"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.

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.

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.

Christo (1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009) created some of the most breathtaking artworks of the 20th and 21st centuries. Their projects radically questioned traditional conceptions of painting, sculpture, and architecture. This lavish photo book is the first comprehensive publication on the artists' oeuvre to be released after Christo's death in May 2020. It also serves as a curtain-raiser for Christo und Jeanne-Claude's last major project - the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which will be carried out posthumously in the fall of 2021. Presenting a wealth of photographs and studio snapshots from 1949 to 2020, some of which are private, this book allows an intimate peek behind the scenes of Christo und Jeanne-Claude's monumental installations which fascinated the public for decades. In addition to pictures capturing the artists at work, it includes photos documenting all of their major projects. Matthias Koddenberg (b.1984), art historian and close friend of the artists, spent many years compiling the more than 300 images featured in this volume. Among them are pictures taken by companions and friends and hitherto unpublished photographs from the artists' estate. Together they tell the extraordinary story not only of the couple's artistic collaboration, but also of their five-decade-long partnership.

There is no soundtrack is a study of how sound and image produce meaning in contemporary experimental media art by artists ranging from Chantal Akerman to Nam June Paik to Tanya Tagaq. It contextualises these works and artists through key ideas in sound studies: voice, noise, listening, the soundscape and more. The book argues that experimental media art produces radical and new audio-visual relationships challenging the visually dominated discourses in art, media and the human sciences. In addition to directly addressing what Jonathan Sterne calls 'visual hegemony', it also explores the lack of diversity within sound studies by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. As such, it contributes to a growing interdisciplinary scholarship, building new, more complex and reverberating frameworks to collectively sonify the study of culture. -- .

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.

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.

Designed by the artist, who grew up in war-torn Georgia, this volume presents new sculptures, paintings and collages that combine sweet nostalgia with a masochistic relish for history's decay. Doppelgangers of the artist as a child seem to be blinded or burned, pointed noses grow from models' heads and figures walk through foreboding landscapes.

The book contains a review of Patrick Hamilton's artistic career, from his beginnings with the series Project, - covering works of architecture, which began in 1996, two years before graduating from art school - to his most recent works. Driven by a desire to move painting onto another plane, Hamilton has created a body of work along object- and concept-based lines with a foundation in his interest towards cultural, historical and literary research. Using the starting point of Santiago, the city where he has lived and worked until recently, Hamilton has woven together countless works over a time period equivalent to a career that has now lasted nearly twenty years. The visual metaphors, popular myths and historical events in them are given form in an impeccable conceptual and visual presentation, which he uses to look for answers to all of the questions which arise on a daily basis in the society of which he forms a part as a citizen and artist. His work takes place mainly in the field of photography, collage, objects and installations and includes a reflection on the concepts of work, inequality, architecture and history - particularly of Chile post-dictatorship. In this sense it is an aesthetic reflection on the consequences of the 'neoliberal revolution' implanted in Chile during the '80s and its projection in the social and cultural field from then until now. Patrick Hamilton (Leuven, Belgium, 1974) has a degree in Art from the University of Chile. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2007. He has had exhibitions at numerous international institutions and has taken part in the Venice Biennale with Chile. He lives and works in Madrid.

Taking place examines feminist and queer alternative art spaces across Canada and the United States from the late-1960s to the present. It looks at how queer and feminist artists working in the present day engage with, respond to and challenge the institutions they have inherited. Through a series of regional case studies, the book interrogates different understandings of 'alternative' space and the possibilities the term affords for queer and feminist artistic imaginaries. -- .

