Elsa Salonen
Stories Told by Stones
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Christine Nippe |
| Author(s) | Christine Nippe, Elsa Salonen, Laura Hirvi |
| Size | 15 x 20 cm |
| Pages | 64 |
| Illustrations | 30 |
| Design | Katharina Tauer, Wolfgang Hückel |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-947563-37-1 |
“I find the question of a consciousness of stones genuinely inspiring, captivating, and provocative!”
Elsa Salonen (b. 1984, Turku; lives and works in Berlin and Finland) produces colored crystals from the pigments of flowers, draws stellar constellations with finely ground meteorite dust on glass, or distils liquid from plants. The Finnish artist experiments with a wide range of “poetic” materials, reviving lost animistic rituals and magical practices. Her subtle works in the field of tension between installa-tion, painting, and conceptual art combine mysti-cism with science, ancient knowledge with recent findings — supported by a great respect for nature. This volume documents her artistic search for consciousness as the primary source of all physical matter.
More books
-
HALBwertsZeit
Zum Umgang mit ‚abgelaufenen‘ Sammlungen28€ Add to cartDo collections have an expiration date? Shifting interests, evolving social contexts, and discursive developments influence when a collection or its presentation is said to be outdated and what that implies for the constraints on, or options for, the actions to be taken in response. The revision or reorientation of a collection presuppose a critical engagement with the criteria regarded as valid at the time, which concern the origins, composition, objectives, and significance of a collection, among other aspects.
The contributions to this volume intertwine historical case studies with contemporary questions about the reasons and circumstances that give rise to the assessment that a collection has outlived its shelf life.
-
Franziska Windisch
Walk with a wire14€ Add to cartThe interweaving of traces, sounds, and movements in an impressive work of sound art
The narrow brown magnetic tape of an audio cassette runs through a half-opened hand, slides through the fingers, is palpated in constant motion, and finally falls to the ground. The hand and its touching, particles of sand and small stones leave their traces and, when the tape is played, generate a multi-layered soundscape with crackling and background noises.
In her performative action in the ruins of the city of Messene in the Peloponnese region of Greece, Franziska Windisch (b. 1983) thematizes aspects of repetition and recording. Her artistic examination of the vestiges of the ancient urban space, the reciprocal transition from traces to writing in her video documentation, and the graphic element of the line visible on the ground lead to a reflection on temporality, dissolution, and decay. -
Born in the Woods
Jems Koko Bi & HAP Grieshaber24€ Add to cartThe Political Substance of Wood
Jems Koko Bi (b. Sinfra, Côte d’Ivoire, 1966; lives and works in Kaarst, Germany, Dakar, and Abidjan) is world-renowned for the monumental wood sculptures he creates using a machine saw. This book juxtaposes his most recent body of works with the large-format woodcuts of HAP Grieshaber (b. Rot an der Rot, Germany, 1909; d. Eningen unter Achalm, 1981). Although the two artists never met, their oeuvres are characterized by similar themes, values, and materials. The central concern is the fate of the forests and its momentous political and social implications: Grieshaber’s woodcuts articulate his principled opposition to the predatory exploitation of nature in the 1970s—an issue that is more relevant than ever today in light of the climate crisis and the Fridays for Future movement. Koko Bi’s figural groups bring this tradition of political art into our time, making a global and universally compelling case for a sustainable husbandry of our resources.
Jems Koko Bi studied at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts et de l’Action Culturelle (INSAAC), Abidjan, and the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; at documenta 13; the Havana Biennial; and several Venice Biennials and Dakar Biennials. In 2019, he founded the forest biennial Abidjan Green Arts.
HAP Grieshaber studied advertising art at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule, Stuttgart. His work is regarded as a signal contribution to the renewal of the woodcut medium in the twentieth century. He participated in documentas I, II, and III, held a professorship at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, and was honored with numerous awards and retrospectives.
- Out of stock
Banksy’s Dismaland & Others
14,80€ Read morePhotographs by Barry Cawston
The two projects by the British street artist Banksy, Dismaland and Walled Off Hotel, received an outstanding response worldwide. The book presents for the first time the documentation of the two extraordinary works from the perspective of Barry Cawston, the artist’s official photographer.
