Hans Ulrich Obrist - Böcker

“Once there was a nation that went to war, but after they conquered a continent their own country was destroyed by atom bombs... then the victors imposed democracy on the vanquished. For a group of apprentice architects, artists, and designers, led by a visionary, the dire situation of their country was not an obstacle but an inspiration to plan and think... although they were very different characters, the architects worked closely together to realize their dreams, staunchly supported by a super-creative bureaucracy and an activist state... after 15 years of incubation, they surprised the world with a new architecture—Metabolism—that proposed a radical makeover of the entire land... Then newspapers, magazines, and TV turned the architects into heroes: thinkers and doers, thoroughly modern men… Through sheer hard work, discipline, and the integration of all forms of creativity, their country, Japan, became a shining example... when the oil crisis initiated the end of the West, the architects of Japan spread out over the world to define the contours of a post-Western aesthetic....” —Rem Koolhaas / Hans Ulrich ObristBetween 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of Metabolism—the first non-Western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan’s postwar miracle. Project Japan features hundreds of never-before-seen images—master plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate snapshots of the Metabolists at work and play, architectural models, magazine excerpts, and astonishing sci-fi urban visions—telling the 20th-century history of Japan through its architecture.From the tabula rasa of a colonized Manchuria in the 1930s, a devastated Japan after the war, and the establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity architect, the apotheosis of Metabolism at Expo ’70 in Osaka, and its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s: The result is a vivid documentary of the last moment when architecture was a public rather than a private affair.Oral history by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist Extensive interviews with Arata Isozaki, Toshiko Kato, Kiyonori Kikutake, Noboru Kawazoe, Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa, Kenji Ekuan, Atsushi Shimokobe, and Takako and Noritaka Tange Hundreds of never-before-seen images, architectural models, and magazine excerpts Layout by award-winning Dutch designer Irma Boom Further reading

From world-renowned curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects offers a unique opportunity to learn about the lives and creativity of the world's leading artistsHans Ulrich Obrist has been conducting ongoing conversations with the world's greatest living artists since he began in Switzerland, aged 19, with Fischli and Weiss. Here he chooses nineteen of the greatest figures and presents their conversations, offering the reader intimacy with the artists and insight into their creative processes. Inspired by the great Vasari, Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects explores the meaning of art and artists today, their varying approaches to creating, and a sense of how their thinking evolves over time. Including David Hockney, Gilbert and George, Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Rem Koolhaas, and Oscar Niemeyer, this is a wonderful and unique book for those interested in modern art.

Planet Earth needs a self-help book, and this is itThe future is happening to us far faster than we thought it would and this book explains whyFifty years after Marshall McLuhan's ground breaking book on the influence of technology on culture The Medium is the Massage, Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that's redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the 'extreme present'.The Age of Earthquakes is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and 'mindsource' images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly's striking graphic design imports the surreal, juxtaposed, mashed mannerisms of screen to page. It's like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read.Welcome to The Age of Earthquakes, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn't just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it's also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket.

Through 140 drawings, thought experiments, recipes, activist instructions, gardening ideas, insurgences and personal revolutions, artists who spend their lives thinking outside the box guide you to a new worldview; where you and the planet are one.Everything here is new. We invite you to rip out pages, to hang them up at home, to draw and scribble, to cook, to meditate, to take the book to your nearest green space.Featuring Olafur Eliasson, Etel Adnan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jane Fonda & Swoon, Judy Chicago, Black Quantum Futurism Collective, Vivienne Westwood, Cauleen Smith, Marina Abramovic, Karrabing Film Collective, and many more.

World-renowned curator Hans Ulrich Obrist for the first time grants a private view of his life, and his journey towards art and artistsWhen Hans Ulrich was six years old, he was knocked down by a speeding car as he was crossing the street. Hospitalized for weeks, a sense of urgency was instilled in him. Enraptured by the healing powers of art from this young age, he began to travel across Europe on night trains, visiting artists’ studios.In a book that is part unputdownable coming-of-age story, part tour de force of the contemporary art world, part user’s manual on how to live a life driven by curiosity, conversation, and not least hope, Obrist takes us through the formative experiences that made him. From his first exhibition in his Zurich kitchen to penning 250 postcards while trapped by an avalanche in Val Bregaglia, Life in Progress is an enchanting ode to the healing properties that engaging with art and the people around us boundlessly affords.

