Spring–Summer 2019
Shannon Ebner Louis LĂźthi Michiel De Cleene Bill 2 Batia Suter The Photographic II Shirin Sabahi Mark Manders Irene Kopelman Silke Otto-Knapp Ari Marcopoulos Erik van der Weijde Jan Kempenaers Marc Nagtzaam Geert Goiris Misha de Ridder Suki Seokyeong Kang Katinka Bock Walid Raad Inge Meijer gerlach en koop
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Roma Publications Nieuwe Herengracht 11a 1011 RK Amsterdam The Netherlands www.romapublications.org info@romapublications.org Distribution: www.ideabooks.nl
Prices are sometimes subject to change. No rights may be derived from the information found in this brochure.
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ROMA 341
Shannon Ebner, STRAY: A GRAPHIC TONE
Audio record in gatefold sleeve 31 × 31 cm, English No ISBN Euro 18.15 (incl. 21% VAT)
This recording features works by American poets Susan Howe and Nathaniel Mackey, as produced by visual artist Shannon Ebner. Juxtaposing historic and recent material from 1991–2018, the work brought together here examines the two writers’ lifelong preoccupation with subjects adrift in narratives of dispossession, both real and imagined. Liner notes contain excerpts of original interviews as well as reproductions of published materials by Howe and Mackey. The fourteen-track record is the fulllength version of what Ebner started in 2016, when she began seeking exchanges with the two poets. She was drawn to their works for their experiments in poetic form. Design: Julia Born & Shannon Ebner
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ROMA 344
Louis Lüthi, A Die with Twenty-Six Faces
104 p, ills colour 13 × 20 cm, pb, English ISBN 9789492811394 Euro 18.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
In A Die with Twenty-Six Faces, the author—let’s call him L.—guides the reader through his collection of alphabet books, that is, books with letters for titles. Some of these titles are well known: Andy Warhol’s a, Louis Zukofsky’s “A”, Georges Perec’s W. Others are obscure, perhaps even imaginary: Zach Sodenstern’s A, Arnold Skemer’s C and D. Tracing connections between these books, L. elaborates on what the critic Guy Davenport has called the “Kells effect”: “the symbolic content of illuminated lettering serving a larger purpose than its decoration of geometry, imps, and signs.” Mixing essay and fiction, A Die with Twenty-Six Faces is a playful meditation on contemporary literature, typography, and book collecting. Design: Louis Lüthi
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ROMA 345
Michiel De Cleene, Reference Guide
176 p, ills colour 24.5 × 32 cm, pb, English ISBN 9789492811400 Euro 35.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
Reference Guide is a collection of entries connected and fuelled by crossreferences. Not only do these determine the characteristics of the collection and its use, but they are also the mechanism behind its expansion. The entries are transcripts of moments when objects and technologies challenge the strict boundaries that apply to them and emphasise their transitory nature. The book therefore invites readers to construct their own path through the various entries, a movement similar to that of navigating from one topic of interest to another in an encyclopaedia or on Wikipedia— following a thread of curiosity from which a host of disparate yet associated things can emerge. Design: We Became Aware, Michiel De Cleene, Zsa Zsa Tuffy
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ROMA 346
Julie Peeters (editor), Bill 2
184 p, ills colour 23 × 31 cm, pb, English ISBN 9789492811417 Euro 22.65 (incl. 9% VAT)
Bill 2 is the second issue of an annual magazine of photographic stories, edited and designed by Julie Peeters. Twelve contributors present new or previously unpublished work. Bill prioritizes visual reading without distraction, the images that appear in the magazine are printed without any accompanying text. Contributors to the second issue are: Gintaras Didžiapetris, Jason Dodge, Archiv Hans Hollein, Inge Ketelers, Tadashi Kurahashi by Tadanori Yokoo—Tadanori Yokoo by Tadashi Kurahashi, Jochen Lempert, Raimundas Malašauskas, Bart Julius Peters / T L P S, Reto Schmid, Megan Francis Sullivan, Linda van Deursen, Ann Woo, and Jiajia Zhang. Design: Julie Peeters
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ROMA 347
Batia Suter, Cloud Service
