



Stephan Kaluza
Fragmente eines Ängstlichen
![]() | |
---|---|
Author(s) | Stephan Kaluza |
Design | Rat und Tat Werbeagentur GmbH, Düsseldorf |
Cover | Hardcover |
Size | 12.5 × 20 cm |
Pages | 404 |
Language(s) | German |
ISBN | 978-3-96912-004-0 |
A Novel on Coping with Guilt or the Feeling of Having Violated Life
The filmmaker Castner and the anthropologist Pollock not only share the similarity of their names with those of Castor and Pollux, the fabled twins of Greek myth, but also a hard fate: an irreparable guilt whose motifs run through the entire novel. Pollock is forced to admit to himself that, in his role as a scientist, he was involved in a genocide against indigenous people in Panama; Castner, meanwhile, tries to get a handle on his bouts of excessive hypochondria. In episodic flashbacks and an interview that gradually turns into an emotional dispute between them, the two characters analyze the minutiae of their life stories and arrive at a surreal insight.
Castor and Pollux were known in antiquity as the patrons of sailors, who took their bearings from the twins’ constellation. That is why water figures in this novel as the element that unites all narrative planes. Water—like life—will fill any vacant space regardless of shape and adapt to all circumstances.
Stephan Kaluza (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) is a visual artist, working in the media of photography and painting, and a writer whose output includes plays, novels, and nonfiction books. The philosophy of nature is a central theme in both Kaluza’s art and his fiction.
More books
-
Arantxa Etcheverria
Doors38€ Add to cartThe Mythical Power of Grids
Arantxa Etcheverria’s (b. 1975, France; lives and works in Bucharest) creative practice encompasses painting, sculpture, performance, photography, and film. Since 2006, she has been especially interested in modernist architecture, a ubiquitous sight in her adopted country, Romania. Blending rationalism with speculation, the artist draws on historical references including post-Communist turbo architecture, Op art, and minimalism for works that balance between figuration and abstraction, construction and deconstruction. This book documents Etcheverria’s more recent panel paintings and installations, seen in interaction with actors in monochrome costumes. With essays by the Paris-based Romanian curator and critic Ami Barak and the art historian and curator Alina Şerban.
Arantxa Etcheverria studied fine arts at Villa Arson, Nice, and stage design at the Théâtre national de Strasbourg.
-
America! America!
How real is real?38€ Add to cartMyths, Projections, Aspirations
In times of fake news and alternative facts it is becoming even more clear how the American Dream is closely interwoven with emotional pictures and symbols. At the same time, it can be said that no other nation might have the same strong awareness of the power of images. Images of the American Way of Life, which are produced in media and entertainment, are able to consolidate existing power structures and perceptions of reality, but also question them in a radical way. The psychologically charged canvasses of Eric Fischl, the hermetic scenes of Alex Katz, the enormous film-noir-like graffiti paintings of Robert Longo dissect the dreams and fears of an insecure white middle class. Simultaneously, artists such as Jeff Wall or Cindy Sherman conquer scenes that critically reflect our media-influenced perception, becoming models for subsequent generations. By showing 70 masterpieces of US-contemporary art, the book shows how artists from the 1960s to date comment on the American reality.
-
Robbie Cornelissen
Terra Nova28€ Add to cartFuturistic / Fantastic
The Dutch artist Robbie Cornelissen’s (b. Utrecht, 1954; lives and works in Utrecht) oeuvre is endowed with unusual narrative power. His architectonic drawings in enormous formats, which often exude a futuristic aura, typically show deserted libraries, waiting halls, factory floors, or other oversized spaces. In alternation with his work on paper, the artist creates animated films out of thousands of drawings. This publication presents 250 drawings from Cornelissen’s new film Terra Nova, which explores an urgent contemporary concern: humanity’s responsibility for the earth and the open question of its long-term survival on the planet.