Drawing on his own experiences and inspirations - from staging his first exhibition in his tiny Zurich kitchen in 1986 to encounters with artists, exhibition makers and thinkers - Hans Ulrich Obrist looks to inspire all those engaged in the creation of culture. Moving from meetings with artists to the creation of the first public museums in the 18th century, recounting the practice of inspirational figures such as Diaghilev, skipping between exhibitions, continents and centuries, Ways of Curating argues that curation is far from a static practice. Driven by curiosity, at its best it allows us to create the future.

A captivating exploration of the life and work of the iconic South African artist Esther Mahlangu, one of the great innovators of Pan-African Contemporary Art. 'Esther Mahlangu is one of the most important artists of our time who continues to inspire artists all over the world. Mahlangu is a visionary who brings art into society' Hans Ulrich Obrist Esther Mahlangu (b. 1935) is globally acclaimed for her bright and bold abstract paintings that are rooted in South African Ndbele art. She was a disruptor from an early age, becoming the first person to reimagine her visual heritage, historically used for decorating houses, on painting media such as canvas. Mahlangu is one of the most influential artists of Pan-African Contemporary Art. Esther Mahlangu: To Paint is in My Heart celebrates Mahlangu’s remarkable journey as a pioneer and innovator of contemporary African art, whose vibrant and distinctive paintings have captured the hearts of many worldwide. Through a series of interviews with Mahlangu conducted by Thomas Girst, Azu Nwagbogu and Hans Ulrich Obrist, readers will gain insight into her creative process, inspiration, and the cultural significance of her work – in the artist’s own words. With a preface by Nontobeko Ntombela, the curator of Mahlangu’s major 2024 travelling retrospective, this book presents stunning visuals and engaging narratives, offering an inspiring experience to the reader.

A thought-provoking collection of quotations from one of the most influential figures in the contemporary art worldHans Ulrich Obrist is one of the most celebrated curators working today and has twice been ranked #1 on ArtReview’s annual list of the most important people in the art world. As the primary or lead author of more than forty volumes of interviews with contemporary artists, of numerous exhibition catalogues for museums around the world, and of influential books on curation, he has established himself as a pivotal figure in contemporary art and culture. Drawn from Obrist’s writings, interviews, and other sources, Obrist-isms gathers a wealth of fascinating quotations from across his career, offering insights on everything from his approach to curating and his affinity with philosopher Édouard Glissant to his interest in artists’ unrealized projects.Obrist-isms is organized into seven thematic sections: Early Years; Curating and Exhibitions; Artists and Conversations; Archiving, Collecting, and Unrealized Projects; Édouard Glissant and Mondialité; On Sleep and Time; Art and the Environment; and Technology and the Future of Art. The book also features an introduction and a brief chronology of Obrist’s life and career.“Art is the highest form of hope.”“The motor, the engine, is curiosity. Curating is connected to curiosity.”“What is happening outside the museum is just as important as what’s happening inside. Make the walls porous. Think beyond exhibitions. Foster alliances.”“If there was ever a time that the world needed artists, it is now. We need their radical ideas, visions, and perspectives in society.”“There are many amazing unrealized projects out there: forgotten projects, misunderstood projects, lost projects, desk-drawer projects, poetic-utopian dream projects, unrealizable projects, partially realized projects, censored projects and so on.”“I believe in generosity as a medium.”

Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is truly an artist for the twenty-first century. In his sculptures he refashions artefacts and antiques into surprising, sometimes monumental constructions such as Template (2007): hundreds of wooden doors and windows taken from demolished Ming and Qing dynasty temples and arranged into a massive outdoor sculpture. As much as these materials look to the past, they also speak of the present, because never before (and probably never again) have they been available in such abundance. Like his benches carved from centuries-old temple beams, Template is a sly commentary on the speed with which China's building boom is obliterating its past. (When Template collapsed in a rainstorm two weeks after its unveiling at Documenta 12, the artist embraced its demise as a clever artistic twist.)In China today, making art that's critical of current cultural and economic policies is not a particularly safe career move. But Ai's father, the poet Ai Qing, walked a similar path, absorbing European avant-garde styles while studying in 1930s Paris and later standing by them in the face of Communist opposition, a move that eventually led to his exile to the distant provincial town where his son Weiwei came to be born and raised. In the late 1970s Ai Weiwei moved to Beijing, banding together with other pro-democracy artists in a loose collective known as the Stars Group. In 1981, following government retaliation against one of their exhibitions, Ai moved to New York, where he attended art school and lived the life of the bohemian for twelve years, his East Village apartment serving as a base for countless visiting Chinese artists. When his father became ill in 1993 Ai returned to China, settling in Beijing and finally taking up his art career in earnest.Weiwei's artistic forebears belong primarily to the Western modernist avant-garde (Duchamp and Beuys are particularly relevant). But Ai has equally and increasingly been influenced by modernist architecture and contemporary urban planning, citing the need for an ideal for living in a country where runaway economic development has shown little regard for the everyday life of the individual. In stark contrast to the glass-and-steel high-rises going up around Beijing, the art galleries, ateliers and homes Ai designs are boxy and modest, made from brick and other vernacular materials. Their resolution of Eastern and Western styles is a fitting parallel to his antique readymade sculptures.At a time when the West is finally discovering Chinese contemporary art, Ai is one of the few to have transcended the label 'Chinese artist'. In part thanks to his gallery Urs Meile (Lucerne and Beijing), Ai has won the support of strong European collectors. His work is increasingly being shown at major venues around the world (Kunsthalle Bern, Kunsthaus Graz, Tate Liverpool) and included in major international exhibitions (the Moscow Biennial, the Guangzhou Triennale, Documenta). A complex, multi-faceted artist, Ai is poised to make a deep impact on contemporary art far beyond China's borders.In the interview Hans Ulrich Obrist discusses Ai Weiwei’s life and motivations, his childhood in a rural province close to the Russian border, his underground political work, his move to New York in the 80s and consequent return to China in the 90s, and his break within the art world. Karen Smith’s survey examines the evolution of Ai Weiwei’s work from the early paintings, drawings, and sculptures pieces through his most recent installations and architectural work, including the cotton-made sculpture World Map (Biennale of Sydney, 2006), the wooden doors and windows structure Template (Documenta 12, 2007) and his collaboration with the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron for the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics.Bernard Fibicher focuses on Working Progress (Fountain of Light) (2007), a site-specific sculpture for Tate Liverpool inspired by Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919) and that takes the form of a spectacular chandelier.

The first book to explore the fascinating career and fantasy-driven worlds created by the acclaimed Argentinean artistAdrián Villar Rojas's works concoct imaginary realms. Usually made from clay, his colossal installations are transitory and so cannot be collected, as they disappear or decay over time. His practice confronts the public with ideas of obsolescence and extinction, but also with the possibilities of humankind and its endless imagination. This is the first book to include all of Villar Rojas' most significant projects, featured in international biennials such as Venice, Documenta, Shanghai, and others.

The artist s important work centers the on Black community, both aesthetically and materially. Halsey gathers icons of pride, autonomy, initiative, and resilience from local vernacular sources recontextualizing and reinterpreting them for her utopic fantasies of the city. Both celebrating Black cultural expressions and archiving them, her work which includes wall works, massive multiroom installations, and immersive outdoor environments is a potent reminder of the importance of community and home. Beyond the signs and symbols of contemporary South Central, Halsey employs the iconography of ancient Egypt as a means to reclaim lost legacies, drawing inspiration from Afrofuturism a transcultural movement blending science fiction with aspects of Black art and culture and the utopian architecture proposed in the 1960s by Archigram and Superstudio.

On September 29, 2018, before a live audience at Navy Pier in Chicago, international curator Hans Ulrich Obrist conducted his first US Marathon interview session as part of Art Design Chicago, a yearlong celebration of Chicago's art and design legacy initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Obrist, who has undertaken a life-long project of interviewing cultural figures, spoke with more than twenty of Chicago's most innovative and influential artists, designers, architects, writers, and other creatives. In their interviews, this diverse group of creatives provided insights into their artistic processes, influences, and ideas about and hopes for their shared city of Chicago. Among the participants were social-practice artist/developer Theaster Gates, architect Jeanne Gang, writer Eve Ewing, Hairy Who artists Art Green and Suellen Rocca, performance/installation artist Shani Crowe, and the city's cultural historian Tim Samuelson. Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon serves as documentation for this event, including edited transcripts of the interviews, biographies of the participants, photos of the event, and images of the artists' work.