104 p, ills colour 9.5 × 28.3 cm, pb, English ISBN 9789492811431 Euro 15.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
As with Suter’s previous projects—Parallel Encyclopedia, Radial Grammar, Surface Series, among others—Cloud Service is principally interested in the visual dialog that emerges with the simple act of placing images in new relation to one another. Drawing from her vast personal library of natural history reference books, encyclopedias, and other flea market finds, Suter assembles an enthralling mix of ‘non-art’ images which she then adapts and reorients in intuitive and often profound ways. The set of appropriated images that makes up Cloud Service is a monographic index of clouds and cloud-suggestive forms, both vast and microscopic in scale. Sweeping aerial shots, volcanic plumes and skyscapes are interwoven with coral, cauliflowers, and bighorn sheep. Placed in the right sequence, these images resonate in new and complex ways, manipulate each other, and—with a sort of synaptic leap—take on new depths of meaning. Published in co-production with Printed Matter Inc., on the occasion of Suter’s exhibition at Printed Matter, New York, from February 21– April 21, 2019. Design: Batia Suter and Roger Willems 7 / 24
ROMA 348
The Photographic II: Signal or Noise
64 p, ills colour 20 × 27 cm, pb, English/Dutch ISBN 9789492811424 Euro 8.25 (incl. 9% VAT)
To a large extent, photography is produced by machines, and knowledge of the technological development of the discipline is crucial to the reading of an image. Readable, manipulated, and hidden information are increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another, yet are of equal importance in our visual culture. This exhibition catalogue presents a selection of artists who recalibrate the “photographic” as an artistic field of research and experiment, playing on the functions, processes, and spaces of photography via hybrid forms. Featuring Tony Cokes, Forensic Architecture, Lynn Hershman Leeson, David Horvitz, Aaron Flint Jamison, Louise Lawler, Sharon Lockhart, Hana Miletić, Jean-Luc Moulène, Sondra Perry, Marina Pinsky, Seth Price, R.H. Quaytman, Thomas Ruff. Design: Roger Willems
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ROMA 349
Shirin Sabahi, Pocket Folklore
196 p, ills colour & bw 14.5 × 21.5 cm, pb, English/German ISBN 9789492811455 Euro 25.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
This book revolves around ‘Matter and Mind’ by Japanese artist Noriyuki Haraguchi, permanently installed at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art since the museum’s inauguration in 1977. The sculpture consists of a steel basin filled with used engine oil. Visitors gradually started throwing coins and other things into the pool over time, turning it into an unwilling wishing well. Forty years on, Shirin Sabahi invited Haraguchi to restore his pool. The book includes a previously unpublished booklet by the museum’s first chief curator, which follows the logic of the project, where Sabahi’s films, Haraguchi’s sculpture, and the sunken objects it holds sequentially encase one another. Design: Louis Lüthi
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ROMA 350 a,b
Mark Manders, Floor with Notional Newspapers a
Box with 10 notional newspapers 24 × 35 cm, pb, English No ISBN / Edition of 50 Euro 50.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
Mark Manders, Table with Notional Newspapers b
Box with 10 notional newspapers 24 × 35 cm, pb, English No ISBN / Edition of 50 Euro 50.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
Mark Manders: “I cannot use real newspapers, because my work would then be linked to a certain date and place in the world. All of my works appear as if they have just been made and were left behind by the person who made them. There is no difference between a work made twenty-four years ago or just a single day ago. Like the words in an encyclopedia, they are linked together in one big super-moment that is always attached to the here and now. The newspapers in this edition consist of all the existing words in the English language. Each word is used only once. The photos are taken in my studio and are mostly of studio dust. I try to avoid including language in the pictures. The newspapers I make are the opposite of On Kawara’s date paintings or Kurt Schwitters’ collages.”
