A World After the Anthropocene

What comes after the Anthropocene? Can we depart from our human-centered perspective to build a future for the benefit of all species? What tools and techniques might help us get there? These are the questions investigated by the long-term interdisciplinary project Interspecies Future, which brings together perspectives from art, science, and technology to explore what this future might look like. First initiated in 2022 by LAS Art Foundation, this project explores new pathways for planetary thinking and collective intelligence. With more than 60 contributions, this interactive reader is the first book to provide an extensive foundation of key concepts, debates, and case studies that propose ways to re-frame, repair, and re-imagine interspecies relations. Interspecies Future: A Primer draws on recent advancements in planetary computation and machine learning, new discoveries in non-human intelligence, as well as post-human theory and Indigenous knowledge.

The publication offers both critical/concrete and abstract/imaginative propositions, including contributions by artists Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Anicka Yi, Jenna Sutela, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, James Bridle, and Tomás Saraceno alongside texts from leading scientists like Karen Bakker, Daniel Chamovitz, Mirjam Knörschild, Dorion Sagan, and Kristin Andrews, as well as notable philosophers like Sue Donaldson, Tyson Yunkaporta, Vinciane Despret, Benjamin Bratton, among others. The texts are brought to life through interactive augmented reality animations designed by Wang and Söderström, as well as video, audio, and 3D content from artists and scientists.

In a creative career that now spans almost three decades, Chitra Ganesh (b. Brooklyn, New York, US, 1975; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, US) has built an extensive oeuvre that, anchored in drawing and painting, branches out in manifold ways into media ranging from animation, mural, collage, and sculpture to computer-generated imagery and video. With enormous passion for detail, Ganesh combines a multifaceted palette of cultural influences with the visual idiom of vintage comics, Bollywood posters, and videogames. Her practice lets her delve into narratives and images drawn from the cultural history of South Asia without veering into nostalgia. Her works instead challenge conventions of gender, sexuality, and power by putting complex mythological narratives around iconic female protagonists front and center. The monograph is primarily dedicated to Ganesh's work 2013-2023, while including images and context from 1996 to the present. With essays by Natasha Bissonauth, Gayatri Gopinath, Saisha Grayson, Tausif Noor, Svati Shah, and Ksenia Soboleva.

The studio of Erin O'Keefe is filled with geometric wooden shapes and boards that she carves, paints, arranges, and finally photographs to produce abstract still lifes featuring stunning optical effects. By removing the glossy surface we ordinarily associate with the printed photographic medium, O'Keefe foregrounds the painterly texture of her brushstrokes, which comes into view when one examines the prints more closely. The complex process deftly leads the beholder astray; her works look like they were subjected to digital postprocessing and manipulated or even outright created on the computer. Continual experimentation and the search for juxtapositions of forms and colors by means of aesthetic techniques borrowed from modelmaking, architecture, painting, and installation art are distinguishing characteristics of her creative practice.

The monograph How are things? offers a comprehensive overview of O'Keefe's output. Essays by Emily LaBarge, Richard Paul, and Wayne Koestenbaum introduce the reader to her multilayered practice.

The publication Action as Sculpture / Handlung als Skulptur stages an encounter between two key figures in the recent history of art whose oeuvres revolutionized the role of the beholder. Although Lygia Clark and Franz Erhard Walther never met in person and despite their works being different in many ways, the participatory approaches they developed almost simultaneously reveal fundamental similarities.

Lygia Clark (b. Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1920; d. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1988) has been hailed as a leading exponent of Brazilian Neoconcretismo. Pursuing a vision of art as a participatory, sensual, and sometimes healing experience, she became one of the defining artists of the second half of the twentieth century.

In the early 1960s, Franz Erhard Walther (b. Fulda, Germany, 1939), working in the orbit of minimalism, framed an open conception of the oeuvre that casts the beholders as actively involved protagonists. Walther's idea that the action is the true work influenced entire generations of artists.

The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at the VILLA Franz Erhard Walther. It focuses on works from the 1960s and 1970s, the period during which both Clark and Walther changed the relationship between art and audience in their respective cultural contexts by redefining object, form, authorship, and aesthetic experience. With essays by Jessica Gogan, Daniela Labra, Luis Perez-Oramas, Irene Small, Gregory Williams, and a foreword by Susanne Walther.

