Queer Exhibition Histories

Queer Exhibition Histories comprises case studies highlighting the countless efforts, both large and small, of LGBTQIA+ artists and curators, centring on queer art exhibitions and their modes of documentation and archiving. Often, the legacy of these projects largely depends on personal archives, memories, and paraphernalia, with the overriding notion, or need, for public display. In these contexts, “public” is relative in events that were either short-lived, held under the veil of domestic spaces, or kept exclusive for those “in the know.” Therefore, they were not exclusively artistic, but could equally be discursive, activist, educational, or serve as a tool for community building. At the intersection of queerness and contemporary art, this volume considers how the efforts of LGBTQIA+ artists have advanced their public presence in museums and society alike.

Contributors: Tawanda Appiah, Aaron Betsky, Övül Durmusoglu, Cédric Fauq, Aleksandra Gajowy, Jessica Gysel, Bas Hendrikx, Valentina Iancu, Katrin Kivimaa, Ryan Kearney, Léon Kruijswijk, Elisabeth Lebovici, Joci Márton, Edwin Nasr, Katarina Pirak Sikku, Francois Piron, Karol Radziszewski, Sylvia Sadzinski, Sara Salminen, Liang-Kai Yu

Valiz with support from Mondriaan Fonds

Dream Big Cat, A4 hand printed woodcut print

The little cat is a superhero! A great children’s room motif for brave boys and girls with big dreams. The hand-made woodcut print is a wonderful wall decoration in the baby and children’s room.

3-color woodcut, DIN A4, printed area: approx. 15 cm x 21 cm, hand-printed original graphics, limited edition of 15 pieces, numbered and signed. Every copy is hand-printed by the designer Pia Kolle.

Productive Archiving—Artistic Strategies, Future Memories, and Fluid Identities

Productive Archiving discusses a variety of problems archival organizations. It mainly focuses on the following three issues with archival organizations that are usually overlooked: first, the question of inclusion in or exclusion from the archive; second, the loss of individuality and specificity in the archive, the danger of homogenization; and third, that archiving may become a form of pigeonholing, boxing specific identities into a confined space. Avoiding the archive because of these problems is not an option, because archival organization is a basic symbolic mode on the basis of which we organize our lives, the past, the present, and the future.
What this book suggests is that it is best to explore constructive and creative solutions for these problems. Especially artistic archives seem to be able to develop these possible solutions, because they offer speculative, unexpected ways to order, select, and narrate specific information, and bring about new connections and archival organizations.
Supported by Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds.

Sola

Sola begins with the narration of a dream in luminous shapes and colors: a house in which light shines in every corner, surrounded by a flowering garden—a utopian place of refuge, communal togetherness, and a life in harmony with nature. But like in a moment of awakening, the harmonious ideal breaks against a reality that offers neither security nor confidence. It is a reality in which crises like climate change threaten the fragile balance of the environment and call the certainties of our everyday lives into question.

In her new book, Malwine Stauss uses radiant watercolors to create a deeply personal insight into an emotional world shaped by the tensions, fears, and hopes of our present time. With multi-layered graphic compositions that are abstract and accessible at the same time, Sola offers an expressive visual language that invites us to pause for thought.

Hexen

Do witches exist? Of course, maybe they even have their studio next door.

In her book debut for Rotopol, Malwine Stauss investigates the borderlands between art and alchemy, between the abstract and concrete. Inspired by the spiritual art of the 19th and 20th centuries, the author plays with radiant colors and shapes to outline decisive questions: how does one draw the invisible? Does magic exist? What is inspiration? The gaze into the past becomes a door to the future: the falsely neglected female artists of today have a lot in common with the witches of the past. Both cross borders to find their personal freedom, both are highly in tune with their environment and have a sensibility for the openings in the seemingly consistent order of society.

Fürchtetal

“Like a spotlight, one decision leaves an entire life in shadow. The darkness swallows the memories. Even if someone asks about him. Then, like a hammer, the ending shatters any words about travel, friends, family and happiness.”

