument from practitioners who explicitly depict the archive (Samuel Beckett, Christian Boltanski, Art & Language, Walid Raad) to those whose materials and practices are archival (Miroslaw Balka, Jean-Luc Godard, Silvia Kolbowski, Boltanski, Atom Egoyan). Jones considers in particular the widespread nostalgia for 'archival' media such as analogue photographs and film. He analyses the innovative strategies by which such artefacts are incorporated, examining five distinct types of archival practice: the intermedial, testimonial, personal, relational and monumentalist.

The Dark Side is a project that solicits the public on the 'dark side' that is in each of us, which manifests itself in ancestral fears such as the fear of the dark ( to which this first volume is dedicated), the fear of loneliness, the fear of time. These fears require a pause, a reflection: they destabilise, but at the same time ignite new possibilities, new thoughts, new perspectives. This volume Who's Afraid of the Dark? investigates the theme of physical and metaphorical darkness, and consequently the relationship with its opposite, light. It includes works ranging from installations, multi-sensory experiences, mixed media and large scale-works from 13 of the most important international artists such as Gregor Schneider, Robert Longo, Hermann Nitsch, Tony Oursler, Christian Boltanski, James Lee Byars up to the new protagonists of the contemporary art scene such as Monster Chetwind, Sheela Gowda, Shiota Chiharu and, among Italian artists, Gino De Dominicis, Gianni Dessi, Flavio Favelli, Monica Bonvicini. The artistic perspective is countered with the interventions by theologian Gianfranco Ravasi, physicist-theorist Mario Rasetti, psychiatrist Eugenio Borgna and philosopher Federico Vercellone, who offer a polyphonic look of great intellectual interest on this theme. The Dark Side project inaugurates Musja, a new museum in the city of Rome, which is proposed as a reference for the most innovative trends in the contemporary art scene. Text in English and Italian.

This book is about the digital interface and its use in interactive new media art installations. It examines the aesthetic aspects of the interface through a theoretical exploration of new media artists, who create, and tactically deploy, digital interfaces in their work in order to question the socio-cultural stakes of a technology that shapes and reshapes relationships between humans and non-humans. In this way, it shows how use of the digital interface provides us with a critical framework for understanding our relationship with technology.

00s is the first exhibition that explores the 2000s, taking as its starting point one of the most important European collections of contemporary art - the Cranford Collection. This accompanying catalogue selects 100 works from the collection, and includes pieces by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Damien Hirst, Gerhard Richter, Raymond Pettibon, and Josh Smith. With an introduction by Nicolas Bourriaud, the CEO of MO.CO, and interviews with Muriel and Freddy Salem, the Patrons of the Cranford Collection. Text in English and French.

Latest production of Cuban artist, Adrian Fernandez, concerned with the impact of material culture, history and memory on contemporary man. Interested in the symbols that represent ideologies and that construct collective identities, he searches in his photography for the memory of the historical past and its impact on his cultural present. His work is organised in series that sometimes interconnect and complement each other. Each new series is a consequence of the previous one, with similar concerns and interests, from black and white photography with a documentary perspective, to studio photography, to the use of digital media and colour photography. His sculptural work is developed in installations, in which he uses assemblage and welding of metal and carbon steel. Text in English and Spanish.

In this in-depth analysis, Peter Muir argues that Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect (1975) is emblematic of Henri Lefebvre's understanding of art's function in relation to urban space. By engaging with Lefebvre's theory in conjunction with the perspectives of other writers, such as Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, and George Bataille, the book elicits a story that presents the artwork's significance, origins and legacies. Conical Intersect is a multi-media artwork, which involves the intersections of architecture, sculpture, film, and photography, as well as being a three-dimensional model that reflects aspects of urban, art, and architectural theory, along with a number of cultural and historiographic discourses which are still present and active. This book navigates these many complex narratives by using the central 'hole' of Conical Intersect as its focal point: this apparently vacuous circle around which the events, documents, and other historical or theoretical references surrounding Matta-Clark's project, are perpetually in circulation. Thus, Conical Intersect is imagined as an insatiable absence around which discourses continually form, dissipate and resolve. Muir argues that Conical Intersect is much more than an 'artistic hole.' Due to its location at Plateau Beaubourg in Paris, it is simultaneously an object of art and an instrument of social critique.

2019 marked the 40th anniversary of Barbara Nanning's graduation in ceramics from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Over those forty years, Nanning (b.1957) has become an internationally respected artist with work in countless public and private collections in the Netherlands and around the world. Originally, her reputation was due mainly to her pioneering ceramics and installations, which had completely abandoned the container form that had so long dominated studio pottery. But for the last 25 years Nanning has worked chiefly in a different medium: glass, in which she has created an amazing and multi-faceted oeuvre. Each year she spends an extended period in the Czech Republic, where expert glassblowers help her to conjure up the most extraordinary and thrilling objects in that material.

Zadok Ben-David is an award-winning artist who lives and works in London and is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks. He explores themes linked to human nature and evolution. His work is often referred to as poetic and magical, always oscillating between delicate miniature-work and monumental installations. Metalworking has become Ben-David's preferred language in contrast to the subtle optical illusions that he creates, thanks to a sometimes-rough medium. The book celebrates the work of Ben-David, and features the moody floor installation Blackfield, containing over 17,000 miniatures of flowers, duplicated and hand painted from 900 different species. The book also includes new works inspired by botanical drawings in Kew's archives from the 15th - 18th century.