-
Ossian Fraser
DISSOLVING ACTS38€ Add to cartOssian Fraser (b. Edinburgh, 1983; lives in Munich and Berlin) molds and captures evanescent moments. Working with volatile materials such as water, dust, or light, the artist exposes the latent potentials of unremarkable situations in the urban fabric and natural scenes. A tunnel in a city, a rock face in the mountains become points of departure and elementary components of his site-specific interventions, which he records in photographs. The book is the first to offer comprehensive insight into Fraser’s artistic practice. Series of pictures showcasing his conceptual and poetic pieces alternate with conversations that not only demarcate the framework in which his art operates, but also touch on the great issues of our time.
Ossian Fraser studied fine arts and sculpture at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences, Bonn, from 2006 until 2009 and at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin, from 2009 until 2013, rounding out his education in Albrecht Schäfer’s master class in 2013–2014.
-
Alexandra Tretter
24€ Add to cartThe art of Alexandra Tretter (*1988) is as deep as it is playful. Owing just as much to the gentle spirituality of Hilma af Klint’s late geometries as it does to Sonia Delaunay’s exuberant disc paintings, almost bursting with sheer chromatic pleasure. Her compassionately designed artist’s book combines monumental paintings with intimate works on paper, all of which are imbued with the contexts of Tretter’s own life as an artist, as a woman, as a mother.
Her kaleidoscopic figurations unfold from a center at rest in itself and multiply in symmetry and asymmetry towards all sides. She contrasts the circular form, the unchanging basic element of her compositions, with the oval, which constantly strives beyond itself, transforming itself in ever-new permutations from one figure into the next, into eyes, mouths, breasts, petals or vulvas.
Her images strive for composure, unfold and blossom, only to let go of all gestalt-like form. Once gained stability is instantly pushed into turmoil. Colors flare up violently or flow delicately about, lighten or shade each other, carry or throw each other off course. Tretter equally realizes materialization and dissolution as basic principles of her painting.
Whereby all, what her images absorb, preserve and release, is experience, growth and slow maturing. Her paintings are “figurations of affection”, in which each individual turns towards something else, doubts or grows, at times turns away or surrenders all the more consciously. They question everything, start anew and yet find their way back to themselves, into their very own.
-
Ion Bitzan
48€ Add to cartThe painter and object artist Ion Bitzan (b. Limanu, 1924; d. Bucharest, 1997) belonged to the generation of Romanian artists who, in the 1960s and 1970s, broke through their country’s isolation to connect to the international avant-garde. His creativity and the quality of his artistic experiments, which drew inspiration from conceptual art, Dada, and other sources, made him a leading figure in the Romanian art of the Ceaușescu era. This book also sheds light on the complex relationship between artistic innovation and political (propaganda) art behind the Iron Curtain during this period, in which nothing was ever black or white. Bitzan represented Romania at the Venice (1964) and São Paulo Biennales (1967, 1969, 1981). In 2017, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest mounted a major retrospective of his oeuvre.
-
Anaïs Horn
Fading14€ Add to cartThe mystery of love and its language, translated into a photographic discourse
The starting point for the series by Anaïs Horn, which the artist, who works in Vienna and Paris, began in 2013 and now comprises eighty photographs, is the book Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Fragments of a Language of Love) by the French philosopher and author Roland Barthes. Terms such as “asceticism,” “magic,” “yearning,” “venerable,” and “unfathomable” serve Horn as models for her staged photographs. The linguistic “figures,” from which Barthes developed his “discourse” in an open structure, find their counterparts in views of people, landscapes, objects, and spaces. The result is a cosmos of images that is as non-binding as it is intimate, as touching as it is light, as vulnerable as it is challenging, and appears to be infinitely expandable. Viewed together, fragments of collective experiences and cultural codes of our notions of love become visible.
