Mousse Publishing

Post-Capital: A Reader

30 October 2021 in Books Comment

“If industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature and threatens to cost us Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism will thrive at the expense of human nature and threatens to cost us humanity.” —Shoshana Zuboff

Post-Capital: A Reader is published as both a reader and a catalogue accompanying the exhibition Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age, curated by Michelle Cotton at Mudam Luxembourg. This richly illustrated volume documents works of sculpture, painting, photography, video, and performance by more than twenty artists from different parts of the world, all addressing production, consumption, and wealth. The images cohabit with excerpts from longer texts by some of today’s most influential thinkers on the subject of our digital age, its consequences concerning human freedoms, and the largely invisible dynamics that are driving an evolving and unequal world order.

Edited by Michelle Cotton
Texts by Sarah Beaumont, James Bridle, Michelle Cotton, Heike Geissler, Clémentine Proby, Richard Seymour, Chloe Stead, Hito Steyerl, Joel Valabrega, McKenzie Wark, Lauren Wetmore, Shoshana Zuboff

2021
English
188 pages
Softcover, 21.6 × 29 cm
ISBN 9788867494774

Mousse Publishing

Ilit Azoulay: No Things Dies Cover

28 May 2020 in Books Comment

Ilit Azoulay: No Things Dies
Front and back covers

Mousse Publishing

Ilit Azoulay: No Things Dies

28 May 2020 in Books Comment

Ilit Azoulay: No Things Dies

Edited by Maurin Dietrich 
Texts by Maurin Dietrich, Noam Gal, Quentin Meillassoux, Ursula K. Le Guin

This publication brings together images and archival materials related to Ilit Azoulay’s No Thing Dies project, as well as illuminating texts by authors from different fields. One of the starting points in putting it together was the extended research conducted by the artist into the collections of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in preparation of her exhibition there (June to December 2017). The project raised the question of how such an institution gives shape to a collection of objects and, consequently, gives voice to certain histories while silencing others.

The project started out by the artist listening to the stories of the people in charge of the museum collections and of the items within them. For her, storytelling is a way of passing on history and its complexity, in a manner unequaled by any other form of transmission of accumulated knowledge and culture. Eventually, this contributed to her articulating a critique of this encyclopedic museum, such as is not habitually presented in its exhibitions or catalogues. With her team, she recorded many such stories. She then revisited all the departments, and photographed every single object that was mentioned.

The photographic method Azoulay used in this, as in most of her other projects, is unique. To capture the image of each object, she uses a digital camera with a macro lens and takes several shots of it, moving upward along the surface of the standing object, as though scanning it. These images she then stitches together digitally, in Photoshop, into a single image. The result is a very high-definition image of the object, often exceeding the resolution that our eyes are capable of.

By this method, Azoulay acquired the images of 753 objects (or fragments) from 24 different departments, which she came to view as raw data or “archive pages,” a selection of which is included in the book. Then, she composed scenes to conjure up the histories evoked by the interviews, constructing novel interactions between objects (cast as characters) and creating “stages” for them. Hierarchies were shuffled, inter-department boundaries were removed; all elements became contingent upon the stories told by the complex images Azoulay assembled. Every one of the final works consists of numerous sections, each comprised of multiple details, spaces, and perspectives, merging together time periods, spheres, perceptions, and modes of representation.

The photographic images, thus stitched together, were then placed in three-dimensional display-like casings––vitrines (as the artist dubbed them)––each comprising several sections enclosed within frames of varying depth. In this way, each work is presented as a photographic diorama that, much like a Persian miniature, offers multiple windows onto a possible page in a local history.

In the book devoted to this project, the reader is invited to wander among the images composed by Azoulay from the museum’s many stories and artifacts, in an effort to give expression to their fascinating, polyphonic, and multifaceted viewpoints.

2019
English
264 pages
Softcover, 23.5 x 33 cm
ISBN: 978-88-6749-383-8

Mousse Publishing

Jesper Just: Servitudes. Circuits. Interpassivities.

28 May 2020 in Books Comment

Jesper Just: Servitudes. Circuits. Interpassivities.

Edited by Irene Campolmi
Texts by Andrew Berardini, Irene Campolmi, Pedro Gadanho, André Lepecki, Michael Thouberg, Marianne Torp, Fatos Ustek.