Memory as a dynamic process has been the underlying theme of Sabine Moritz s drawings and paintings since the early 1990s. In her work the Cologne-based artist has captured remembered images from her childhood in the GDR; drawn flower compositions; and in recent years has engaged with the motif of war. This publication presents Moritz s latest work: a collection of drawings and paintings of helicopters created between 2002 and 2013. The Helicopter series has arisen from Moritz s interest in the shift in their symbolic meaning. They are based on images of helicopters from newspapers and television that the artist transferred into her own language.The outcome is a series of beautiful drawings and paintings that range from objective depictions of helicopters to more poetic compositions. The works are accompanied by poems by Adam Zagajewski and Friedrich Holderlin, alongside a text by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Roberto Matta, Cecilia Vicuña, Alfredo Jaar, Paz Errázuriz and others offer insight into Chilean art and politicsThis volume looks closely at the Chilean experimental art scene, in which practitioners have mastered avant-garde strategies and encouraged cultural dissidence. Over the past five years Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed three generations of Chilean artists, performers and writers, many of whom worked despite the horrific violence and censorship of the Pinochet dictatorship and now navigate through the hazy context that surrounds the post-dictatorial nation in the 21st century. This unique constellation of practices has become a model for a particular mode of postmodernism based on research and experimentation. The stunning archival images and extensive interviews organized chronologically with Roberto Matta, Juan Pablo Langlois, Catalina Parra, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Carmen Beuchat, Eugenio Dittborn, Paz Errázuriz, Gonzalo Díaz, Cecilia Vicuña, Diamela Eltit, Raúl Zurita, Alfredo Jaar and Seba Calfuqueo offer a deeply personal insight into Chile’s evolving culture.

When Hans Ulrich was a young boy, he was knocked down by a speeding car. Hospitalized for weeks, he discovered the healing powers of art. Once he was able to travel again, he began to set out alone, on night trains, to meet artists in their studios across Europe.From these early youthful encounters with the art world to his first exhibition in his Zurich kitchen, and even penning 250 postcards while trapped by an avalanche in Val Bregaglia, Obrist takes us through the formative experiences that made him.Part unputdownable coming-of-age story, part tour de force of the contemporary art world, part user’s manual on how to live driven by curiosity, conversation, and not least hope, Life in Progress is an enchanting ode to what engaging with art and the people around us boundlessly affords.

A definitive and timely monograph celebrating the work of ground-breaking conceptual artist Cerith Wyn EvansCerith Wyn Evans is one of today's most respected and acclaimed sculptors. Born in Wales and educated through his first language of Welsgh, his work reflects his fascination with  literature, film, music, and philosophy. Evans is an artist interested in language and how this can be perceived in spatial terms.Originally an experimental filmmaker, in the 1990s Evans started creating sculptures and installations defined by poetic conceptualism and elegant aesthetic forms. Often made of neon light, his pieces subtly disrupt existing systems of communication, either through the subversion and alteration of given spatial forms or by adopting a communal rather than a singular, authoritarian voice.In 2003 Evans represented Wales at the country’s inaugural pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale. This book, the first comprehensive study dedicated to his work, includes contributions by luminaries such as the former Guggenheim Chief, Nancy Spector and the 2011 Venice Biennale director, Daniel Birnbaum, together with a previously unpublished text by Evans himself.

