Launches new archive, website, and issue
New archive, new website
PUBLIC launches an archive of its 20+ years of publication. Issues long out of print (Utopia; Touch; Cities/Screens; Eating Things) are finally available, as are those published as recently as 2009. Included are articles by Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard, Simon Critchley, Vilem Flusser, Vera Frenkel, Bettina Funcke, Elizabeth Grosz, Kaja Silverman, Bernard Stiegler, Allen S. Weiss, and many others. All issues will be made available in the archive two years after publication. Free and open to all.
*Artist projects remain available in hard copy only.
PLUS: visit the newly redesigned PUBLIC site to get detailed information on back issues, past projects, upcoming themes, sign up for our newsletter, donate, and to subscribe or order your hard copy of any available issue.
Issue 42: Traces out now
Edited by Chloë Brushwood Rose and Mario Di Paolantonio, PUBLIC 42 explores the Traces of historical memory experienced and expressed through varying artistic attempts to give memorial significance to past wrongs. Traces grapples with the very possibility of representation and remembrance, and at the same time reflects a commitment to the notion that encounters with art may exceed the desire for recovery and offer a connection to the past that reorients us to new possibilities for being in the present.
Francesco Torres documents the digging up of abandoned bones in Spain, while Anita Glesta also works to recover memory through images and recordings of the lost stories of those who survived Gernika. In M2:T4, Graciella Sacco depicts the trace of the footstep, which Vikki Bell suggests “prompt a consideration of the spaces between dispersed human subjects.” Scott Waters‘ paintings of those who go to war in The Hero Book pose what Sara Matthews argues is both an engagement with and a sense of estrangement from traumatic experience. Elke Grenzer considers the growing proliferation of images, memorials and exhibitions devoted to visualizing the Nazi destruction of European Jewry in Berlin. Kenneth R. Allen writes about a selection of photographs from David M.C. Miller‘s The Museum, as animating the work of art in representing the unrepresentable. Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatsky‘s photographs of the “absence-presence” of destroyed Palestinian villages similarly remind us of What Isn’t There.
In a series of video stills, Avelino Sala performs the tearing down of historical monuments. Meanwhile, Blake Fitzpatrick and Vid Ingelevics photograph souvenir fragments of the Berlin Wall, exploring “the irrationality at the heart of the archival compulsion.” In Picnic, Renay Egami‘s work explores the traces of both horror and beauty found in “the wounded city” of Hiroshima, while elin O’hara slavick‘s experimental photo essay documents the traces of World War II in both Japan and France. Amber Dean reconsiders the trace of ‘the name’ by turning to Rebecca Belmore and Janis Cole‘s work on the women who disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Angela Failler engages with Eisha Majara‘s new photomontage series Remember Me Nought in response to “the politics of remembering and forgetting that surround the unsettled history of the 1985 Air India bombings.” Roger Simon reflects on the ways in which “marking a past event within an aesthetic practice might be understood to conjure an on-going, critical relation between the past and the present.”
Also included: a column on quaking by Ian Balfour, and book and exhibition reviews.
Upcoming issues:
SPRING 2011
Suburbs: Contemporary Dwelling in Transition + Leona Drive catalog: Edited by Steven Logan, Janine Marchessault, and Michael Prokopow
Contributions by Alberto Perez-Gomez, Beatriz Colomina, Roger Keil, and many more, including the 20+ artists of the Leona Drive project (www.leonadrive.ca)
THEN:
Experimental Media Congress: Edited by Peggy Gale (Fall 2011)
Art and Civic Spectacle: Edited by Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher (Spring 2012)
Traffic: Conceptualism in Canada: Edited by Barbara Fischer (Fall 2012)
Plastics: Edited by Christine Davis and Scott Lyall (Spring 2013)
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