Vit Havránek – författare

Artist, singer, curator and visual poet Boris Ondreicka (born 1969) compiles two series in this volume: the long poem “John Doe & Joe Bloggs,” typeset in a portrait orientation; and “Spoken Word/Written World,” which compiles what the artist calls “autonomous artworks, theoretical performances, list of titles, etc,” created between 1994 and 2011, typeset in a landscape orientation.

This two-volume publication presents 300 recently realized collages by Czech artist Eva Kotatkova (born 1982). This new body of work is presented as having been compiled from an imaginary schoolbook from the 1980s, when the artist was growing up in Prague, under the totalitarian regime of that decade. The images--which often feature drawn embellishments by Kotatkova--largely consist of children playing games or interacting with various other collaged components, such as anatomical parts, or being manipulated as puppets. Kotatkova thus dramatizes relationships between people, ideas and objects in elaborate psycho-physical dramas redolent of the writings of Franz Kafka or Miroslav Holub. Interspersed among the collages are installation photographs and related documentation. Kotatkova studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, and was acclaimed in The Guardian (UK) as a highlight of the 2013 Venice Biennale (The Encyclopedic Palace). Note that that text on the rear of the black volume is printed upside down.

"If you really want to understand me, it is necessary to see my life from the beginning." This comment by Slovakian aartist Ján Mancuska (1972–2011) is not intended to encourage the audience to track down the artist’s concrete biographical details (that of a subject born in the former Eastern Europe), but to show that the meaning of life and art are intertwined, structured like memory and based on the rules of narratives.This first retrospective publication respects this logic and gathers together Mancuska's work from the second half of the 1990s to his last unrealized projects from 2011. The book contains many resources: original texts, interviews with the artist and contemporary reviews. Mancuska's work, which combined different media—literature, film, theater, installations, video and text—was exhibited widely, including at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Kunsthalle Basel, tranzitdisplay, TBA 21 Vienna, as well as on the stages of the Takkelloftet Royal Theater Copenhagen and the Berlin theater HAU2.