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ROMA 351
Irene Kopelman, Cardinal Points
84 p, ills colour & bw 21 × 28 cm, pb, English ISBN 9789492811462 Euro 22.65 (incl. 9% VAT)
Cardinal Points, the 10th volume in the series Notes on Representation, charts Kopelman’s investigations through drawing, writing, and taking photographs on several trips in Argentina where she joined the research campaigns of different groups of scientists: to Pampa de Achala, Cordoba, working with biologists on invasive terrestrial species and studies of litter; to El Litoral, to the provinces of Entre Rios and Corrientes, with a team of ecologists studying floral ecology; to a lab in Puerto Madryn in the Patagonian region, with a team that works with invasions of marine organisms; and to the Ischigualasto Provincial Park and Jachal in the province of San Juan, with a team of geologists and palaeontologists. Design: Ayumi Higuchi and Roger Willems
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ROMA 352
Silke Otto-Knapp, Bühnenbilder
128 p, ills colour & bw 22 x 28 cm, pb, English ISBN 9780996524131 Euro 30.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
‘Bühnenbilder’, the title of Silke Otto-Knapp’s recent exhibition in Minneapolis, are the fabricated views resulting from dressing sets. Neutral until they are costumed, they are like blank volumes awaiting a set designer’s meticulous treatment. The only colours in these works are black, grey, silver, and white. The artist’s palette and methodology, in which she applies a dark watercolour wash and then subtracts from it using absorptive implements, raising images from the dark, reflects the photograph’s urge to resurface something whose very location—in history, memory, desire—eludes the grasp of any image. Design: Julie Peeters
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ROMA 353
Ari Marcopoulos, Entropy
64 p, ills colour 24 × 33 cm, pb, English ISBN 9789492811486 Euro 25.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
Ari Marcopoulos was born in Amsterdam in 1957 and moved to New York in 1980, at the height of the city’s art scene. An artist, filmmaker, and photographer, his body of work includes portraits, street scenes, and landscapes from places as diverse as Tokyo, Lebanon, New Orleans, Brooklyn, and the California coast. His subjects have been musicians, celebrities, artists, and friends, as well as the anonymous denizens of the boroughs he has wandered. His images are saturated with movement and transformation, with outsiders, the underground, and the periphery, with discontinuities and amnesia. Design: Roger Willems
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ROMA 354
Erik van der Weijde, Bollenveld
32 p, ills colour 17 × 24 cm, pb, English ISBN 9789492811493 Euro 12.50 (incl. 9% VAT)
Erik van der Weijde presents a series of photographs of Bollenveld, a futuristic housing project by Dutch architect Dries Kreijkamp, situated in a residential area of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands. The 50 ‘bolwoningen’ (“ball-” or “bulb-houses”) were built in 1984 using prefabricated spheres of glassfibre reinforced concrete. Each has a diameter of 5.5 metres and total living area of 55 square metres. They are the last examples of houses that were funded by the Dutch subsidy for experimental building, which was created in 1968. Design: Roger Willems and Erik van der Weijde
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ROMA 355
Jan Kempenaers, Belgian Colonial Monuments
72 p, ills bw 22 × 22 cm, pb, Dutch/English ISBN 9789492811509 Euro 24.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
This book contains an inventory consisting of 40 colonial monuments related to the Belgian colonial past, from King Leopold II’s Free State to the independence of Congo in 1960, which to date and without exception can all be found in the Belgian public space. Today we experience monuments and the symbolism of memory and veneration in a different way than when they were conceived. The colonial era still has an impact on today’s society, which is why the memorials are now rightly under discussion. Design: Roger Willems
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ROMA 356
Marc Nagtzaam, Regular Features
272 p, ills colour & bw 21.1 × 27.9 cm, pb, English ISBN 9789492811448 Euro 45.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
Artist book with text drawings by Marc Nagtzaam, made between 1992 and 2019. Complementary to the rhythmic writings, 24 artists contributions on loose pages, are randomly inserted throughout the book. The contributing artists are Mark Manders, Louis Lüthi, Sue Tompkins, Stephan Keppel, Steve Van den Bosch, Nickel van Duijvenboden, Sophie Nys, Pierre Leguillon, Batia Suter, Experimental Jetset, Na Kim, Tim Hollander, Lily van der Stokker, Karin Herwegh, Karel Martens, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Kasper Andreasen, Jochen Lempert, gerlach en koop, Henri Jacobs, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Marijn van Kreij, and Willem Oorebeek. As a continuation of the first Roma Publication; (SOME), by Marc Nagtzaam, dating from 1998, this book marks the 20+ years anniversary of Roma Publications. Design: Marc Nagtzaam and Roger Willems
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ROMA 357
Geert Goiris, World Without Us
172 p, ills colour 21.3 × 25.5 cm, pb, English ISBN 9789492811578 Euro 40.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