Robbie Cornelissen studied biology and ecology at Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht and at Vrije Akademie, Den Haag, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. His work has been shown at Centraal Museum Utrecht, Hamburger Kunsthalle, the 11th Biennale de Lyon, and elsewhere.
-
Plastique Fantastique
A Journey through an ephemeral Realm32€ Add to cartIn the wake of Frank Lloyd Wright’s pioneering work, visionary architects including Frei Otto and Buckminster Fuller established bubbles as a recognized artistic and architectonic form. The Berlin-based art duo Plastique Fantastique (Marco Canevacci and Yena Young) go one step further and harness them as a medium of temporary social interactions. The philosopher Vilém Flusser conceived of space in the digital universe as a network of relational settings in which humans can be in multiple places at one, as a “bubble that extends into the future.” Plastique Fantastique transform our urban and rural environments into laboratories for such spaces in which urgent social, political, and aesthetic questions are negotiated. Oversized translucent bubbles, traffic islands ringed by diaphanous tubes, giant lifebelts, air-filled sausages that the audience at a Peaches concert pass over their heads: Plastique Fantastique’s installations fuse art, performance, people, and architecture in a multisensory experience that blurs the conventional boundaries of art and focuses our attention on the larger bubble in which human existence is contained. Richly illustrated with exceptional photographs, this monograph is the first to document a representative selection from the duo’s projects of the past two decades.
-
Shara Hughes
Time Lapsed35€ Add to cartShara Hughes (b. Atlanta, 1981; lives and works in New York) describes her pictures and drawings as psychological or invented landscapes. Her cliff coasts, river valleys, sunsets, and lush gardens, often framed by abstract patterns, might be the settings of fairy tales or scenes from paradise. As the New Yorker put it, the paintings “use every trick in the book to seduce, but still manage to come off as guileless visions of not-so-far-away worlds.” Wielding oil paint, brushes, spatulas, and spray cans, the artist celebrates painting itself, not infrequently quoting the masters of past eras.
Shara Hughes studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her most recent solo exhibitions are currently on view at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, and the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland. In 2021, she had shows at the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; the Garden Museum, London; the Aspen Museum of Art, Colorado; and at Le Consortium, Dijon.
-
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.
-
Ohne Schlüssel und Schloss
Chancen und Risiken von Big Data19,90€ Add to cartVon Kunsthandwerk zu digitaler Verschlüsselung
An jeder Haustür ziehen wir Grenzen, wir schließen auf und schließen ab. Und noch in jüngster Vergangenheit war eindeutig, was als Verschlusssache galt. Ganz anders stellt sich diese Frage im IT-Zeitalter. Ausgehend von der kunsthandwerklichen Sammlung des Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern wird deutlich, wie in früheren Jahrhunderten über mechanisch und symbolisch aufwendig gestaltete Schlösser, Schränke oder auch Reliquienbehältnisse Distanzen austariert wurden. Sie alle sind sichtbares Vehikel für die bewusste Wahrnehmung von innen und außen, zugehörig und ausgegrenzt, wissend und unwissend oder öffentlich und privat. Für Big Data gilt dies in keiner Weise mehr. Beim Digitalen werden Serviceleistungen mit Datenerhebungen verbunden, deren weiteren Einsatzbereiche wir weder unmittelbar verstehen noch überblicken können. Historische, technologische und philosophische Überlegungen bieten wichtige Beträge zur aktuellen Debatte und Einschätzung der Risiken und Chancen von Big Data.
-
Photography of Presence
24€ Add to cartThe Importance of the Moment in Artistic Photography
Can photographs exist which represent concrete places? In view of the daily flood of images, this question seems superfluous at first. Only on closer inspection does the distance between the visual experience of places and the media images generated from them become apparent. “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once stated. The present volume examines this decisive moment and explores the question of how artistic photography can describe the gap between spatial reality and photographic image and make the present at the time the photograph was taken visible.