In this lavishly illustrated volume, Laura Lee introduces the art of Tokyo-based digital art collective teamLab, which has soared to global fame with its electrifying immersive and interactive installations. The first of its kind, Worlds Unbound: The Art of teamLab provides a comprehensive overview of teamLab's artistic vision and achievements from its beginnings to its twentieth anniversary in 2021, and illuminates the remarkable scope of teamLab's groundbreaking art and its fundamental contribution to the pivotal field of new media art. This original new book, the first scholarly monograph on this popular group, unpacks the popularity and success of the digital immersive environments created worldwide by the Tokyo-based collective, teamLab, from multiple perspectives and addresses the lack of critical appreciation of their work. The book includes an extensive interview with teamLab. teamLab launched in January 2001 with five members and now comprises more than 600 individuals in a multidisciplinary collaboration of engineers, computer graphics animators, mathematicians, graphic designers, architects, artists and computer programmers. The digital art collective has attained international celebrity for its electrifying installations that transcend boundaries between gallery, public space and popular entertainment and, judging from press coverage, ticket sales and prolific production, it seems clear teamLab's success is only on the rise. In 2018, the collective opened the MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless, a massive technological environment in Tokyo that recorded 2.3 million visitors in its first year of operation - the world's largest annual number of visitors of any single-artist museum. The same year saw numerous other high-profile immersive exhibitions, including teamLab: Massless in Helsinki, Au-dela des limites in Paris, and teamLab Planets TOKYO, a second exhibition in Tokyo. These were quickly followed by two new museums, teamLab Borderless Shanghai in 2019 and, in 2020, teamLab SuperNature in Macao. The vast sea of selfies that have emerged from these venues index the collective's soaring global popularity. At the same time, teamLab's works have found art market success and have been exhibited in major museums worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and they are part of the permanent collection of The Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and Amos Rex in Helsinki, among numerous others. This canonization of teamLab's art belies the fact that the group did not have a traditional gallery start, and in fact teamLab has always engaged in software development and corporate work, in addition to creating artworks. The collective thus boasts an enigmatic status, spanning conventional categories and defying traditional art world pedigree. In so doing it has produced a tremendously rich body of work that speaks to several overlapping issues pertinent to contemporary art while advancing a unique artistic vision. Primary readership will include artists, art historians and visual studies scholars who are particularly interested in the most recent media art and Japanese contemporary art. It will be an essential resource for students and scholars working in Japanese art, global contemporary art, digital art, augmented reality, expanded cinema and installation art and related fields. It will also be of more general interest to those who have visited, or hope to visit, teamLab environments worldwide.

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.

The art of Makoto Azuma uses flowers and plants as its starting point, but juxtaposes their timeless yet transient beauty with an incredibly diverse range of striking settings. In a series of sculptures, installations and interactive events, he delights in blurring the boundaries between nature and artifice. Azuma founded the floral atelier Jardins des Fleurs in 2002, taking commissions from private clients as well as brands and corporations, both in Japan and all over the world. His parallel career as an artist began in 2005 and involves creating and exhibiting artworks that turn flowers and plants into a medium for self-expression. In 2008, Azuma founded AMKK (Azuma Makoto Kaju Kenkyujo), a group specializing in experimental floral creation, with the aim of seeking new forms of botanical beauty and new ways to exhibit them. His works have travelled the globe, from barren deserts to frozen expanses, from thousands of feet below the sea to the very edge of space. Featuring more than sixty projects captured in breathtaking photography, this beautiful book is the most comprehensive showcase of Azuma's art ever published.

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

Stano Filko is considered as an influential utopian and polyartist, who understood art and life universally and cosmologically as a unity beyond geographical attributions of East and West. Filko was one of the most important representatives of the Central European neo-avant-gardes, whose work has remained current. Early on, he designed hybrid objects and environments, extending them into unfamiliar terrains with his basic conceptual approach. Again and again, the focus of the work changes: assemblages are followed by text-based works and performances that attempt to circumvent state repression, and later by large-scale gestural painting, characterized by artistic self-assertion, and finally by a final phase, which he dedicates to his increasingly complex "System SF". The publication approaches the multi-layered œuvre from various perspectives and takes a fresh look at this exuberant oeuvre. After achievements in the 1960s, Stano Filko (1937-2015) became persona non grata as a result of the Prague Spring, which led to a daring escape from the "Eastern Bloc", his participation in Documenta, and him eventually moving to New York. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he returned to Bratislava and transformed the studio house Snezienková into a multi-dimensional, colorful "gesamtkunstwerk".

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.

Installation art has become mainstream in artistic practices. However, acquiring and displaying such artworks implies that curators and conservators are challenged to deal with obsolete technologies, ephemeral materials and other issues concerning care and management of these artworks. By analysing three in-depth case studies, the author sheds new light on the key concepts of traditional conservation (authenticity, artist's intention, and the notion of ownership) while exploring how these concepts apply in contemporary art conservation. Based on original empirical research and cross-case analysis, this ground-breaking study offers a re-examination of traditional conservation values and ethics, and argues for a reassessment of the role of the conservator of contemporary art.

1961, three years after meeting Jeanne-Claude in Paris, Christo made a study of a mammoth project that would wrap one of the city's most emblematic monuments. 60 years, 25,000 square meters of recyclable fabric, and 3,000 meters of rope later, the artists' vision finally came true. Discover their posthumous installation with this book gathering photography, drawings, and a history of the project's making. Like most of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work, L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped is temporary and runs for 16 days from Saturday, September 18 to Sunday, October 3, 2021. Carried out in close collaboration with the Centre des Monuments Nationaux, the historic structure is wrapped in recyclable polypropylene fabric in silvery blue and recyclable red rope. The project is the posthumous realisation of a long-held dream for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who first drew up plans to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in 1961 while renting a small room near the monument. Published as a tribute to the late artists and their lifelong partnership, the book includes original sketches, technical data, and exclusive photography, creating a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the genesis of this prodigious artwork.

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.