-
Beyond the Box
Dohmen Collection30€ Add to cartBreaking the Mold of Convention
Presenting installations, sculptures, objects, and paintings from Mexico, Cuba, West Africa, Israel, Bulgaria, Russia, South Korea, and Japan, rounded out by extraordinary works from the U.S. and Europe, this selection from the Dohmen Collection features artists from countries that did not typically register on “Western” art radars until fifteen years ago. It was the seminal documenta 11 (2002), curated by a team led by Okwui Enwezor, that ushered in a departure from the contemporary art world’s entrenched geopolitical ideas. This book showcases a treasure that has long been ahead of its time yet did not attract public attention: the private collection of Werner Dohmen, a physician in Aachen. It includes works by Mariana Castillo Deball, Wim Delvoye, Jimmie Durham, Diango Hernández, Rodney McMillian, Pavel Pepperstein, Nora Turato, Haegue Yang, and other artists who continue to provoke audiences, ask probing questions, and prompt fresh thinking.
Dr. med. Werner Dohmen has been head of the board of Neuer Aachener Kunstverein since 1988. In addition to building his own collection, he has been a committed supporter of the intercultural project No es arte, which advocates for the return of goldwork of the pre-Colombian Tairona people that was stolen from sacred sites during the colonial conquest of South America.
-
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt – Wie eine Spinne im Netz
38€ Add to cartRuth Wolf-Rehfeldt (b. Wurzen, Germany, 1932; lives in Berlin) is one the few East German female artists who devoted themselves to graphic art produced on the typewriter. Working on her trusty “Erika,” she arranged letters, digits, commas, and plus signs to compose imaginative visual creations. Under her hands, the black and red characters were transformed into poetic verbal images, gently undulating waves, serial patterns, and architectonic or figurative formations. Sometimes verging on concrete poetry, these typewritings also evince unmistakable affinities with conceptual and minimalist art. In the 1980s, the artist expanded on them in collages that recall Hannah Höch’s Dadaist visual montages. With her graphic work, Wolf-Rehfeldt was also an active participant in the GDR’s mail-art program: she sent the typewritings to artists beyond the impassable borders of her country, building an extensive network of correspondences that spanned the globe.
The richly illustrated monograph underscores the diversity and contemporary relevance of Wolf-Rehfeldt’s works, which were created in the shadow of the Cold War and address the fragility of peace as well as early manifestations of the environmental devastation wrought by the industrial age.
- Release February 2026
Roman Ondak
The Day After Yesterday48€ Add to cartThe internationally acclaimed Slovakian conceptual artist Roman Ondak (b. 1966) responds to the historical specificities of Central Europe while also reflecting on the functioning of society in today’s global world in works that highlight the cyclical nature of processes and the reciprocal mirroring of the past and the present. His distinctive creative traits include the use of ordinary objects and materials as well as everyday situations, which he transfers into the exhibition space. This richly illustrated catalogue with essays by Barbora Ropková and Dieter Roelstraete accompanies the exhibition The Day After Yesterday at Kunsthalle Praha and explores Ondak’s artistic universe, in which existential and societal themes naturally intertwine with a biography of his own family.
THE DAY AFTER YESTERDAY
KUNSTHALLE PRAHA, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
NOVEMBER 13, 2025 UNTIL MARCH 9, 2026
more info here -
MK Kaehne
Π = 3,1415935€ Add to cartThe biography of conceptual artist MK Kaehne (b. Vilnius, 1963; lives and works in Berlin) oscillates between Vilnius, Moscow and Berlin. Influenced by Russian Constructivism, he draws and builds suitcase sculptures with a department store aesthetic, a reversal of the readymade principle. His focus gradually shifted from the formal to the psychological, towards life-size figures such as It’s me (2023): a hyper-realistic replica of himself, lying upside down in the mud, with a garden gnome next to him. Kaehne’s work is strictly analytical, but the results are full of tragedy and irony. Unintentional drawings, in which biographical, Dadaist and political elements merge, accompany his oeuvre. A total work of art that traces personal and social development.
