Martha Rosler Library
April 12 – June 14, 2008
Site
Liverpool John Moores University
School of Art and Design
68 Hope Street
Liverpool L19EB
Opening hours: Mon – Sat 11-6 pm
Site is pleased to announce the opening of Martha Rosler Library on Friday, April 11, 2008 at 6pm. Comprised of approximately 7,700 titles from the artist’s personal collection, the Library was opened to the public by Anton Vidokle in November 2005 as a storefront reading room at e-flux, on Ludlow street in New York City. It has since traveled to Frankfurter Kunstverein, MuHKA, Antwerp, unitednationsplaza, Berlin and Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris. The library will remain on view in Liverpool through 14 June and will travel to Stills in Edinburgh in the Fall.
“In an act of incredible generosity, one of Americas most important living artists temporarily dispossessed herself of the vast majority of her personal library so that it could be made available for consultation. No borrowing was possible, but the eclectic ensemble of books on economics, political theory, war, colonialism, poetry, feminism, science fiction, art history, mystery novels, childrens books, dictionaries, maps and travel books, as well as photo albums, posters, postcards and newspaper clippings could be studied at will. Smart, decidedly political in orientation, often funny, and all over the place (in that way a perfect mirror of its owner), the library is packed with essential reading and titles that even your better bookstores would love to get their hands on. As the product of decades of avid reading, the contents of the library are both the source of Roslers work and an installation/artwork that continues many of the concerns with public space, access to information and engaged citizenship that traverse her entire oeuvre.”
–Elena Filipovic, Afterall, issue 15, Spring/Summer 2007
A personal library represents the private sphere of an individual, her way of acquiring and combining knowledge. Accumulation is the result of an intellectual inquiry that takes place in parallel with a more random search, which can lead us to unexpected textual, and therefore mental, spaces. Martha Rosler Library offers the visitor an opportunity to approach this open source of information with her or his own interests, and to create new affinities and connections between the elements of the library that add to more than the sum of knowledge contained in it. The bibliography, currently in process, can be accessed online at projects.e-flux.com/library
Talks
Martha Rosler Library project includes a series of informal public conversations, lectures and discussions which started in New York and continued at all its venues.
Following the opening of Martha Rosler Library, Martha Rosler and Anton Vidokle will be in conversation on Saturday 12 April at 1pm.
Further conversations include Shepherd Steiner, Simon Sheikh, Center of Attention and Maria Hlavajova. (check website for exact dates/time)
Admission is free. All are welcome.
Publication
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication including interviews with Martha Rosler and Anton Vidokle by Stephen Wright, and an essay by Elena Filipovic.
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Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives, after spending the 1970s in California. She works in video, photo-text, installation, sculpture, and performance, and writes on aspects of culture. She is a renowned teacher and has lectured widely, nationally and internationally. Rosler’s work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women’s experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport. Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennale of 2003; the Liverpool Biennial and the Taipei Biennial (both 2004); documenta 12 and SkultpturProjekte Münster (2007); as well as many major international survey shows, including several Whitney biennials. She has had numerous solo exhibitions. A retrospective of her work, Positions in the Life World (1998-2000), was shown in five European cities and at the New Museum and the International Center of Photography (both in New York), concurrently. Rosler has published fifteen books of photography, art, and writing, most recently Imágines públicas: La funcíon política de la imagen (Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2007). Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Essays 1975-2001 was published by MIT Press in 2004. Books of her photographs include Passionate Signals (Cantz, 2005), In the Place of the Public: Airport Series (Cantz, 1997), and Rites of Passage (NYFA, 1995). If You Lived Here (Free Press, 1991) addresses her Dia project on housing, homelessness, and urban life. Rosler has been awarded the Spectrum International Prize in Photography for 2005, the Oskar-Kokoschka Prize in 2006, and Anonymous Was a Woman award in 2007. She teaches at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and
Rutgers University.
Anton Vidokle was born in Moscow and arrived to the US with his parents in 1981, settling on the Lower East Side. His work has been exhibited in shows such as the Venice Biennale, Lyon Biennial, Dakar Biennale and at Tate Modern, London; Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; Musée d’art Modern de la Ville de Paris; Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; UCLA Hammer, LA; ICA, Boston; Haus Der Kunst, Munich; P.S.1, New York; among others. With Julieta Aranda, he organized e-flux video rental, which traveled to numerous institutions including Portikus, Frankfurt; KW, Berlin; Extra City, Antwerp; Carpenter Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; and others. As founder of e-flux, he has produced projects such as Next Documenta Should Be Curated By An Artist, Do it, Utopia Station poster project, and organized An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life. Vidokle initiated research into education as site for artistic practice as co-curator for Manifesta 6, which was canceled. In response to the cancellation, Vidokle set up an independent project in Berlin called Unitednationsplaza—a twelve-month exhibition-as-school involving more than a hundred artists, writers, theorists, and diverse audiences. Located behind a supermarket in East Berlin, UNP’s program featured numerous seminars, lectures, screenings, book presentations. Unitednationsplaza recently traveled to Mexico City and a parallel project called the Night School will continue at the New Museum through January 2009.
Site is a collaboration between Liverpool John Moores University School of Art and Design and Liverpool Biennial and acts as an interface between students from Liverpool School of Art and Design, Liverpool Biennial and the work of national and international artists.
Site
Liverpool John Moores University School of Art and Design
68 Hope Street
Liverpool L19EB
Opening hours: Mon – Sat 12-5 pm
For more information
Helen Klemm
H.Klemm@ljmu.ac.uk
