"For the past fifteen years, Lin May Saeed (b. 1973, Germany) has focused on the lives of animals and human-animal relations. With empathy and wit ,she tells stories, both ancient and modern, of animal subjugation, liberation, and cohabitation with humans, working toward a new iconography of interspecies solidarity. On the occasion of her first museum solo exhibition, this catalogue illustrates Saeed's drawings, paintings, and sculptures in materials such as paper, steel, and polystyrene foam. It includes two interpretive essays on the artist, Saeed's own writings, and a previously untranslated text on animality and otherness."--
A reflection on our changing relationship with the sea, imagined by artists such as Jeff Koons and Alison Katz It goes without saying that our relationship to the natural world, especially the sea and its enigmatic and unfathomable contents, is complex and fraught. Far from a wholesale critical condemnation of anthropocentrism, The Imaginary Sea seeks to present a balanced, multifaceted perspective of our evolving relationship with the natural world. It operates, if not in different temporalities, then in different imaginations, compiling work inspired by the sea from artists such as Jeff Koons, Miquel Barceló and Alison Katz, working across a wide range of mediums. This publication, released alongside the eponymous exhibition at the Fondation Carmignac, considers not only how artists are reevaluating our relationship with nature, but also how nature, particularly the sea, sparks our imagination. Akin to the emotional range of a Shakespearian comedy or tragedy, The Imaginary Sea intends to evoke joy, mystery, wonder and melancholy, as well as loss.
"Naila's vacation to visit relatives in Pakistan turns into a nightmare when she discovers her parents want to force her to marry a man she's never met"--
Renowned artist and architect Maya Lin's visual and verbal sketchbook—a unique view into her artwork and philosophy. Walking through this parklike area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth -- a long, polished black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward, and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into the grassy site contained by the walls of this memorial, we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial's walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole.... So begins the competition entry submitted in 1981 by a Yale undergraduate for the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. -- subsequently called "as moving and awesome and popular a piece of memorial architecture as exists anywhere in the world." Its creator, Maya Lin, has been nothing less than world famous ever since. From the explicitly political to the un-ashamedly literary to the completely abstract, her simple and powerful sculpture -- the Rockefeller Foundation sculpture, the Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial, the Yale Women's Table, Wave Field -- her architecture, including The Museum for African Art and the Norton residence, and her protean design talents have defined her as one of the most gifted creative geniuses of the age. Boundaries is her first book: an eloquent visual/verbal sketchbook produced with the same inspiration and attention to detail as any of her other artworks. Like her environmental sculptures, it is a site, but one which exists at a remove so that it may comment on the personal and artistic elements that make up those works. In it, sketches, photographs, workbook entries, and original designs are held together by a deeply personal text. Boundaries is a powerful literary and visual statement by "a leading public artist" (Holland Carter). It is itself a unique work of art.
In a near-future world ravaged by climate change, who will win in the struggle between humanity and nature? A thick fog rolls in over Shivering Heights. The river overflows, the sky is streaked with toxic green, parasites proliferate in torrential rains and once safely classified species – humans included – are evolving and behaving in unprecedented ways. Against this poetically hostile backdrop, a biologist, Laura, fights to understand the nature and scope of the changes transforming her own body and the world around her. Ten lush and bracing linked climate fictions depict a world gorgeous and terrifying in its likeness to our own. Fauna, Christiane Vadnais’s first work of fiction, won the Horizons Imaginaires speculative fiction award, the City of Quebec book award, and was named one of 2018’s best books by Radio-Canada.
The animal-rights organization PETA asked “Are Animals the New Slaves?” in a controversial 2005 fundraising campaign; that same year, after the Humane Society rescued pets in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina while black residents were neglected, some declared that white America cares more about pets than black people. These are but two recent examples of a centuries-long history in which black life has been pitted against animal life. Does comparing human and animal suffering trivialize black pain, or might the intersections of racialization and animalization shed light on interlinked forms of oppression? In Afro-Dog, Bénédicte Boisseron investigates the relationship between race and the animal in the history and culture of the Americas and the black Atlantic, exposing a hegemonic system that compulsively links and opposes blackness and animality to measure the value of life. She analyzes the association between black civil disobedience and canine repression, a history that spans the era of slavery through the use of police dogs against protesters during the civil rights movement of the 1960s to today in places like Ferguson, Missouri. She also traces the lineage of blackness and the animal in Caribbean literature and struggles over minorities’ right to pet ownership alongside nuanced readings of Derrida and other French theorists. Drawing on recent debates on black lives and animal welfare, Afro-Dog reframes the fast-growing interest in human–animal relationships by positioning blackness as a focus of animal inquiry, opening new possibilities for animal studies and black studies to think side by side.
I?m a painter by nature, almost biologically, but I?m also a painter by default, culturally, because I found out that a lot of what I want to convey to the world can only be told through image and not through words."?Francesco Clemente0This richly illustrated volume documents 'Watchtowers, Keys, Threads, Gates', Francesco Clemente?s exhibition at Dallas Contemporary in 2019, curated by Peter Doroshenko. The large-scale installation presented there included a massive, site-specific fresco and two series of sculptures realized in the artist?s signature style. The overall dreamlike atmosphere was firmly in keeping with Clemente?s aesthetics and imaginary.0Through the winding waves murals??realized with the help of three Oaxacan artists??and the bodies of the sculptures??created over the past five years in collaboration with artisans in India??Clemente constructed a labyrinth of patterns and resonances made up of the elements enumerated in the title. Visitors entered his mythological universe and experienced full immersion in his ongoing research on gesture, knowledge, transition, and color.00Exhibition: Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, USA (13.04-18.08.2019).
A young man begins a journey from Saudi Arabia, believing it will end with his death in England. If his mission succeeds, he will go to his god a martyr - and many innocents will die with him. For David Banks, an armed protection officer, charged with neutralizing the threat to London's safety, his role is no longer clear-cut: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter: dangerous distinctions to a police officer with his finger on the trigger. Soon the two men's paths will cross. Before then, their commitment will be shaken by the journeys that take them there. The suicide bomber and the policeman will have cause to question the roads they've chosen. Win or lose, neither will be the same again...