- Out of stock
Welt ohne Inventar
16,80€ Read moreThe stories by Katja Hachenberg (b. 1972, Rhineland-Palatinate; lives and works in Karlsruhe) bridge the gap between fiction and reality. They urge the familiar to disappear and the usual to dissolve. Hachenberg is interested in complex and broken characters who oppose the conventions: outsiders, jailbreaker, dropouts. The relief faces of the sculptor Reinhard Voss (b. Rendsburg; lives and works in Karlsruhe) are juxtaposed with her texts. In dialogue, a relational panopticon of figures emerges which invites the reader for a visual and imaginative stroll.
-
Beate Passow
Monkey Business24€ Add to cartDrawing on the Past to Build a Better Future
Beate Passow (b. Stadtoldendorf, Germany, 1945; lives and works in Munich) creates installations, photodocumentaries, and collages that seek to salvage her subjects from oblivion, though as she sees it, her art is an effort to come to terms not so much with the past as with the present. When her compositional inventions touch on painful memories, their objective is not to arrive at new insights. Rather, she aims to uncover visible and verifiable states of affairs and throw them into sharp relief. In her cycle of pictures Monkey Business, the artist unfolds a mysterious fairy-tale world with a political edge. Strange animals and mythical figures populate the large-format black-and-white tableaux, which a closer look reveals to be woven tapestries. The unusual protagonists roam readily identifiable locations: Gibraltar, New York’s Wall Street, Brussels, or the island of Lampedusa. Behind these ostensibly simple facts of geography loom the darker aspects of contemporary European politics: Passow’s work calls for a debate on the systems, economic structures, and political movements that rule the continent.
-
Michael Bertram
mehr licht35€ Add to cartThe Mülheim-Kärlich Nuclear Power Station, 1975–2019
In 1975, construction began in Mülheim-Kärlich on what was to be the only nuclear power plant in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. After numerous court battles and only two years of trial and regular operation, the plant was decommissioned in 1988 and dismantled starting in 2001. The 530-foot cooling tower, taller than Cologne Cathedral, was the point of reference, landmark, and eyesore of an entire region; its time-consuming demolition became a symbol of the perennial political polarization over the decision to phase out nuclear power.
Michael Bertram (b. Mendig, 1968; lives and works in Mayen) took photographs of the reactor looming between homes and factories in order to record the future past in pictures. The plant cost seven billion deutschmarks to build and one billion euros to take back down: vast resources expended on a temporary installation that lasted forty years and left a lasting mark on the landscape, the surrounding communities, and the people who lived in its shadow. Starting with the demolition, the book presents an inverted timeline in eighty-one black-and-white photographs. The object seems to rise before our eyes until, at the end of the series, five color photographs conjure up a past that was very much present only a moment ago—a singular document of Germany’s industrial heritage.
-
Dietmar Lutz
Ein Jahr40€ Add to cartDay by Day
For a full year, from August 2020 until August 2021, Dietmar Lutz (b. Ellwangen, 1968; lives and works in Düsseldorf) painted or drew a picture every day in which he rendered a scene or detail from his day-to-day life. All 365 works appear here in chronological sequence, either in reproductions or in photographs showing them in the setting in which they were created. Taken together, the series constitutes a radically subjective review of one year. The paintings capture memories, but although they invariably owe their existence to a particular situation, they do not necessarily frame it as a memorable event. The artist observes himself in his world and defines his role in it. Painting as a daily task seems to structure time rather than the other way around. Each picture opens up a new space in which the different facets of time manifest themselves to the senses.
Dietmar Lutz studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and rose to renown with large-format paintings in which he portrays situations from ordinary life and weaves references to the histories of film and literature. Lutz is a cofounder of the German-British artists’ collective hobbypopMuseum, with which he has exhibited at the 1st Athens Biennale; Deitch Projects, New York; Tate Britain, London; and elsewhere.