Men and motorcycles: a story that has vacillated somewhere between cult and clich for years. Custom bikes, in particular, have a history that is deeply rooted in the spirit of freedom and change of the 1960s, as well as man's primal urge to build something with his own hands--or, in this case, tools. The Ride 2nd Gear is a showcase of the power and beauty of these bikes. The Ride 2nd Gear presents a stunning selection of recent custom motorcycles, as well as the small, local workshops around the globe in which they are built. Hotbeds of creativity and craftsmanship, these workshops are mostly run by single individuals and attract a small yet devoted community of fans and fellow builders. The custom bike community as a whole is united by its passion for the ride--one so strong that it is now attracting a younger generation. Whether alone or in a group of like-minded friends, in a city or in the countryside, just for the weekend or embarking on a long-distance road trip, these drivers are actively sharing and celebrating pure riding pleasure on their own unique motorcycles that are lovingly crafted with time, dedication, and technical expertise. From limited series to one-offs, The Ride 2nd Gear features the brilliant results of this process. Its pages are filled with bikes that offer extraordinary design and driving experiences. In fact, established brands are now acting on trends set by the custom scene whose bikes are often more radical and sophisticated because more attention can be paid to detail and each new idea can be fine-tuned to perfection. Some models shown in The Ride 2nd Gear stem from or are based on classic bobbers and choppers, Italian-style racing machines, plastic Japanese motorcycles, and rare BMWs or Triumphs, which may very well be up to 80 years old. Others are art bikes made for show or futuristic visions inspired by the aesthetics of science fiction, fantasy, or anime. But whether they preserve or radically expand on traditional craftsmanship, these custom machines are more agile, faster, and therefore more fun than anything produced in the past. Journalist and custom motorcycle expert Chris Hunter co-edited both this book and our previous release The Ride. Born in England, Hunter now lives with his family in New Zealand, where he runs the motorcycle website Bike EXIF. It is now the world's most popular showcase of custom bikes with millions of pageviews every month and a passionate global following.

In a radical act of transformation, Mark Grotjahn (b. Pasadena, 1968; lives and works in Los Angeles) turns an ordinary wobbly cardboard box into a precious and solid work of art: a bronze sculpture on a pedestal. With rough cutouts for mouths and eyes, cardboard rolls for noses, and corrugated surfaces, the assemblages recall primitive infantile masks. Grotjahn casts them in bronze and then paints them in a gestural expressive style with streaks of bright oil paint. Set on pinewood bases, the masks are paintings and threedimensional objects at once: not just mere combinations of two techniques but genuine hybrids, neverbeforeseen chimeras. They enrich the genealogy of modern art, and of painted sculpture more particularly, with a new facet, engaging the modernist ideas of found object, assemblage, and welded sculpture in dialogue and harking back to the masks and sculptures of classical modernism inspired by non Western art. With an essay by Mark Prince.

Anna Uddenberg's art pursues an ambitious and polarizing perspective on physicality, gender, and commercial aesthetics. The artist's sculptures and performances examine the inextricable entanglements that novel technologies engender between consumerism, spirituality, and self-promotion. Uddenberg rose to renown in the 2010s primarily with her hypersexualized figures riding through the gallery space on trolleys, their selfie sticks extended toward the sky and their butts, booties, crutches, pussies. Yet beyond these lascivious and provocative representations of bodies, Uddenberg's work is always also a play with space. In new works, she turns her attention to the real estate market and heterotopian infrastructures. The use of medical or automobile skeletal structures refers to the concepts of care and comfort as means of control. Uddenberg's first monograph, featuring works created since 2010, is released on occasion of the artist's receipt of the 2022 Hectorpreis. It contains a foreword by Johan Holten, director of Kunsthalle Mannheim, and a conversation with the artist by the writer and curator Samuel Staples. Caroline Busta, founder of the media platform New Models, approaches Uddenberg's work that intrigues as a futuristic result of multiple rearrangements of everyday objects and materials.

The Sound of Abstraction

Chris Succo (b. Düsseldorf, 1979; lives and works in ibid.) rose to international acclaim with the success of his series White Paintings, which made its public debut in Geneva in 2013. Best known for his abstract paintings, he also works in a wide range of other media, including sculpture and photography. Many of his works originate in drawings, writing, or calligraphy, suggesting the major influence in his oeuvre of poetry and music, which inspire his sustained exploration of the potentials of abstract painting. A sequel to the earlier publication Blood and Chrome (DISTANZ, 2017), the artist's book features works from the past several years. With essays by Seda Pesen, Marlene A. Schenk, and Mounira Zennia.

