Pavel S. Pys – författare

A handsomely designed overview of Chan’s acclaimed Badlands imprint and his latest sculptural series exploring the metaphor of the “breather”This volume surveys Paul Chan’s publications and works made between 2010 and 2022 following his return to artmaking. The exhibition takes as its organizing principle the notion of the “breather,” a word that can signify a moment of rest or pause but can also reference a purposeful redirection toward other activities.Chan’s turn to publishing through the founding of his independent press Badlands Unlimited represented a type of “breather.” Badlands for Chan embodied a radical break that seeded new ideas and ways of working. The term is also what Chan titles a recent major body of work. Breathers is an ongoing series of pneumatic sculptures and installations that he considers a new genre of moving-image works. Tacitly and overtly, the metaphor of the “breather” underscores each of the works in the Walker Art Center exhibition, which, with the artist’s input, is conceived in four sections. The exhibition catalog includes scholarly contributions by Chan; Pavel Pys, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center; and Vic Brooks, Senior Curator of Time-based Visual Art at Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (EMPAC).Paul Chan (born 1973) is an artist, writer and publisher who lives in New York. Chan is the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize in 2014, a biennial award honoring artists who have made visionary contributions to contemporary art. Chan founded the independent press Badlands Unlimited in 2010. Badlands has published over 50 books, including the works of Yvonne Rainer, Calvin Tomkins, Lynne Tillman, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carroll Dunham, Claudia La Rocco, Dread Scott, Martine Syms, Craig Owens, Petra Cortright, Cauleen Smith, Ian Cheng, Rachel Rose, Aruna D’Souza and many others.

“[Her] poetic and political art pushes viewers to consider the limits, and misunderstandings, that come with communication in any language.” —Andrew Russeth, the New York TimesThis volume surveys Christine Sun Kim’s works across painting, sculpture, drawing, moving image, performance, large-scale murals and collaborations with other artists made between 2011 and 2024. Kim’s practice considers how sound operates in society, deconstructing the politics of sound and exploring how oral languages operate as social currency. Identifying as Deaf and Korean American, Kim draws on musical notation, written language, infographics, American Sign Language (ASL) and the use of the body, strategically deploying humor to examine communication with her family and her community and to create new channels of dialogue with wide audiences.Published alongside the traveling exhibition, All Day All Night is brimming with supplementary texts from curators, artists and scholars, including an interview between Christine Sun Kim and exhibition curators Tom Finkelpearl, Jennie Goldstein and Pavel S. Pys; scholarly contributions by Seth Kim-Cohen, Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield and Park McArthur; and an intimate artist timeline compiled by Brandon Eng and Rose Pallone. A substantial plate section follows these enriching text contributions.Christine Sun Kim (born 1980) is an American artist based in Berlin. Her work explores her relationship to spoken and signed languages, to her built and social environments and to the world at large. Kim has exhibited and performed internationally, including at the Queens Museum, New York (2022); the Drawing Center, New York (2022); Whitney Biennial, New York (2019); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2019); and the Art Institute of Chicago (2018).

Akhavan’s sculpture and installation works attend to the ecology and politics of spatial relations, often incorporating ephemeral, organic materialsSpanning the 20-year practice of Canadian artist Abbas Akhavan (born 1977), Variations on a Garden highlights the recurring conceptual concerns manifest across his work—from site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video, sculpture and performance. Specifically, the volume explores Akhavan’s engagement with human relations to the natural world, public and private space, and the conservation of heritage sites. In the artist’s corpus, portions of domesticated landscapes, adjacent to or coextensive with the home and archeological sites, are conspicuously situated within the liminal zone of the gallery. Amid the backdrop of white expanse, Akhavan intermingles indexes of artifice, such as green screens or tangled wires, with organic materials and perishable matter such as soil, water and plants. A suite of texts by curators and an interview conducted with the artist delve into the processes and inquiries that inform Akhavan’s practice.