Contemporary art

This February in Artforum: Dan Nadel on the art of Christina Ramberg, Howardena Pindell talks about her forthcoming retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Amy Taubin on Errol Morris's Wormwood, Caroline Lillian Schopp on the art of Franz Erhard Walther, plus reviews from New York, Detroit, Paris, Bologna, Mexico City, Sharjah, Tokyo, Beijing, and more.

This extensive volume spans the drawings of Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca from 1971 to 2017. Gathering together for the first time more than 650 works on paper selected from a body of more than 3,000 produced over the course of 40 years, the book lies somewhere between a catalogue raisonné and an artist's book.

Conceived by Sigismond de Vajay, this artist's book combines 70 of his drawings with commissioned essays by Mexican novelist Mario Bellatín, French biologist and glaciology researcher Bruno Jourdain, and geography and biotechnology expert Elizabeth R. Johnson. Together, thanks to their intertwined dialogue around reality, fiction, science, knowledge, and the power of artistic approaches, they express a subjective vision of our changing times.

The catalogue for Heman Chong's first solo museum exhibition in mainland China, at the Rockbund Art Museum, provides an insightful and critical look into the Singaporean artist's recent practice.

Craig Kalpakjian is a pionneer in the use of digital software for artistic purposes. This first monographic book is an in-depth look at Kalpakjian's work Black Box, an installation featuring a robotic dog taking pictures. The artist examines this work in cunjunction with declassified CIA and Army Intelligence interrogation manuals. The publication includes an interview with Bob Nickas, and essays by curator Paul Wombell and Gilles Deleuze.

Some four thousand Polaroids depicting nearly fifteen years in the life of artist and former director of the Lausanne art school, ECAL. This photographic diary offers an intimate and erotic portrait of Keller, from its time in 1970s New York to trips to South America and Europe. With texts by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stéphanie Moisdon.

In a junction of artist's book, illustrated sci-fi story, and a glossary of sculptural objects Ludovica Carbotta explores the concept of “fictional site-specificity” through different media, authorships, and descriptive strategies: a site-oriented practice that considers imaginary places, or real places within fictional contexts, to recover the role of imagination in the process of constructing knowledge.

This artist's book is based on a namesake project of video installations and art objects exploring the transformation of the image within time and space. With texts and drawings by curator Vitaly Patsyukov.

An intimate diary in the shape of an apparently cold, monochromatic book, Negative Book collects a series of eighty-four black-and-white photographs taken by Grzeszykowska following a very particular procedure, which is both visual and performative.

The first publication by Roberto Timperi gathers more than ten years of photographic work: an intimate diary and a one-way ticket into the underground world.

A story of love and drunkenness with Venus in Zurich's forest, by German writer Oskar Panizza. This edition comes with a musical piece and illustrations by experimental intermedia duo My Cat Is An Alien.

This publication investigates our present relation to the future and asks which means and strategies artists and scholars pursue today, to gain a new scope of action for shaping alternative futures. It brings together contributions by academic staff at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich as well as selected artistic work by students.

Contemporary views on Egon Schiele; the controversial artistic treasury of the Gurlitt Collection; Macron's victory explained in literature; interviews with Giuseppe Penone and Lucy McKenzie; Glasgow: Britain's true artistic capital; photography in India; Tokyo's urbanistic issues; “Negative” section with Robert Menasse's Die Hauptstadt, Tonya Harding, Google, ballet's gender-free future, and a marriage advice for an American at Kensington Palace; portfolio by photographer Michele Borzoni.

What can art do to relieve pain and heal wounds? This issue's main section addresses these questions through an examination of works by Kader Attia, Emily Falencki, Eric Fischl, Berlinde De Bruyckere and Teresa Margolles, as well as two essays by Édith-Anne Pageot and Mirna Boyadjian. Other features includes an interview with Marion Zilio, followed by the usual sections “Interview”, “Events” and “Reviews”.

The review of the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Grand-Hornu (MAC's) inaugurates its new formula with the theme of the museum and its criticism by artists. This issue showcases a selection of contemporary and international artistic projects reflecting on the concept of museum. With artists Yto Barrada, Christoph Büchel, Jacques Charlier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Tamar Guimarães, Jompet Kuswidananto, Wesley Meuris, Rei Naito, Ryue Nishizawa, Noah Purifoy, Dayanita Singh, Fiona Tan, and Fred Wilson.