After the sudden suicide of their father, two siblings begin a silent correspondence: she writes to him, he sends drawings back. Each filled page makes visible what words often lack. The dialog opens a world full of enchanted memories, riddles, and feelings that, as intimate as they may be, bring to light something universal: that nothing is as one expects, fears, or hopes. Sister and brother let themselves be accompanied a short way through their present and their past. In the forest of their childhood, on the way through the valley, in multi-layered image-word compositions and allegorical and occasionally ironic drawings they show that in the end a place is often surprisingly more than just a catastrophe.

To Be A Brave Scout

Ready for a trip into the wilderness? With her new book, Julia Kluge invites you to wondrous adventures in nature. In a tongue-in-cheek style, she presents all sorts of impressions from the lives of brave scouts—from hiking at sunrise and picking delicious berries to camping under the stars. The dreamy and expressive illustrations make familiar flora and fauna seem excitingly alien. No wonder, because after all, a practiced look at nature brings all kinds of amazing things to light. And should life in the wilderness ever get dicey, you can always rely on your fellows.

In To Be a Brave Scout the seriousness of the Scout movement, founded at the beginning of the last century, gives way to a timeless fascination for the forms of animals and plants, for a life in and with nature. The atmospheric colors of the book exude a longing for freedom and tempt you to lose yourself while reading.

Happy Place

In times of insecurity and turmoil, it’s good to have your happy place, especially if you encounter incomprehension as an artist, or when the internet jumps at you in an unguarded moment.

Happy Place by Max Baitinger collects stories about the search for balance in everyday life full of absurdities. In which doctors instruct machines to diagnose patients, and at the same time, you are asked by your computer whether you are a robot. Where you go to the sports studio to accept bruises for your health and where the grouchy tax system observes you through the window. In order not to lose your balance, it helps to start the day with yoga exercises and to take a deep breath. After all, you want to be ready to visit inspiration and intrusive people. And what if everything still ends up becoming too much? It’s simple: dream of your happy place and pet the animals.

Wie lange noch

Loosely and yet meaningfully, Alice Socal describes the experiences of her pregnancies in an interplay of irony and perplexity. Combining text and image, she organizes her doubts, fears, expectations and wonders of this special time. In the leading roles: a cat as alter ego, a dog as boyfriend and a seal as the pregnancy itself.

Wie lange noch is documentary and reflection at the same time. The narrative in comic form proves to be the perfect medium, both for the humorous contemplation of personal insights and for the analysis of identity issues between desire and reality—as woman, partner, artist, and mother-to-be.

BookBindingKit

The BookBindingKit offers an overview of the elements of haptic book design. When different techniques are combined playfully, new ideas for unconventional books and book objects emerge.
The poster can be used in many ways—as teaching material for students and apprentices or as inspiration for designers and artists. It can also be helpful when meeting customers in print shops, bookbinderies, and publishing houses.

Jan-Holger Mauss – For Adults Only

Jan-Holger Mauss erases the models featured in vintage gay magazines. Meticulously he goes through an entire publication, page by page, using an ‘analog’ eraser to render these figures invisible and clear out everything but a few words or some parts of the background. This results in landscapes, interiors, and abstractions, leaving only what he wants us to see: the charm of editing, the art of two-dimensional sculpting, the merits of rubbing away.
Referring to “whole train” graffitis, Jan-Holger Mauss describes his editions as “whole books.”