Moods of Human Loneliness, Indeterminate Melancholy, and Radical Tenderness

Aubrey Levinthal's (b. Philadelphia, US, 1986; lives and works in ibid.) figurative paintings capture the precarity and flux of daily life while focusing on ordinary activities such as shopping, waiting for a bus, or eating at a restaurant with friends. They are everyday observations that tell of daily life in realistic, unsentimental, and prosaic ways. They mostly express a woman's attitude to life, determined by self-doubt and multiple role models, moving between internal and external perspectives, public and private space. The facial expressions of her characters are both cryptic and direct, moods wavering between soft frowns of introspection, elusive half-smiles, and uneasy stares.

The monograph Cloud Cover shows a cross-section of Levinthal's works for the first time. With essays by Russell Tovey and Dorothea Zwirner.

Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra (b. Sittard, Netherlands, 1959; lives and works in Amsterdam) has produced an impressive body of photographic and video work, offering a contemporary take on the genre of portraiture. By isolating people from their everyday context and searching for glimmers of individuality while focusing on subtle details, the posture and gaze of the subject. Dijkstra is fascinated with the theme of authenticity, the way people express their personality, and how you can capture a certain kind of naturalness in a photograph.The monograph will give an overview of Dijkstra's work, concentrating on the theme of transition, with series like New Mothers, Bullfighters and Almerisa. Also The Park series partly created in Tiergarten, Berlin will be presented, as will photographs which have remained in her archives and so far have not been published yet. With essays by Elisabeth Fritz and Thomas Köhler.

Sophio Medoidze's (b. Tbilisi, then USSR, 1978; lives and works in London) practice encompasses film, photography, writing, and sculpture and explores the poetic potential of uncertainty. Her work has been shown at Tate Modern, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, the Serpentine Gallery, the Close Up Film Centre, Kunstmuseum Luzern, and the Whitechapel Gallery, amongst others. For a time she worked anonymously as part of the Clara Emigrand collective, disseminating her work outside the gallery context. Medoidze explores the relationship between rural and urban, languages and translations, as well as gender politics and dynamics. Her works often emerge from writing and unfold as installations incorporating moving image, sculpture, and text.

The publication Bastard Sun brings together a collection of photographs taken after the civil unrest in Georgia in the 1990s with short texts written over the subsequent visits to Georgia, together with a collection of twelve short stories. Medoidze's writing provides nuanced and at times humorous reflections on personal and political change.

Bastard Sun is co-published with KONA BOOKS, a Tbilisi-based publishing house that focuses on contemporary visual and interdisciplinary projects.

Action As Sculpture

In the early 1960s, Franz Erhard Walther (b. Fulda, 1939; lives and works in Fulda), moving in the orbit of the Minimal Art movement, devised an open conception of art that involves the beholders as active participants. His understanding of their actions as the actual work would inspire entire generations of artists.

The catalogue documenting the major retrospective at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn pays homage to Walther's conceptual approach: by combining two book blocks facing each other, readers can constantly create new juxtapositions and associations. The book presents a broad selection of action-based works, drawings as well as a comprehensive archive section showing historical photographs as well as documentations of Walther's early work. The extensive text part features essays by Selen Ansen, Luisa Fink, Susanne Keline, and Gregor Quack, a laudation by Peter Weibel, and a conversation between Erik Verhagen and the artist. With a foreword by Eva Kraus and a greeting by Susanne Walther.

A cooperation between the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, the Franz Erhard Walther Foundation, and DISTANZ.

Hair as a Medium of Information, Anchor of Identity, and Sign of Belonging

Hair has always been used to send political messages and signal personal convictions. A medium of both public representation and intimacy, hair marks profound social shifts, reflects changing ideas, and can become a tool of transformation and self- empowerment. Hair serves as a (sub)cultural code and symbol of political power and emancipatory liberation; it is an object of politics of the body and queer discourses.