Drawing especially on the encounters and relationships that defined her exceptional career, The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda outlines a sustainable legacy for the celebrated director and visual artist. Over nine chapters, it unpacks how creation, connection, and environment form the core of Varda’s artistry, which centers foremost on relationships with her family, with other artists, even with passersby she would meet in her travels around the world. Also celebrating her feminist legacy, the chapters cover a wide range, from the classic Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) to documentaries The Beaches of Agnès (2008) and Faces Places (2017) as well as selected art installations. The book’s final section is dedicated to teaching Varda’s work; here, ten scholars from around the world consider how Varda’s art and feminist pedagogies offer unique ways to bring crucial concepts into the classroom. By seeking a sustainable praxis to discuss and teach Varda’s work, and by making pedagogical concerns an explicit part of this approach, this book argues that Varda’s insights about the nature of creative work will inspire new generations of viewers and audiences.

Haegue Yang is renowned for her multifaceted works that vary in form from collage to kinetic sculpture, perceptively evoking historical and contemporary narratives of migration, displacement, and cross-cultural translation. Using a language of abstraction, Yang transforms ordinary and domestic materials, such as venetian blinds, light bulbs, drying racks, yarn, and bells, into deeply allegorical, meticulously constructed installations and sculptures that dissociate these materials from their original contexts. The artist's installations become immersive environments that provoke the senses with a diversity of scents, sounds, and textures. Featuring essays contextualising Yang's artistic career, this book fully illustrates the scope of Art Gallery of Ontario's groundbreaking exhibition and generates new understandings of Yang's transformative contributions to the field of contemporary art.

The work of the artist couple Christo (1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009) resists categorization. It is a hybrid of art, urban planning, architecture, and engineering, but above all an aesthetic uniquely their own: surreal and ethereal environmental interventions that have graced monuments, public parks, and centers of power alike. This compact book spans the complete career of the couple who were born on the very same day, met in Paris, fell in love, and became a creative team like no other. With rich illustration, it spans Christo and Jeanne-Claude's earliest projects in the 1950s right through to The Floating Piers, installed at Lake Iseo, Italy, in 2016. The book celebrates all of the couple's most famous environmental interventions, such as The Gates in New York's Central Park and the Wrapped Reichstag in Berlin, while also featuring early drawings and family photos unknown to the wider public. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

When this book first appeared in 1982, it introduced readers to Robert Irwin, the Los Angeles artist 'who one day got hooked on his own curiosity and decided to live it'. Now expanded to include six additional chapters and twenty-four pages of color plates, "Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees" chronicles three decades of conversation between Lawrence Weschler and light and space master Irwin. It surveys many of Irwin's site-conditioned projects - in particular the Central Gardens at the Getty Museum (the subject of an epic battle with the site's principal architect, Richard Meier) and the design that transformed an abandoned Hudson Valley factory into Dia's new Beacon campus - enhancing what many had already considered the best book ever on an artist.

Published to accompany MASS MoCA's landmark installation of LeWitt's innovative wall drawings, this book celebrates the artist and his illustrious 50-year career. Published in association with Mass MoCA Exhibition Schedule: Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (opens November 16, 2008)

Lesley Dill is an American artist working at the intersection of language and fine art in printmaking, sculpture, installation and performance, exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche. Dill transforms the emotions of the writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, into works of paper, wire, horsehair, foil, bronze and music — works that awaken the viewer to the physical intimacy and power of language itself. Lesley Dill – Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me features a uniquely inspired group of sculptures and two-dimensional works more than a decade in the making. It is testimony of Dill’s ongoing investigation into the significant voices and personas of America’s past. For the artist, the American voice grew from early America’s obsessions with divinity and deviltry, on fears of the wilderness out there and wilderness inside us. The plates, in colour throughout, are supplemented with essays by Lesley Dill, Brooklyn-based writer Nancy Princenthal, Figge Art Museum’s curator Andrew Wallace, and researcher and tribal historian Juaquin Hamilton-Youngbird. The book also features a literary text by writer by Tom Sleigh and a poem by author and poet Ray Young Bear.

Lumen, a survey of the four-decade career of British-Indian artist Sutapa Biswas, accompanies two solo exhibitions of the artist's work held in 2021-22. Biswas emigrated from India to the UK with her family in the 1960s. Taking the long histories of colonialism together with personal memories, Biswas's art meditates on questions of migration, identity and belonging. Her practice has consistently interrogated Western tradition and discourse, pushing past absences, exclusions and limited representations to make evident the entwined histories of culture and politics. This publication details Biswas's career from its origins in the Black Arts Movement in the 1980s to her important photographic installations of the 1990s and her subsequent major moving-image works, including her newly commissioned film Lumen. The first substantial publication on the artist in over 17 years, it features two new conversations with the artist and two commissioned essays. It also includes a republication of Griselda Pollock's important text on Biswas's work, along with a postface reflecting on their relationship in the decades since the essay's original publication. Published on the occasion of the exhibition: Sutapa Biswas: Lumen BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (26 June 2021-22 March 2022) and Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge (16 October 2021-30 January 2022).