Tina Haber – Schlossbesuch

Experimenting with the drawing possibilities of a tablet screen, Tina Haber finds a different approach to the painterly process of creating an image. The arrangement and layering of transparent markings or text fields brings forth abstract structures that may evoke architectures, landscapes, or even figures. Some areas appear shadowed; others seem superimposed. A vague spatiality emerges.
In Schlossbesuch Haber shows a selection of vector graphics from the years 2020–2022; the abstract spaces and objects depicted appear permeable and almost weightless. During this period, the artist visited her father’s birthplace for the first time, a village near the Czech-German border, and its castle, Zámek Cervený Hrádek (Rothenhaus Castle), where her grandfather worked before being drafted to serve in the Second World War. The artist could easily recognize some parts of the building that were known to her from old family photos. Thus, a foreign place reveals its fragmentary connection to her personal history. The titles of the drawings are a list of components for a building—Ramp 1, Walls 14, Relief 3, Passage 2—and the changing color saturation of the risoprints reinforces the impression of a fictitious architecture, or one from a memory or dream.

Jan-Holger Mauss – Buddy

Jan-Holger Mauss erases the models featured in vintage gay magazines. Meticulously he goes through an entire publication, page by page, using an ‘alog’ eraser to render these figures invisible and clear out everything but a few words or some parts of the background. This results in landscapes, interiors, and abstractions, leaving only what he wants us to see: the charm of editing, the art of two-dimensional sculpting, the merits of rubbing away.
Referring to “whole train” graffitis, Jan-Holger Mauss describes his editions as “whole books.”

Jan-Holger Mauss – Wild Thing Nr. 1

Jan-Holger Mauss erases the models featured in vintage gay magazines. Meticulously he goes through an entire publication, page by page, using an ‘analog’ eraser to render these figures invisible and clear out everything but a few words or some parts of the background. This results in landscapes, interiors, and abstractions, leaving only what he wants us to see: the charm of editing, the art of two-dimensional sculpting, the merits of rubbing away.
Referring to “whole train” graffitis, Jan-Holger Mauss describes his editions as “whole books.”

Collision

Collision by Lars Harmsen is the collision of intuition and the human experience. A visual journey of photographs, design, and ideas.

With this publication, the author mercilessly settles accounts with the last 10 years of his creative work. Numerous pieces and creations, from Slanted, PosterRex and 100for10 to freelance works and other projects have been destroyed, cut up and reassembled. A maximum of carnage. With a minimum of diplomacy.

Raban Ruddigkeit wrote about the work: “A year ago Lars bought a boat. He has actually been sailing all his life. He sails as a designer over the trends and hypes, over the egos and the shooters. In his work he connects drops to water and waves to a sea. Now and then he expresses himself in his own graphic language. Especially when, as today, the sea becomes rougher and more uncomfortable. Then Lars brings out his unwavering compass—a true sailor only proves himself in the storm.”

 

Longlist Die Schönsten Deutschen Bücher 2024, Stiftung Buchkunst
Awarded by Art Directors Club, ADC Award Germany 2024 (Silver)

Grafikmagazin 01.23 Bars & Drinks

As the name indicates, Grafikmagazin is a print magazine focusing on all things graphic design. Primarily it’s aimed at professional creatives and design students from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and beyond. Grafikmagazin presents outstanding work from graphic design, typography, illustration, photography, design theory, research, paper, and printing every two months.

The editorial team of Grafikmagazin created a variety of sections and categories but selected focus themes for each issue, like Bars and Drinks. The topics portray how imaginative, eclectic, and playful graphic design can be while featuring successful branding concepts and niche ideas.

The extensive Showroom section lets readers know other creatives and the stories behind design studios worldwide.

The Design & Research category presents interdisciplinary projects that show how science and research can benefit from creative solutions and play an active role in graphic design.

In the Production & Publishing section, everything revolves around print. You will find exquisite books, sophisticated annual reports, and high-quality embossed greeting cards. Also, the cover artists of each issue are interviewed or get to highlight their ideas.

Each cover is printed on a different paper, and the design interprets the particular Grafik+ theme more broadly or shares a fresh perspective on a unique design technique.

The Grafikmagazin team, its correspondents, and freelancers are bound and driven by the firm belief that print is not dead. With the will to prove just how alive it is, and the motivation to start something fresh yet deeply traditional, they strive for nothing less than to create another print magazine that makes history.