With works by Viktoria Binschtok, Julian Faulhaber, Mareike Foecking, Stephanie Kiwitt, Nikolaus Koliusis, Barbara Probst, and Wolfgang Zurborn as well as texts by Holger Kube Ventura.
-
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.
-
FINALE
DIRECTOR’S CUT25€ Add to cartThe Best Part …
In 1994, Britta Erika Buhlmann took the helm at Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, from which she will retire in the spring of 2022. In her twenty-eight-year tenure, she has enlarged the museum’s art collection and put her personal stamp on it. The classical modernism division was strengthened with the addition of major works by Otto Dix, Hermann Scherrer, and Karl Buchheister, while key pieces by François Morellet, Martin Willing, Werner Pokorny, and others have enriched the museum’s holdings in sculpture. A newly established division of the collection is dedicated to the creations of American artists such as Eric Levin, Kiki Smith, Charles Pollock, and Richard Pousette-Dart. More than a few artists—the list includes Carmen Herrera, Pierrette Bloch, Eva Jospin, and Nobuyuki Tanaka—made their German or even European début at the mpk.
In this book, members of the mpk’s staff offer their takes on selected works in the collection, unfurling a subjective story of their engagement with works that have earned the museum its reputation as a “place of discoveries.”
-
The Power of Wonder – New Materialisms in Contemporary Art
34€ Add to cartFor the longest time, physical matter was seen as no more than a passive and lifeless object. Since the early years of the twenty-first century, however, visual artists and scientists alike have initiated a change of thinking, conceiving matter as active, unruly, and autonomous. The ethnologist Hans Peter Hahn has called it the “willfulness of things,” while the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers has underscored the “power of wonder”—the bracing sense of marvel and surprise instilled by a material world that sometimes defies the attempt to put it into words.
This pioneering publication features six selected artistic positions that highlight the New Materialism’s significance for contemporary art. The artists employ materials that are millions of years old such as rocks from an open-pit mine as well as classic inorganic staples like ceramics and cutting-edge materials like digital products transformed in high-tech procedures into hitherto unseen hybrid objects. Their work lends art a powerful voice in contemporary debates around man’s position vis-à-vis his environment, around sustainability, participation, and justice.
With works by Ilana Halperin, Agata Ingarden, David Jablonowski, Markus Karstieß, Robert Smithson, and SUPERFLEX.
-
Kay Rosen
NOW AND THEN35€ Add to cartKay Rosen (b. Corpus Christi, TX, 1943; lives in New York City and Gary, IN) has made art out of language since the 1970s. She garnered international acclaim with wall pieces spelling individual words, phrases, or strings of letters, often on a vast scale. Her works combine minimalist form, aesthetic force, and clever ideas in compelling ways. By modulating their arrangement and typographic and color design, the artist puts irritating twists on everyday terms and expressions. Subtle alterations often yield striking effects. Through punning, reframing, and onomatopoeic exploration, Rosen continually unearths unexpected layers of meaning. Released on occasion of the artist’s eightieth birthday, the publication presents wall pieces, paintings, drawings, prints, and video stills, inviting readers to discover or rediscover a multifaceted oeuvre that blends lightness and humor with analytical acumen in singular fashion.
Kay Rosen obtained a B.A. in linguistics, Spanish, and French at Tulane University’s Newcomb College in New Orleans, LA, in 1965. She then taught Spanish at Indiana University in Gary while attending studio classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she subsequently taught for twenty-four years.
-
Elias Sime
Echo የገደል ማሚቶ35€ Add to cartEthiopia’s multi-award-winning artist Elias Sime (born 1968 in Addis Ababa) impresses with monumental wall reliefs made of ornamentally interwoven wires and cables or sawn-up circuit boards. For years, together with his team, he has been tirelessly
reworking discarded electronic components into complex and colorful assemblages. In doing so, he draws on traditional Ethiopian techniques of weaving, braiding and carving. Sime is interested in the “biography of the material” and each collage is a search for traces (of the local and global past). The artist obtains the electronic waste, which the countries of the global North are known to like to “dispose of” in the African continent, from the flea markets in Addis Ababa. His friezes are monuments both to the throwaway society and to global networking and interaction.
