Les Devis manquantes, artist's book

To celebrate the Tenth Anniversary of the bookartbookshop, London, artists were invited to submit books on the theme 'X=Or what is to be done'. Twenty books were shortlisted and exhibited at the RED gallery, an event attended by over 400 people. A catalogue was produced on newsprint, listing all the participants, with images of the twenty shortlisted books. The twenty shortlisted artists' books are now at bookartbookshop and will be toured around art college libraries and shown to student. Ten books were prizewinners

Le modèle - a solo exhibition curated by FRAC Bretagne for Rendez-vous à Saint=Briac, France

Sharon Kivland is an artist who collects, a gleaner in search of a feminine imagery that could be called popular. Using images (engravings from old journals, postcards, illustrations, and photographs from women’s magazines) and contemporary texts e, under the double illumination of clothing and literature, the artist draws an image of a woman between stereotype and emancipation. (Catherine Elkar) The exhibition Le Modèle presented in the former presbytery of Saint-Briac forms an introduction to the summer exhibition Armel-Beaufils, le regard des femmes, which will be presented from 1 July to 3 September 2017, curated by Sharon Kivland A SHORT RESUMÉ In the first room foxes carry books by Marx in their jaws, wearing the cap of liberty, echoed in a group of drawings of citoyennes elegantly coated for street action, and no doubt contained by the girdles with fox tails. They are accompanied by citoyens, which makes the girdles somewhat troubling to consider. There are women doubled and haunted. There are echoes across space and time. Women in negligées and underwear extracted from the pages of French lingerie magazines of the 1950 may be ‘femmes folles de leur corps’, as Karl Marx adds in a footnote to Capital (Chapter II, ‘The Process of Exchange’), comparing commodities with women, citing a twelfth-century French poet who come across ‘wanton’ women among other goods on view and for purchase at a fair. The women in the drawings and photographs look away for the most part, though some meet the viewer’s regard. Some look down, while others hide their faces, but not in shame, despite the very feminine mode of display, which some might consider as masquerade (posing as a woman while being something else, as in any act assumed to be a seduction). In the magazines the women are models, objects that carry another object to the market place. The distinction between public and domestic space is evident in the two artists’ studios, two regimes of production divided by a measure, a radical standard raised at a moment when subjectivity changed forever. In the second room there are women in négligés and in bed-jackets (liseuses), copied faithfully once more. The women are reading Marx (one may assume) in their boudoirs. The red ribbons around their necks and the red covers of their reading matter indicate something more is at stake than indolence and luxury. They are observed by a number of foxes, naturalised (as the French say; that is, more natural than Nature, and good citizens) who hold the constraining corsets designed for little girls. Bodies are constrained and fashioned. Yes, bodies and subjects are produced. It is unclear if the foxes are the liberators and educators, or if there has been an act of violence, wrenching the garment or book from a body or bodies by force, an exchange that the women – if they are commodities – cannot do for themselves. The foxes, too, are things, objects rather than the animate beings they were once, yet they are brought again to life in this new encounter, capricious, sportive, endowed with life, like wanton women. Perhaps they are going to the market on their own, in their own right, and if so, then social organisation is subject to change (if the dead, animal or woman, starts to speak, moves, acts)

To forget and to repeat: negative and cliché

An illustrated essay about postcards, which performs as a postcard. No, rather it is an essay with postcards, which performs as a series of postcards. In any case, it begins and ends with a postcard. There are a number of clichés, and a number of negatives. Images of the unconscious, unconscious representations, are evoked. That an idea or image or presentation is present in more than one register is also the stuff of dreams, the material of The Interpretation of Dreams

Homenagem à Shelagh Wakely

A group exhibition curated by R O O M London, in association with the Castro Maya Museums and the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, in the Museu do Acude, Rio de Janeiro. as a homage to the revered artist Shelagh Wakely who died in 2011. Shelagh Wakely was an important influence in the installation movement and was an inspiration to many artists in both Brazil and the UK. Sandie Macrae, Stephen Bell and Antoni Malinowski travelled to Rio de Janeiro, taking with them small works by eleven British artists. They re-created a seminal work by Shelagh Wakely, and made installations/artworks themselves, alongside works by six Brazilian artists.</p