Krisenkunst – Kunstkrise? Kunst und die globale Umweltkrise. Ein Gespräch mit T. J. Demos

Crisis Art—Art Crisis? Art and the Global Environmental Crisis. A Conversation with T.J. Demos
How can dystopian thinking be transformed into positive forces for a common future? There are no easy answers to this question, yet it is imperative to engage with it in order to contribute to a more sustainable and socially just world.
The publication Krisenkunst – Kunstkrise? deals with this complex topic in form of a dialogue led by young artists and academic staffs from the Acadamy of Fine Arts Leipzig and the Athens School of Fine Arts, as part of the program p o s t documenta: contemporary arts as territorial agencies, with award-winning author and theorist T.J. Demos.
Conceived as a platform for experimental modes of art education, production, and dissemination, as well as for collaborative practice and critical discourse, the p o s t documenta program established an intercultural exchange over a period of three years (2020-2022) between Leipzig and Athens and dealt with urgent challenges of the present. Among other things, this brought about the wonderful opportunity to speak with T. J. Demos about the relevance and potential of artistic creation in the context of the global environmental crisis, about raw ideas and the search for new perspectives between art, ecology, and politics. For T. J. Demos, the current climate emergency is first and foremost a political crisis that must be managed through an intersectional approach if a future worth living is to be shaped.
In the conversation about “Art and the Global Environmental Crisis,” ”world” turns out to be a key concept, evoking the most diverse meanings—parallel, anthropocentric, post-human, utopian, dystopian, future, capitalist, extinct, and constructive. This was the inspiration for a visual essay accompanying the German and Greek versions of the text: 16 collages of images illustrating iterations, fragments, potentials, and evidence of worlds and their transformations.
T.J. Demos writes about contemporary art and global politics. He is a professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the founding director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He researches the intersection of visual culture, radical politics, and political ecology, and is the author of numerous books, including Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke, 2020); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg, 2016); and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg, 2017). He recently co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-2021). Demos is also chair and chief curator of the Climate Collective, providing public programming related to the 2021 Climate Emergency > Emergence program at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Maat) in Lisbon. He is presently working on a new book on radical futurisms.
p o s t documenta: contemporary arts as territorial agencies was an educational and artistic research program of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and the Athens School of Fine Arts, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in the frame of German-Greek Academic Partnerships 2020-2022.
The book is accompanied by a visual essay by Andrea Garcia Vasquez in collaboration with Brigita Kasperaite, Maria Zervoudaki, and Magdalena Zotou.

The New Beauty

In recent years, the beauty industry has shifted the conversation towards individual expression like never before. While people, and women in particular, have historically faced pressure to conform to rigid ideals set by society, nowadays brands and consumers are embracing uniqueness and celebrating identity. Creating a platform for conversation and deconstructing taboos in the process, The New Beauty captures an essential moment of transformation in the business of beauty by exploring the industry from historical, scientific, and journalistic perspectives.

From using makeup as a means to challenge gender, to the link between hairstyling and community-building, or rituals as a form of self-care, The New Beauty is positioned to appeal to anyone with an interest in feeling well in their own skin.

Seven Logics of Sculpture—Encountering Objects Through the Senses

Sculpture as a specific medium is rarely investigated within a deeply cultural, philosophical context, nor within visual art itself. Whilst discussions about installation art, performance art, or other 3D art forms are widespread, the discourse on sculpture seems to be stuck in historical, material, or thematic frameworks. This is a loss for our understanding of art in general, and of sculpture in particular. In order to assess contemporary art practices, one should have a better understanding of the logics that are at work within sculpture as a medium, and how they differ from other art forms.