“Jesper Just is an artist who has made himself known not only for the faultless textural quality of his nonnarrative films but also for conceiving them as part of highly complex architectural installations that, by intervening in the visitor’s experience, create a sensory journey that requires the visitor to “perform”—willingly or not—within the space in order to navigate it.”—Irene Campolmi

Produced in occasion of his solo shows at Maat, Lisbon, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copehnagen, Servitudes. Circuits. Interpassivities. is the first in-depth recognition into Jesper Just’s multilayered body of works. A filmmaker, a screenwriter, choreographer, and a performance artist, Just’s practice has been constantly changing and evolving, to the point of comprising many different disciplines and media, melding together to create a unique form of art. Together with an extensive visual documentation of the artist’s career, the book features texts and essays by Andrew Berardini, Irene Campolmi, Pedro Gadanho, André Lepecki, Michael Thouberg, Marianne Torp, Fatos Ustek.

2019
English
104 pages
Wrapped spiral binding, 21 × 29.4 cm
ISBN: 9788867493630

Mousse Publishing

Sonia Leimer: Via San Gennaro

27 May 2020 in Books Comment

Sonia Leimer: Via San Gennaro

Edited by Kari Conte
Texts by Alessandra Cianchetta, Kari Conte, Luigi Fassi

“Leimer’s experience of being an outsider-insider in Little Italy—as a foreigner looking at familiar yet still puzzling cultural references—allowed her to undertake tactful fieldwork for nearly a year that unraveled the layers and complexities of the area in times of late capitalism. . . . Via San Gennaro creates an affecting portrait not only of the signs and people that make up the neighborhood, but also of the forces that reshaped it from a working-class Italian-American community to the third-most expensive zip code in the United States.”— Kari Conte

Published on the occasion of Leimer’s 2019 solo exhibition at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) and designed by Other Means, Via San Gennaro features documentation of Leimer’s newly-commissioned large-scale sculptures and a video installation, continuing her long-standing interest in urban space, architecture, labor and globalization. The video component is a collaboration with filmmaker and puppeteer Tony de Nonno, who keeps the fading Sicilian Opera dei Pupi (Opera of the Puppets) tradition alive.

2019
English / Italian
112 pages
Hardcover, 24.7 × 17.5 cm
ISBN 9788867494019

Mousse Publishing

Gene Beery

19 July 2019 in Books Comment

Gene Beery

Edited by Balthazar Lovay
Texts by Kenneth Goldsmith, Balthazar Lovay, Jo Melvin, Gregor Quack

“Many years ago, on the way to England to work on a museum project, I was seated in the plane next to a young man who was a classical lute player. We got to talking, and I asked him what he was listening to on his Discman. He showed me the CD and began to talk about the music. It was a collection of a minor composer’s music played from transcriptions of broadsides that were sold on the street for pennies in the Middle Ages. The composer, however, was clever and included beautifully handdrawn images on his scores. Over the ages, they were framed and preserved, not so much because of the music but because of how beautiful and distinctive they were as objects. While his peers’ music—printed and distributed in the same form without decoration—vanished, this composer’s scores remain as the only examples of the genre. By default, they are now considered classics. And in the same way, Beery’s scribbles remain one step ahead of the curve, anticipating a future reception in which they too will be considered classics.” — Kenneth Golsdmith

For more than 60 years, Gene Beery has interrogated the moment of esthetic experience with humor and irony. What are the stakes of an encounter between a viewer and the work? What does the surface of the canvas promise to whoever looks at it? Beery positions himself with pictures to be read, whose phrases announce the arrival, the impossibility or the absurdity of such an experience. Behind the apparent lightness and sarcastic distance of his practice emerges a deep reflection on the existence of art and the role of the artist.

Gene Beery is the first monograph dedicated to this American artist and offers an in-depth investigation of his work. It assembles more than 65 artworks and three essays, by Kenneth Goldsmith, Jo Melvin and Balthazar Lovay, as well as an interview with Gene Beery by Gregor Quack.

2019
English
172 pages
Hardcover, 21 × 28 cm
ISBN: 9788867493746

Mousse Publishing