Echo የገደል ማሚቶ, a richly illustrated book, gives an overview over the artist’s fascinating career and is published on the occasion of the solo show at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf. The volume includes insightful essays by Felicity Korn and Andria Hickey as well as an important conversation with Hans-Ulrich Obrist from 2016. Also discussed is the Zoma Museum complex, which was initiated by Sime (together with the curator Meskerem Assegued)—a total work of art that is exemplary for sustainability and community building.
-
Jürgen Claus
To the Oceans with Imagination18€ Add to cartThe Sea as a Space of Artistic Experience
Jürgen Claus’s (b. 1935, Berlin; lives and works in Aachen and Baelen, Belgium) oeuvre encompasses paintings, films, light and solar installations, and underwater art. He is also a prolific writer on art, with theoretical works that have sold over 100,000 copies. “Jürgen Claus is the first one to see the ocean through an artist’s rather than a scientist’s lens,” Michel Ragon writes. In this book, Claus intertwines his experiences working on the fascinating underwater installations with a pressing contemporary concern: the global efforts to restore the seas to health. The publication combines visual art, architecture, poetry, and music for a multifaceted engagement with the world’s oceans.
Jürgen Claus majored in theater studies at the Universität München and was a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and professor of media art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Cologne.
-
Claudia Fährenkemper
Kontextforschung / context research 1980–202268€ Add to cartClaudia Fährenkemper (b. Castrop-Rauxel, 1959; lives in Steinheim/Westfalen) photographs enormous as well as minuscule objects using scanning electron microscopes to produce images that are as fascinating as they are disconcerting. The play with extreme scales yields fantastic visual worlds: American desert and canyon landscapes, the giant industrial machinery of open-pit mines in Germany, insects, plant seeds, crystals, and plankton, plus historic armaments from Europe and Japan. The lavishly designed book is the first to gather works from her entire oeuvre, which now spans four decades. Surveying the most important of Fährenkemper’s conceptual series, it reveals unexpected interconnections between disparate motifs on vastly different scales from nature, technology, science, and cultural history.
Claudia Fährenkemper studied at Fachhochschule Köln, today’s Cologne University of Applied Sciences, where Arno Jansen was her teacher, and with Bernd and Hilla Becher and Nan Hoover at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Her photographs are held by numerous museum collections, including at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Margulies Collection, Miami.
-
Jagoda Bednarsky
SHADOWLAND ET AL40€ Add to cartJagoda Bednarsky’s (b. Złotoryja, Poland, 1988; lives and works in Berlin) paintings are pop-cultural and nostalgic borrowings that she transfers into the grotesque register, with allusions to stereotyped role models between hypermasculinity and matriarchy. Unfurling pastel-colored hillscapes composed of breasts, breast pumps, vulvas, figures from Greek myth, and motifs from flora and fauna, Bednarsky’s Shadowland series interrogates traditional ideas of femininity and motherhood. The depiction of the female breast serves as a metaphor referring to the titular “Shadowland,” where this part of the body is still perceived as a sexualized object rather than as natural. The title, one might note, is borrowed from a culture magazine first published in New York in 1919 in which the artist spotted Art Deco illustrations that became a vital source of inspiration. Despite the dense aggregation of fraught symbols and referential gestures, the sensual, poetic, and richly imaginative works exude a lightness that stems from their translucency and subtle irony.
The comprehensive volume presents Bednarsky’s works from between 2018 and 2023 and a singular conversation with the artist.
Jagoda Bednarsky studied fine arts, first at Kunsthochschule Kassel (2008–2009), then at HfBK Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, with Michael Krebber and Monika Baer (2009–2014).