Grow It, Show It! is the first-ever large-scale photography exhibition in Germany that is all about hair. Historic and contemporary photographs, videos, and film clips show body hair or its absence and shed light on it from diverse cultural, formal-aesthetic, and media angles. The catalogue combines a rich selection of pictures--including fine art photographs and imagery from fashion and social media--with an artist contribution and ten interdisciplinary essays from art history and cultural studies to shed light on the manifold aspects of hair, with a focus on the political, religious, and social dimensions that manifest themselves in fine art, fashion, and advertising photography. With essays by the curators Miriam Bettin and Thomas Seelig as well as Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Shahram Khosravi, Alma Kittner, Annekathrin Kohout, Johanna Kuroczik, Helga Lüdtke, Adebayo Quadry-Adekanbi, Jörg Scheller, Bernd Stiegler, and Lori L. Tharps.

Artists
Hoda Afshar, Diane Arbus, Juan Pablo Echeverri, Samuel Fosso, Pippa Garner, Nan Goldin, Florence Henri, Peter Hujar, Herlinde Koelbl, Zoe Leonard, Ana Mendieta, Helmut Newton, Satomi Nihongi, Ulrike Ottinger, Ringl&Pitt, Roxana Rios, Thomas Ruff, Wolfgang Tillmans, and more.

What would the bottom of the ocean tell us tomorrow, if emptied of water today?

Artist, author and thinker Grada Kilomba (b. Lisbon, 1968; lives and works in Berlin) mastered a unique practice of storytelling. Her work is often described as a new postcolonial minimalism. Using performance, choreography, video, large scale sculptural and sonic installations Kilomba blurs form, image and movement and therefore the boundaries between the disciplines she is familiar with. Opera to a Black Venus makes reference to the Black history of resilience and resistance, and is dedicated to the entanglement between ecological collapse and colonial injustice.

The new commissioned works Opera to a Black Venus (2024), a large-scale video installation, and Labyrinth (2024), a site-specific spatial installation, are at the center of the publication accompanying the exhibition. The authors Denise Ferreira da Silva, University of British Columbia, Vancouver; Tamsin Hong, Serpentine Gallery, London; and Ashish Ghadiali, Radical Ecology & Black Atlantic, London, as well as Çağla Ilk and Misal Adnan Yıldız categorize Kilomba's work along her subversive stories of memory and resilience.

I believe art re-ritualizes the everyday to reveal something fresh about our lives. This revelation is a vitality and it is a power to change the world.--Pope.L

Pope.L (b. Newark, US, 1955; d. Chicago, US, 2023) was one of the foremost creators of political conceptual art in the United States. Among his best-known works rank his Crawl performances, for which the artist--variously wearing business attire, a dandelion in hand, or a Superman costume--got on his hands and knees to crawl through New York's streets for miles. Challenging bystanders to look down and actually see him, he used his body to expose inequalities and power differentials in society. His oeuvre also spanned the media of painting, sculpture, installation art, and photography. Devising a practice with deep roots in philosophy and the theater, Pope.L from the 1970s onward produced seminal works exploring questions of language, gender, racism, and community.

Hospital documents Pope.L's 2023 exhibition at the South London Gallery, which tragically turned out to be the last in his lifetime. With an essay by Legacy Russell, an introduction by Margot Heller, and an interview with the artist.

Power, Care, Control

Yalda Afsah's (b. Berlin, 1983; lives and works in Berlin) films probe the relationship between man and animal, scrutinizing mechanisms of power, care, and control with respect to various forms of domestication and retracing the often blurry boundaries between nurture, solicitousness, and identification with animals on the one hand and discipline, subjugation, and human dominance on the other. Her works confront viewers with an intimate portrait of the mutual dependencies between human and nonhuman protagonists. Never suggesting that a return to an ostensibly pristine nature is possible, Afsah instead prods us to negotiate new conceptions of coexistence and conflict. After the German-Iranian artist's work was featured at Manifesta 13, the New York Film Festival, and the Locarno Film Festival, the exhibition Every word was once an animal gathers older and more recent productions to shed light on the disintegrating boundary between nature and culture. Far from being a mere passive object of political influence, nature is a recalcitrant protagonist to the political.

The accompanying publication provides a first survey of Afsah's growing oeuvre. In addition to extensive visuals from her videos, the book includes writings by Fahim Amir, Maurin Dietrich, Cathrin Mayer, Gina Merz, and Filipa Ramos.