Anicka Yi; on “post-work” by Tom McCarthy; Twing Peaks: The Return, by Philippe Parreno & Asad Raza; death of the art gallery model: a round table; Gilbert & George; Oliver Laric; new formats in digital art; Do we need a new avant-garde?; interview with the Contemporary Art Writing Daily; Courbet's La dame au podoscaphe; Documenta X (1997) by Daniel Baumann; John Russell by Tobias Madison; Manifesto for the public museum; reviews from London, Milan, New York, Paris…

Stemming from the Master Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts, this theoretical publication investigates educational processes and what it means to teach and learn fine arts in a city such as Zurich. It also reflects on the field works made by the MFA students in 2017 in Athens, Beirut, and Lesbos.

Fiction as Method brings authors into dialogue with artists, technologists, theorists and filmmakers in order to examine the diverse ways in which fiction manifests. The aim is to explore the concept through direct and indirect means, ultimately considering how fictions proliferate, take on flesh and come to act in the world.

Armen Avanessian's Miami chronicles: An inventory of the self in the second person, intertwining thoughts on the art world and interrogations on our digital times.

Artist Oraib Toukan presents an informal register of modernist Palestinian architecture—an assemblage of images and stories collected from 2013 to 2015 in the cities of Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Jericho.

Two-volume box set documenting a 2013 eponymous international festival reflecting on the impact of technologies in our present and future lives. Inspired by a seminal 1966 Stockholm festival, this event featured both lectures and artistic acts. The publication gathers the catalogue and proceedings of the 2013 event, archival materials, and includes unpublished correspondence by John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller, and texts by Alvin Lucier and Nam June Paik.

This catalogue is the first survey of the art and practice of Art+Positive, a significant affinity group of ACT UP New York during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. The publication presents previously unseen archives featuring artworks, documents, protest ephemera, and meeting notes, as well as commissioned essays and unpublished writings.

This catalogue / artist's book inaugurates a new series dedicated to the site-specific installations exhibited in the nave of the CAPC. The eponymous project by artist Leonor Antunes is a sculptural ensemble influenced by textile and architectural works, thus recalling the commercial past of the nave as well as the cultural legacy of modernism. The publication features an interview with the artist and a text by textile artist Anni Albers.

The second book in a series dedicated to the installations exhibited in the nave of the CAPC, De la source au poème documents artist Rosa Barba's eponymous video installation: an investigation on cultural legacy and spaces of memory. Designed as an artist's book, the publication offers a rich and poetic journey to the heart of the exhibition, and features an interview with Barba.

Current technological issues and new boundaries of human corporeality.

Rita Mcbride, Julia Scher, Lu Yang, Michael Stevenson, Alexandra Pirici, Martin Arnold, Erika Verzutti, Julia Phillips & Aaron Gilbert, Simphiwe Ndzube, Diego Marcon, Tiona Nekkia Mcclodden, Diamond Stingily, Meriem Bennani, Siri Aurdal, Asad Raza, Lydia Ourahmane…

The first publication dedicated to the work of fashion illustrator and artist Kelly Beeman. Drawing her inspiration from lookbooks and catwalk shots, Kelly Beeman creates paintings that plunges the viewer into a fantasy world of rare delicacy, tinted with subtle references to interior design, architecture, music and literature.

A companion to his previous book, Colour in Contextual Play, Joseph Kosuth's Neon in Contextual Play continues the artist's investigation of the interplay between language and reality, words and objects, color and light. Within these pairings, early neon works by Kosuth interact with those by Arte Povera artists who also used the industrial medium.

Bienvenue intends to bring back to life the forgotten story of the publication of Pour Jean Sénac, a book dedicated to gay poet and Algerian nationalist Jean Sénac. This edition gathers old and contemporary documents by graphic designer Christophe Jacquet on the project, and features a long conversation between Jacquet and Thierry Chancogne.

Three Double Tales is the first monographic publication on Aurélien Froment's work. Published in three languages and designed in collaboration with Åbäke, the book revisits the artist's interest in the questions of translation and wordplay. A photography book, an exhibition catalogue as well as an artist book, Three Double Tales unites three projects that share the use of photography, and whose sources – places and fantasy – have structured Froment's work for the past fifteen years.

A critical perspective on Guyton's work.

Comparative Studies of Neo-Avant-Gardes in a Bipolar World.

This book, the first major publication in English devoted to the Korean critic and art historian Lee Yil (1932-1997), is a collection of texts on aesthetics, theory and history of art by the main observer of “Dansaekhwa”, or Korean monochrome. It also brings together essays and monographic prefaces that gave wide coverage to artists who had been active from the end of the Korean war up until the mid-1990s.