This book explores ‘seven logics’ of sculpture—not as a historical overview, but with a contemporary analytical approach, drawing from literature, philosophy, psycho-analysis, architecture, and mundane daily culture—that help understand specific manifestations of sculpture and the active perception by the viewer. It relates to aspects such as the senses, the skin, the body, objecthood, narrative dynamics, the shaping of space, fragmentation, and montage.
Seven Logics of Sculpture opens up new ways of looking at, understanding, and appreciating sculpture, placing the medium at the heart of art’s experience; how sculpture can be shaped, assembled, encountered, seen and embodied.
Ernst van Alphen (b. 1958) is a cultural analyst and a professor emeritus of Literary Studies at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. His publications include Shame! and Masculinity (Valiz, 2020); Failed Images (Valiz, 2018); Staging the Archive (Reaktion Books, 2014).

Featuring work by: Carl Andre, Aldo Bakker, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Louise Bourgeois, Constantin Brancusi, Anthony Caro, Joseph Cornell, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Jeannette Christensen, Lygia Clark, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, Dan Graham, David Hammons, Raoul Hausmann, Barbara Hepworth, Heringa/Van Kalsbeek, Eva Hesse, Hans Hovy, Ann Veronica Janssens, Donald Judd, Maria van Kesteren, Per Kirkeby, Katarzyna Kobro, Jannis Kounellis, Geert Lap, Sol Lewitt, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Michelangelo, Henry Moore, Bruce Nauman, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, Giuseppe Penone, Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Ray, Auguste Rodin, Medardo Rosso, Fred Sandback, Marien Schouten, Richard Serra, David Smith, Alina Szapocznikow, Johan Tahon, Didier Vermeiren, Rachel Whiteread, and many others.

Posters Can Help

Global dramas can lead us to question our own credibility and the significance of our own lives and/or actions. Recent events in Ukraine have led us, the Slanted team, to ask what our work is really for? Can we accelerate the transition to a sustainable, fair, and just society through the power of design?

With a global call, we invited the design community to contribute with a piece of work and a donation. 434 people from all over the world participated in this project and almost 700 posters were submitted. All the proceeds have been donated to two select organizations that we appreciate for their work: ARTHELPS and MSF—Médecins Sans Frontières.

We believe in the problem-solving power of design. We want to work every day towards a vision of the world that is sustainable, inclusive, equitable, and safe. This book is an effort to bring the global creative community together to take a small but valuable step towards solving the big problems of our time.

Container Atlas

Container architecture has become an essential part of our twenty-first century surroundings, with it being used to create modular structures for pavilions, brand showrooms, retail premises, and even residential homes. Ten years after the first publication of Container Atlas, this eagerly anticipated follow-up charts how this movement has evolved into an essential part of today’s architectural vocabulary. Container Atlas serves as a practical and inspirational reference not only for architects and engineers, but also for all creatives eager to learn about the rich and diverse language of container architecture and modular building.

The Story of Eames Furniture

In The Story of Eames Furniture, Marilyn and John Neuhart tell the story, to paraphrase Charles Eames himself, of how Eames furniture got to be the way it is. The Story of Eames Furniture is a biography—not of an individual person, but of arguably the most influential and important furniture brand of our time.

Brimming with more than 2,500 images and insider information, this two-volume book in a slipcase sheds new light on the context in which the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames was created. It documents in unparalleled detail how the design process in the Eames Office developed as well as the significant roles played by specific designers and manufacturers.

Volume 1 presents the early years of the Eames Office and its method of furniture design and development. It introduces not only Charles and Ray Eames, but also key members of their design team including Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Herbert Matter, and others. This volume also focuses on Charles Eames’s early work with plywood and how he adapted plywood-molding techniques into a system to mass-produce furniture.

Volume 2 features the period from the aftermath of the Second World War through 1978, the year of Charles Eames’s death and of the effective, functional end of the Eames Office. It provides incomparable insight into how new technologies served as the genesis for the most interesting pieces of Eames furniture. This volume also focuses on the role of the Herman Miller Furniture Company in the evolution of furniture design at the Eames Office and investigates the influence of Don Albinson, who was Charles Eames’s primary designer and technician from the mid-1940s to 1960.