The Natural Forms. Parts I, II, III

A series of works developed in three parts for three venues addresses gender constructions and economics. In Part I, large format photographs show women in negligés adopting certain gestures and forms. Taken from ‘modern’ magazines of the 1950s in which the latest French ladies’ undergarments are introduced, these women correspond to those cited in a footnote in the second chapter of Capital, which offers women as part of the display of commodities in the market-place, suggesting that standardised productions of the female body use stereotypical poses and views to produce seductive patterns and desires. Foxes, naturalised – more natural than Nature and good citizens – carry silk negligees in their jaws and paws. In Part II, women in bed-jackets (liseuses), copied from French lingerie magazines and annotated, may not be ‘femmes folles de leur corps, after the footnote in Capital, as the red ribbons around their necks and the red covers of their reading matter indicate more is at stake than indolence and luxury. Tracts in the pink paper of the Financial Times, the title of each drawn from Capital, show women as corps morcelés, extended captions describing fabric and ornamentation in lingering detail. The commodity is feminine, exchanged and accruing value in that exchange, followed in the work Mademoiselle la Marchandise in Part III. In correspondence with large-format portraits of anonymous women, films and embellished objects and drawings appear, and also an unusual menagerie of weasels, foxes, and squirrels, leading metaphorical lives in each exhibition while performing different functions, as readers, agents, and provocateurs. The function of images of women in the economic theory and social reality of capitalist systems is explored in relation to education through reading (theory) and direct action (practice). Reading and politics are evoked and feminised, coalescing around a footnote in Capital and its translations (and shifts in meaning) according to edition. Notes: 1. Works from the series have been acquired for the public collection of the Dieselkraftwerkmuseum. 2. The feminist journal Out of the Box commissioned a work for its Winter issue, no. 6, 2016: Madame la Marchandise

Transmission Annual: Labour, Work, Action

Transmission Annual Labour, Work, Action is framed by Hannah Arendt’s reflections on three important themes of human agency. Arendt refused to be called a philosopher, for philosophy, she said, deals with the singular, while she addressed the plural, that humans not man inhabit the world. She proposes that freedom is constructed in community, in common space, and it is associative, performative, and public. In The Human Condition (1958), she develops her theory of political action, drawing out the distinctions between what is social and what is political, and then what is labour, what is work, what is action (and thus, how is agency achieved, the capacity to act, to make choices, undetermined by supposedly natural forces). Arendt proposes three important human activities: labour, work, and political action. She is as materialist as Karl Marx: labour is a biological activity, a vital necessity operating under constraint. The goal of production is to produce, and there is a constant exchange of objects. It is never-ending, consumed quickly, making a slave of the labourer. Work may be thought of differently, most usefully with the term ‘œuvre’: as what lasts or remains, as ‘technique’ and poiesis, as what is not spent or wasted and is transmitted; a ‘common world’ where life unfolds and objects endure beyond the act of their making. Transmission, in Arendt’s sense, is a struggle against death, and thus already a form of liberty. It is, one might say, the distinction between what is kept and what is thrown away. Yet this freedom is only partial, for work is still instrumental, determined by causes and ends. To work and labour, then, like Arendt, we add an essential action, when ‘something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever happened before’, asking what role might be played by the artist or work of art, and this we propose, makes for agents and agency. Contributors: Ivana Bago, Jordan Bear, Pascal Beausse, Bernard Brunon, Pavel Büchler, Armin Chodzinski, Annie Coll, Michael Corris, Janeil Engelstad, Francesco Finizio, Charlie Gere, Jerome Harrington, David Hopkins, Shannon Jackson, Vincent Victor Jouffe, the Pedagogy Group, Elizabeth Legge, Dana MacFarlane, Roberto Martinez, Mary-Lou Lobsinger, Hester Reeve, Oliver Ressler, John Paul Ricco, Abigail Satinsky, Juliet Stey

Freud in London

[About the book] Through bringing together a new interdisciplinary field of artists, writers, architects, musicians, human geographers and philosophers Walking Cities: London considers how a city walk informs and triggers new processes of making, thinking, researching and communicating. In particular, the book examines how the city contains narratives, knowledge and contested materialities that are best accessed through the act of walking. Ultimately, Walking Cities: London seeks to understand the wider significance of changing geographies to generate critical questions and creative perspectives for navigating the social and political impact of rapid urban change