The downfall of the world is probably one of the oldest human conceptions. Representations of the End are often embedded in religious narratives predicting an apocalyptic end in which only the righteous will survive the final judgment. Since the end of the Second World War, a major shift occurred. The apocalypse is no longer a punishment of the gods or of God, but it is man himself who has gained the expertise to exterminate himself. This book is the final piece of a practice based Ph.D research in the arts, conducted at the Royal academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, in collaboration with the University of Antwerp. Design: Roger Willems and Dongyoung Lee
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ROMA 358
Misha de Ridder, high up close by
84 p, ills colour 24 × 34 cm, pb, English ISBN 9789492811561 Euro 45.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
July 21st 2017, Misha de Ridder was entrusted with the key to Oude Kerk in Amsterdam allowing him day and night access to all areas of the church. Design: Mevis & Van Deursen
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ROMA 359
Suki Seokyeong Kang, Black Mat Oriole
240 p, ills colour 22 × 29 cm, English/Korean ISBN 9789492811547 Euro 32.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
Published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Black Mat Oriole’ curated by Alex Klein and Kate Kraczon, presented at the ICA, Pennsylvania in 2018. This exhibition was the first occasion in the United States to experience Suki Seokyeong Kang’s ambitious and multilayered body of work, grounded by the rich histories of Korean painting, craft, and choreography. Design: Sulki & Min
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ROMA 360
Katinka Bock, Tomorrow’s Sculpture
400 p, ills colour 21.5 × 29 cm, hb, English/French/German ISBN 9789492811523 Euro 42.50 (incl. 9% VAT)
‘Tomorrow’s Sculpture’ results from three consecutive exhibitions taken place over the course of 2018: ‘Sonar’ at Kunst Museum Winterthur, ‘Smog’ at Mudam Luxembourg, and ‘Radio’ at IAC, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes. Circa fifty works have circulated between the three institutions. In dialogue with the spaces Bock displayed them in different configurations and added site specific interventions. The photographs of Johannes Schwartz—exclusively commissioned for this book —offer a rich and multiangled view on Bock’s sculptures and installations of the past 15 years. With texts by Simone Menegoi, Christina Végh, François Piron, and Christophe Gallois. Design: Roger Willems and Dongyoung Lee
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ROMA 361
Walid Raad, Better be watching the clouds / I want to be able to welcome my father to my house
28 p, ills colour 21.5 × 28 cm, pb, English ISBN 9789492811554 Euro 27.50 (incl. 9% VAT)
Walid Raad (1967) investigates how violence affects bodies, minds, art and tradition. This artist book highlights two of Raad’s thoughtful and witty artworks. Here, as elsewhere in his artworks, Raad departs from historical events linked to the protracted Lebanese wars of the past forty years to create somewhat absurd, outlandish but plausible documents. Better be watching the clouds concentrates on the local, regional and international political figures whose faces and names became fixtures in the Lebanese landscape; I want to be able to welcome my father to my house leans on diaries that Raad’s father kept throughout the wars. Design: Roger Willems with Walid Raad
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ROMA 362
Inge Meijer, The Plant Collection
112 p, ills colour & bw 21 × 29.7 cm, pb, English/Dutch ISBN 9789492811530 Euro 28.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
When Willem Sandberg, the newly appointed director of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, held an exhibition in 1946 in honour of Piet Mondrian, he did something quite remarkable. He placed a Swiss cheese plant next to Mondrian’s paintings. For Sandberg, the aesthetic placement of a plant in the museum made a statement. No longer would the Stedelijk be an elite temple for art; rather, he wanted the public to become accustomed to contemporary art in a familiar, domestic environment. Artist Inge Meijer investigated the vanished and subsequently forgotten vegetation in the museum during the 1945–1983 period for this book, rendering its history once again visible. Design: Roger Willems and Dongyoung Lee
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ROMA 363
gerlach en koop, :
376 p, ills colour 17.5 × 17.5 cm, pb, English ISBN 9789492811516 Euro 29.00 (incl. 9% VAT)
This publication follows the exhibition : by collective artist gerlach en koop with the collection of the Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht in 2016, at the invitation of curator Paula van den Bosch. This publication also follows the catalogue cubics by architects and designers Slothouber and Graatsma from 1970, such that it served as support for the artworks in print, just like their cubic system of blocks supported the artworks in the exhibition. All exhibited artworks are included in this publication, works by Francis Alÿs, Dan Asher, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Pieter Brueghel, Ben d’Armagnac, Bethan Huws, Oscar Jespers, Marijn van Kreij, Agnes Martin, Willem de Rooij, Lily van der Stokker, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Franz West and many others, plus several anonymous objects of different provenances and different times. The publication contains a long interview with the artists by a ghosted ghostwriter, in Dutch and English. Design: Charles Mazé and Coline Sunier in collaboration with gerlach en koop
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Upcoming: Ariel Schlesinger Batia Suter Paulien Oltheten Arthur Ou Marinus Boezem Giorgio Andreotta Calò Diego Tonus Mark Manders Sigmar Polke Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky Jßrgen Bergbauer Karel Martens among others
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