Narratives of a New Order - Israeli Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale

Ilit Azoulay (b. Tel Aviv-Jaffa 1972, lives and works in Berlin) is known for her photographic tableaus, which are composed of everyday objects, architectural fragments and artifacts in the manner of collages. In her current project she continues her unique method of taking apart and reassembling unregarded objects and their stories through macro-lens photography. In 2022 she will contribute to the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. By means of large-scale panoramic photomontages, a collaborative sound installation and architectural interventions Azoulay transitions the Pavilion from euro-centric modernity to Middle Eastern contemporaneity. Based on forgotten archival research materials on medieval inlaid vessels of Islamic art, the question of ownership over images and of cultural appropriation takes center stage. The Queendom--a story of transformations-- has risen out of an all-encompassing system crash, resulting from a malfunction of existing power structures, flooding out of the digital realm, and spilling a new order of data into reality.

The artist picks up on this upheaval in a 360 publication, which expands on the exhibition and has neither a definite beginning nor an end. Azoulay's photomontages function as cartographies to the Queendom and focal points of the publication. The accumulative and polyphonic methodology of the book, with contributions by Naomi Alderman, Timo Feldhaus, Tehila Hakimi, Hanin Hannouch, Shelley Harten, Sheikha Hlewa, Adi Keissar, Lali Tsipi Michaeli, Vicki Shiran and Anat Zecharia, mirrors the Queendom's capacity as a rhizomatic space of knowledge production, where stories and histories merge.

The Wealth and Elegance of Physical Matter - Iceland's contribution to the 59th Venice

Biennale Sigurður Guðjónsson (b. Reykjavík, 1975; lives and works in Reykjavík) creates powerful videos in which image, sound, and space coalesce in an organic whole. He launched his career as an artist in the early 2000s in Reykjavík's vibrant experimental arts scene, which nurtured new work in temporary venues throughout the old town, by exhibiting dark and atmospheric videos whose hypnotic allure quickly caught critics' attention. Harnessing the potential of time-based media, Guðjónsson creates works whose rhythms enfold the viewer in a synesthetic experience, fusing the senses of sight and hearing in a way that seems to expand their field of perception and inducing yet unfelt sensations. Many of his works examine man-made constructions, machines, and the infrastructure of technical relics in conjunction with natural elements, arranged in complex loops and intricate rhythmical patterns.

On occasion of Guðjónsson's contribution to the 59th Venice Biennale, the accompanying catalogue presents a cross-section of his growing oeuvre. With an essay by Mónica Bello.

An Encounter between Two Humans: A Painter and a Refugee

Ruprecht von Kaufmann (b. Munich, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) is widely regarded as a leading exponent of contemporary narrative painting. When he began work on his series of portraits Inside the Outside, images of refugees arriving in droves were all over the media. Hoping to understand what drives people to leave their homes and undertake a dangerous journey toward a new life in a foreign country, the artist invited refugees to his studio and painted them. A portrait in oil is a status symbol. I wanted to harness this symbolic power to put faces on some of the people behind the anonymous television footage. The resulting twenty-six paintings will be on display at the United Nations headquarters in New York in early 2019.

Released in advance of the exhibition, this book, also titled Inside the Outside, showcases the unusual project. In addition to the twenty- six paintings and the sitters' stories, it contains essays by the Chechen journalist Maynat Kurbanova and the Italian director Michele Cinque, whose personal perspectives add to this deeply moving exploration of the issue.

Selma Selman's (b. Bihac, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1991; lives and works in Amsterdam and New York) performances, paintings, photographs, and video installations grapple with autobiographical experiences of social stereotyping, racist discrimination, violence, and sexism. It was only a few years ago that Selman made a confident and powerful entry into the international art world. Collaborating with her family, she guts status symbols like a Mercedes Benz to extract the reusable metals. The spoken-word performances of the artist with Romani roots are typically similarly noisy, expressing rage and the urge to turn the distribution of power upside down.

Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt mounts a major solo presentation of the artist's work, including pieces developed especially for the exhibition. An installation consisting of orange peel grabs bearing the poetic title Flowers of Life gestures toward her family's business--they are scrap metal dealers. The new video Crossing the Blue Bridge, meanwhile, delves into Selman's mother's memories of the Bosnian war.

The first monograph on Selma Selman's work includes essays by Catherine Nichols and Matthias Ulrich, an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, texts by Theresa Dettinger, and a foreword by Sebastian Baden.