Michele Robecchi – författare

The book presents a series of new works produced by Adel Abdessemed for the MAC’s/Museum of Contemporary Arts in Grand-Hornu. The Algerian-born French artist Adel Abdessemed (b. 1971) works in a wide variety of media including animation, installation, performance, sculpture, and video; through his art he addresses contemporary themes and he reflects the bleak picture of the present day.  His works, unsettling in their simultaneous beauty and raw reality, have made Abdessemed one of the most visible international artists of our time. This volume is composed of two distinct parts, each showcasing and examining one of two series of brand new, site-specific works created by Abdessemed for the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Grand-Hornu and the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon.Distributed for MercatorfondsExhibition Schedule:MAC’s, Grand Hornu(03/04/18–06/03/18)Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon(03/09/18–07/08/18)

The first comprehensive monograph on groundbreaking neo-conceptual artist Tavares Strachan, whose diverse practice speaks powerfully to today’s cultural climateTavares Strachan is arguably one of the most important artists working today. His open-ended practice offers distinctive points of view on a broad range of urgent social and political themes: archaeology, history, geography, music, science, and extreme climatology are only a few of the subjects he has explored to create allegorical exhibitions that tell of colonialism and cultural displacement, human aspiration, mortal limitation, and the space race.Strachan’s extensively researched projects are often monumental in scale and scope. Created in collaboration with thought leaders and organizations across a wide spectrum of fields, his projects are also expansive in reach – The First Supper, Strachan’s massive sculpture at London’s Royal Academy, was one of the most popular art pieces exhibited in 2024.In his birthplace Nassau, Strachan established the scientific research platform BASEC (Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center). In 2018, in collaboration with LACMA, Strachan launched ENOCH, a 3-U satellite bringing to light the forgotten story of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first Black astronaut to be selected for any national space program. ENOCH circled the earth for three years in a sun-synchronous orbit before re-entering on December 2021.This timely monograph, created in close collaboration with the artist, reveals the breadth and impact of Strachan’s work. Part of Phaidon’s acclaimed Contemporary Artists Series, the book includes a conversation with Strachan; text contributions from writers and experts including Emma Dabiri, Gavin Delahunty, and Michele Robecchi; a studio visit with specially commissioned photography; and a comprehensive chronology of Strachan’s career.

Anna Freeman Bentley (b. 1982) is an artist based in London. Her painting practice explores the built environment, architecture and interiors, inviting emotive, psychological and semiotic readings of space. This publication, Complete Reality, documents Freeman Bentley’s latest series of paintings, which she created after visiting the film set for My Driver and I (2024), a coming-of-age drama set in the port city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.Over the course of the shoot, Freeman Bentley took over two thousand photographs, which she edited and worked from in her London studio. The paintings show lavish rooms, filled with fringed lamps, dusty chandeliers, vast mirrors and ornate furniture, juxtaposed with the incongruous signs of a film set: screens, leads, computers and plastic chairs. Exploring the relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘fabrication’, the series continues the artist’s interest in spaces that have an inherent tension or transience.Alongside the paintings that comprise Complete Reality, the publication also includes a series of oil studies on paper that explore additional rooms, angles and spaces from the film set. Installation images of the artist’s most recent solo exhibitions – Video Village at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris (2024), make shift at Monica de Cardenas, Zuoz (2024), and Complete Reality at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2024–25) – showcase the works staged in different configurations and gallery environments. In her introduction, Jennifer Higgie considers the interiority of Freeman Bentley’s elusive scenes, and her interest in temporary and unreal spaces. The curator and writer Elisabetta Fabrizi interviews Freeman Bentley about the interplay of reality and illusion in her paintings. They reflect on themes of authenticity and narrative tension, and discuss Freeman Bentley’s earlier explorations of cinema, particularly Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Kathryn Lloyd writes about the conceptual and historical relationships between cinema, photography and painting. She analyses how Freeman Bentley forges an interdependence between these three distinct media, creating an unmistakably painterly language that somehow distils the essence of both film and photography.In an interview with Michele Robecchi, the artist discusses her recent solo exhibition in Switzerland, make shift. Freeman Bentley reflects on her personal connections to the work, the significance of the temporary and transitory nature of the film set and her use of triptychs, mirrors and fragmentation to disrupt conventional readings of space. In her contribution, the film producer Georgie Paget offers a speculative film script based on the exhibition Video Village at MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris.Edited by Matt Price and designed by Joanna Deans, the book is published by Anomie Publishing, London.Anna Freeman Bentley (b.1982) is an artist based in London. She completed her BA at Chelsea College of Arts, London, in 2004, and also undertook an Erasmus exchange at Kunsthochschule Weissensee in Berlin in 2003. She received her MA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2010.

"Pretenzione Intenzione: Objects of Beauty and Bewilderment from the Archive of Harald Szeemann draws on a selection of objects in the estate of art historian and exhibition maker Harald Szeemann (1933–2005). These objects were part of what Szeemann called his Museum of Obsessions, a mind mirror that manifested itself through Szeemann’s exhibitions as well as in the workspace and archive known as the Fabbrica Rosa in Ticino. There he gathered the numerous and diverse objects, including papers, sketches, photographs, books, exhibition catalogues, letters, works of art and ephemera. As 'Pretenzione Intenzione' – the phrase from one of Szeemann's handwritten notes that gives the project its title - suggests, a desire lies dormant in these objects. It makes itself felt intuitively while intimating a purpose that attains only passing concretion in the telling of stories. Starting from this mysterious casualness, the authors have embarked on an archaeological journey. While Hayat Erdogan, Simone Lappert, Raimundas Malasauskas, Michele Robecchi, Una Szeemann and Michael Taussig unearth, explore, describe and reimagine the object, Bohdan Stehlik captures their auratic presence through photography. Texts and photographs bear witness to the inspiring illegibility and secrecy of these objects, which meander somewhere between preciousness and ephemera, encouraging readers to let their own thoughts drift.Hayat Erdoğan is a dramaturg, theater maker, curator, lecturer, and author. Elsa Himmer is an art historian and curator. Simone Lappert is a writer and poet. Raimundas Malašauskas co-wrote an opera libretto, co-produced a TV show, published several books, and curated a number of projects, and exhibitions. Michele Robecchi is an independent curator, author, and editor specializing in contemporary art. Bohdan Stehlik is an artist and psychologist. Una Szeemann is a visual artist. Michael Taussig is an emeritus professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York."