Crossing perspectives on performance acts within the discursive space of contemporary art.

This January Artforum looks at The Uses of Power: to picture our current life and imagine possible lives otherwise, Artforum invited seven artists and two writers—Nan Goldin, Adrian Piper, Sable Elyse Smith, Kia LaBeija, Donald Moffett, House of Ladosha, K8 Hardy, Johanna Fateman, and Paul B. Preciado—to consider how we can and should use power. Plus new Editor David Velasco on the Power of Good-bye, Azikiwe Mohammed talks with Claudia Rankine about Jimmy's Thrift of New Davonhaime, a preview of more than 40 spring shows worldwide, and more.

Eight essays on the German avant-gardes (Hugo Ball, Max Beckmann, Marcel Breuer, Franz Marc, Merzbau, Expressionnism, Dada…).

First comprehensive monograph dedicated to minimalist pioneer and postcolonial artist Rasheed Araeen. The publication gives an overview of 60 years of career, encompassing Araeen's visual art, writing, editing, and curatorial work. It includes scholarly essays, surveys, and documentation spanning every aspects of the artist's oeuvre, from his early works to his political engagement to today's ongoing Homecoming series.

A collection of new writing and curatorial projects stemming from the activities of the Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark, from 2013 to 2014. These projects reflected on the conditions for making curatorial “events” that are extended over longer durations to connect their constituent elements—exhibitions, texts, projects—across space and time.

The first comprehensive survey of video artist and filmmaker Theo Eshetu's extensive body of work. It provides documentation and critical analysis of Eshetu's practice, in which he examines the imagery of the collective unconscious, exploring cultural identity and challenging official media narratives through a complex interplay of signs and symbols.

This publication is charting the Allan Sekula's research into and investigation of the oceans. It intersperses essays from scholars, historians, and thinkers with a selection of the artist's seminal texts and excerpts from his private notebooks.

Sam Anderson's body of work examines the existential conditions of human life on the basis of her own biography and stories from her social milieu. This catalogue documents her first solo shows at SculptureCenter in New York and the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne. It features both new and older works, including sculptures, installations and video works.

The third volume of a five-chapter publication series, this catalogue celebrates a new iteration of the artist's color spectrum series that congregates his art, the architecture of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, and the public as collaborators in an all-encompassing experience.

The fourth of a five-chapter publication series by Ugo Rondinone, this catalogue documents the iteration of Ugo Rondinone's Vocabulary of solitude at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in the summer of 2017.

The third issue of Frédéric Acquaviva and La Plaque Tournante's audio / video hybrid magazine, featuring Frédéric Acquaviva, Lieutenant Caramel, Jean-Baptiste Favory, Joël Hubaut, Andy Ingamells, Eduardo Kac, Maurice Lemaître, Loré Lixenberg, and Christoph Ogiermann.

As a child in the 70's Daniela Comani travelled with her parents in their car where they used to past time jotting down the cars that drove by. 40 years later she found one of these old notebooks and researched photographs of the cars. The project now takes the form of this artist's book, which can be seen as an interesting social and historical study on style in the pre-globalized world and, above all, a kind of self-portrait.

New technologies today make it possible to translate raw data into graphic representations. This action of translation has become essential in the era of big data. It forms the core of this publication, which presents the outcomes of an experiment conducted by conceptual artist Tyyne Claudia Pollmann at the Charite CrossOver Institute Berlin Mitte since 2013.

This publication presents the outcomes of Romana Schmalisch's long-term project, the Mobile Cinema, an itinerant apparatus somewhere between urban model, cinema, and plate camera. The artist constructed the Mobile Cinema and used it to present films created during her travels, mobilizing film extracts and archive material.

Publication gathering 49 posters representing photographs and film stills by the Danish artist. It also includes a booklet with comments by Villesen, and an essay by Joerg Franzbecker.

The third issue of the erotic journal Féros, featuring Phoebe Clarke, Claire Dantzer, Victor Man, Anthony Pearson, Benoit Platéus, Georges Tony Stoll, Matthew Stone, Phillip Zach...).

Mouvement inaugurates its new formula: a new visual identity, new sections and 16 additional pages dedicated to photography. Contents: interviews with Jacques Rancière, Julien Gosselin & Aurélien Bellanger, Katsuya Tomita; portraits of Neïl Beloufa and Mette Ingvartsen; Pierre Ducrozet; Nik Void & Peter Rehberg; Ana Pi; Pauline Bayle; makers and sculpture in Sheffield; Iraqi cinema; portfolios, January-February agenda…