HENI Publishing is delighted to present INVADER: In Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, a book that offers unique insight into the enigmatic French street artist, renowned for his iconic ceramic tile mosaics inspired by the pixelated 8-bit video game art of the 1970s and 80s.INVADER features an expansive, in-depth interview conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist, which guides readers through the artist’s recent Paris exhibition, Invader Space Station (17 February – 5 May 2024), in the first section and through his studio in the second, offering an unparalleled glimpse into Invader’s technical and creative processes, and the global impact of his work. The first section of the book traces the route of the exhibition – held at the former offices of the newspaper Libération– with sub-chapters corresponding to the ‘levels’ of the show, reflecting on the conceptual and spatial dimensions of Invader’s work and his position as a ‘hacker’ of public spaces. The second section takes place in the artist’s studio where the conversation continues on a more personal note, offering an intimate look into Invader’s creative world. Richly illustrated, the book maps Invader’s numerous artistic encounters, from the graphic novels of Enki Bilal to legendary street artists like Leonard Hilton McGurr (aka Futura 2000) and Tsang Tsou-choi (the ‘King of Kowloon’), as well as his relationships with contemporaries including the provocative British artist Damien Hirst, American artist and activist Shepard Fairey and New York graffiti artist Revs.

The Hockney Interviews brings together expansive conversations held between art world icon David Hockney, who is best known for his large scale, vivid paintings, and pre-eminent curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist. Since their meeting in 2006, when Obrist first visited Hockney at his London studio, the conversations span a 16-year period to the present day. Exploring Hockney’s dedicated and prolific practice, his relationship with fellow artists Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon, fervent preoccupation with painting nature, ruminations on new technologies and his love of smoking - Hockney’s musings are as bold and varied as his work. The Hockney Interviews is a hardback reading book and intimate portrait of David Hockney, one of the world’s most distinguished living artists. Fully illustrated with artworks spanning the breadth of Hockney’s artistic career.

The Zaha Hadid Interviews brings together twelve conversations between the architect and Hans Ulrich Obrist, conducted between 2001 and 2013. Across these exchanges, Hadid reflects on architecture as a field of experimentation, shaped by drawing, exhibition-making, urbanism and new technologies. The interviews trace the evolution of her thinking from early speculative projects to the realisation of major cultural buildings, including museums and civic spaces across Europe, Asia and the United States. Hadid discusses interior complexity, movement and perception, the testing of ideas through exhibitions and installations and the relationship between architecture, art and performance. She also addresses collaboration, authorship and the challenges of translating radical ideas into built form. Illustrated with drawings and paintings — some of which are published here for the first time — models, documentary and archival photographs, The Zaha Hadid Interviews offers an intimate portrait of a highly influential figure in contemporary architecture.

While for many architects, drawing is a functional tool in the development of specific building projects, visionary British architect Sir Peter Cook has used the medium throughout his long career to channel his boundless imagination. From those made in the 1960s at Archigram to the present day, Cook’s colourful, highly detailed images resonate beyond the architectural sphere, as seen in his major solo exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark in 2022. Cook’s work pushes the boundaries of architectural norms of design and construction, with the freedom to imagine buildings, communities and cities that are, as he succinctly puts it, ‘possible or maybe nearly possible, but importantly, not consciously impossible’.For this book, Cook has selected the 18 projects — 16 drawings, one building and his Serpentine Play Pavilion — that he considers most essential to understanding his creative process. These are accompanied by texts that set them within a historical, cultural andpersonal context. His unorthodox and varied 60-year career is explored further in a conversation with Serpentine’s Artistic Director, Hans Ulrich Obrist, that delves further into Cook’s personal history, belief systems and creative processes from childhood to the present day.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, brings his curating expertise to the Instagram feeds of more than 388,000 followers (and counting!), in an endeavour to revive the art of handwriting from within an ever-advancing digital age. The result is one of the most comprehensive looks at the art world from the inside; inclusive of artists, writers, designers, musicians, actors, architects and public figures.In his open-ended Instagram project, Obrist collects an abundance of thoughts for the day, dreams, drawings, musings, jokes, quotations, questions, answers, poems, and puns from some of the world’s greatest contemporary artists, handwritten on everyday Post-it notes (and other scraps). From the reassuringly philosophical to the inspiringly straightforward, the ingeniously funny to the tenderly post-humous, Remember to Dream! (a note from American artist Carrie Mae Weems) paints a picture of the art world direct from many of the most celebrated artists of the twenty-first century.The book features an introduction by Hans Ulrich Obrist and is designed by Amsterdam-based award-winning book designer Irma Boom.