-
Female Gaze
From Virtual to Reality25€ Add to cartWorks of Art Take a Stance
The “female gaze” embodies a stance that is the polar opposite of the “male gaze.” The latter term came into use in the movie and advertising industries in the 1970s to describe the fact that women typically appear in films in supporting roles, as accessories to men, rather than as protagonists. The male gaze originated in a patriarchal society that has begun to change. The female gaze champions a modern form of emancipation that challenges men to abandon entrenched structures. Much more importantly, it encourages women to become aware of the strength that lies in their femininity and make it the source of their own creative expression and their own perspective on the world. For many years, the writer Silke Tobeler has visited artists in their studios, collecting the photographs she took there and her conversations with her hosts on her blog, Female Gaze.
-
Marion Anna Simon
Gemaltes Kaddisch14€ Add to cartAn artist paints the Kaddish
In roughly 330 self-portraits, Marion Anna Simon (b. 1972, Bitburg; lives and works in Cologne) dares to undertake an unusual transcription of Jewish prayer as a sign of mourning. On January 7, 2017, one day after the death of her mother, Marion Anna Simon began work on her painted Kaddish. What initially began as a very personal process of grieving quickly developed into an artistic concept: Roughly 330 painted and drawn self-portraits were created within eleven months—in daily notes, with acrylic and watercolor, pencil and ballpoint pen, oil crayon and pastel, on paper and canvas, wallpaper and cardboard, in lined exercise books and cheap notepads. Marion Anna Simon’s cycle explores her own face as a place of mourning and self-affirmation, documenting an artistic ritual beyond the Jewish prohibition of images and patriarchal attributions to sons in the tradition of the sanctification prayer for the memory of the dead.
-
Can Yasar Köklü
CYK55€ Add to cartThe young photographer, graphic designer, and filmmaker Can Yasar Köklü (b. Schwelm, 2003; lives and works in Brooklyn) grew up between Cologne and Istanbul and currently studies at New York’s renowned Pratt Institute. In his first publication CYK—an artist’s book featuring breathtakingly beautiful photographs and personal writings—he explores his experiences growing up, the traditions that inform his art, and his feelings in three different cultures: “Heimat” charts his native Germany, where he spent most of his life; “Memleket” is dedicated to Turkey, where his roots are; and “Home” presents the impressions Köklü gathered during a year in high school in Los Angeles and now in New York, where he continues his education. Driven by a passion for storytelling, he captures singular—fascinating and deeply moving—moments in time.
-
DAWN OF HUMANITY – ART IN PERIODS OF UPHEAVAL
37€ Add to cartThe book and exhibition present works from the first two decades of the twentieth century from the Kunstmuseum Bonn’s collection in dialogue with contemporary creative positions. What the works have in common across the distance of a century is their genesis in, and reflection on, a time of major social and political crisis. Back then, life had been profoundly changed by the industrial revolution; nowadays, climate change, wars, and the rising political power of right-wing ideologies are transforming the life of our communities. The presentation conceives art as a tool that lets us interrogate the world and imparts fresh intellectual impulses, and so also plays an active part in our societies. The title Menschheitsdämmerung – Dawn of Humanity – is borrowed from the poetry anthology of the same title released by Kurt Pinthus in 1919, which samples the Expressionist lyric poetry of the young century in four chapters: “Downfall and Outcry”; “Love Human Beings”; “Awakening of the Heart”; “Entreaty and Indignation.” Florian Illies, who already wrote an afterword for the 2019 centenary edition of Menschheitsdämmerung – the bestselling poetry anthology in the history of German literature – contributed the keynote essay in the book.
Artists: Nevin Aladağ, Francis Alÿs, Kader Attia, Yael Bartana, Rebekka Benzenberg, Monica Bonvicini, Andrea Bowers, Heinrich Campendonk, Louisa Clement, Max Ernst, Georg Herold, Franz M. Jansen, Alexej von Jawlensky, Käthe Kollwitz, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Max Liebermann, August Macke, Helmuth Macke, Goshka Macuga, Marie von Malachowski-Nauen, Carlo Mense, Zanele Muholi, Heinrich Nauen, Grace Ndiritu, Anys Reimann, Deborah Roberts, Daniel Scislowski, Paul Adolf Seehaus, Tschabalala Self, Monika Sosnowska, William Straube, Emma Talbot, Hans Thuar, Lawrence Weiner