-
Kai Schiemenz
Priel38€ Add to cartTidal creeks are watercourses that crisscross coastal mudflats. Running between sandbars, they flush deposits out into the sea with the falling tide, and when the tide rises, the water flows back in. In other works, tidal creeks are effectively rivers in the sea. Delving into the implications of this idea, the book presents Kai Schiemenz’s (b. Erfurt, 1966; lives and works in Berlin) major works and projects of the past four years. The publication offers insight into the provenance of selected bodies of work and their genesis. Kai Schiemenz’s art examines the city, spaces, and architecture. His small-format sculptures are self-contained creations that combine digital technologies with natural materials like wood or paper. At the same time, they function as models for expansive installations and outdoor and indoor architectures in which Schiemenz orchestrates sight lines to construct spaces whose permeability makes the audience an integral aspect of the work. If his sculptures are architecture, his exhibitions are landscapes in which the visitors encounter one another as they would in a park. Their central question, time and again, concerns the impact of the built environment and urban landscapes on their inhabitants.
-
Sprache/Text/Bild
32€ Add to cartSpoken words, writing, and images originate in social and cultural contexts and so are fraught with meanings, are vehicles of values and norms. They inevitably also demarcate boundaries, serving to class people as members of groups or outsiders. This adds to the urgency of the question of what can in fact be said and shown, and who or what determines those limits. The present catalog addresses these concerns through a survey of eminent art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The works gathered in it speak to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, to categorizations and the narratives that were created to sustain them. And they remind us that these phenomena are human-made, which is also to say, susceptible to change—that we share responsibility for them.
Artists: John Baldessari, Maria Bartuszová, Alice Bidault, Alejandro Cesarco, Ayşe Erkmen, Nadine Fecht, Gary Hill, Janice Kerbel, Gabriel Kladek, Gordon Parks, The National AIDS Memorial, Markus Vater, Gillian Wearing
-
Laura Schawelka
Double Issues24€ Add to cartSales Spaces without Merchandise
In her installations, Laura Schawelka (b. 1988, Munich; lives and works in Berlin) makes use of photography, video, and sculpture in a multilayered dialogue. In her latest works, the artist focuses on the role of photography in the development of modern consumer society. What does it mean if goods are only communicated through other goods, such as computers, cell phones, tablets? If this withholding of the genuine object is precisely what prompts the desire for it? The artist creates sales spaces without merchandise, in which images, photographs, and videos have replaced consumer goods of any kind.
Laura Schawelka studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main as a student of Tobias Rehberger master-class. In 2015, she was awarded the Master of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, and in 2017 she moved to Paris as the recipient of a studio bursary of Hessische Kulturstiftung.
-
Roland Schappert
Liebe +–24€ Add to cartRoland Schappert’s Liebe+– is a poetic voyage into the mysterious and paradoxical landscapes of love. Combining an unrelenting eye with lyrical precision, Schappert captures the fragile equilibrium between intimacy and distance, between the longing for union and the need for detachment. The +– in the title is a symbolic shorthand for the ambivalence of love: attraction and repulsion, delight and pain, their constant interplay defining the dynamic of love.
The terse and sometimes aphoristic writings enter into a dialogue with the author’s artful and enigmatic pictures and sculptures—text images sewn out of strings of beads or painted in Champagne chalk that subtly mirror and refract the emotional tension of the poems. Nimbly balancing on the fine line between devotion and disaffection, Schappert’s verses are interspersed with ironic allusions to our digital and urban contemporary world.
By forging a symbiosis of poetry and image, this artist’s book charts a world unto itself in which the boundaries between I and you blur and subject and object are fused in a collective we. It invites us to contemplate love with a fresh eye—as tender touch and fractious idea, as a play of expectation and disappointment that we begin anew every day.
‘Love in the age of social media and dating apps, but not from a Gen Z perspective – but from someone who has known this feeling for much longer. And who brings his experiences – which are certainly representative of many – in ever new combinations of text and images into a form that makes reading and viewing a memorable experience.’ – Wolfgang Ullrich