This two-volume set combines two closely related art projects by Heidrun Holzfeind. The first book, entitled “Mexico 68”, investigates the impact of the 1968 student movement on Mexican society, politics and culture in general, and on the lives of the participants in particular. Conducted almost forty years after the fact, the 18 interviews with activists offer a diverse range of personal accounts, political and social analysis as well as reflections on the events that took place during that mythic year. The second book, entitled “CU, Mexico City, August 2006”, is a personal portrait of Ciudad Universitaria, the National University’s Mexico City campus. The carefully composed shots of exterior and interior views, architectural details, and eerily unpopulated hallways, classrooms and walkways highlight Holzfeind’s interest in aging modernist structures, the conceptualization of the campus as a modern “city” and the use of functionality in the Mexican modernization project.

Since 1999, Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs (born 1959) has been documenting children at play in countries across the globe, from rock paper scissors in Mexico City to knucklebones in Kathmandu, Nepal, to hopscotch in a Yezidi refugee camp in Iraq. Amid shouts of laughter and goodnatured bickering, the subjects of Alÿs’ series represent the universality of youthful play and imagination even in politically contentious environments.

Children’s Games is a unique record of humanity through its youngest members, serving as a testament to the time in a person’s life where, despite everything, the biggest conflict was still whether someone had cheated at musical chairs. This book collects Alÿs’ social project of films, performative actions, drawings, documents and paintings into a single publication for the first time, with contributions by curator and art historian Cuauhtémoc Medina and ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall

Of Bridges & Borderscelebrates the opening up of communication (“bridges”) among writers and artists worldwide following the collapse of the Berlin Wall (the primary border referred to in the title), to mark the emergence of a new collective memory in the age of global connectivity. Described as “a project in book form,” its numerous contributors include Carlos Amorales, John Bock, Chris Burden, Matias Duville, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Elmgreen & Dragset, Carlos Garaicoa, Liam Gillick, Fabrice Gygi, Thomas Hirschhorn, Hassan Khan, Guillermo Kuitca, Dr. Lakra, Gianni Motti, Antoni Muntadas, Carsten Nicolai, Alva Noto, Hans Op de Beeck, Dan Perjovschi, Ishmael Randall Weeks, Reynold Reynolds and Santiago Sierra.

In 1997 Belgian artist Francis Alys (b. 1959) created a performance work called “The Loop for InSITE”, a biennial group exhibition held in Tijuana, Mexico. Addressing the idea of international borders and the contemporary ease/unease of global travel, Alys’ contribution was a journey that started in Tijuana and ended in the nearby border town of San Diego – never, however, crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. The artist instead took the long way, skirting the Pacific rim from Mexico to Panama, Sydney, Bangkok, Vancouver, Los Angeles and finally San Diego. The Loop took Alys one month and five days rather a few minutes – an absurd journey that called attention to Mexico and America’s frought attitudes to their shared border. Combining humour, sensitivity and an extremely personal connection to the people and places where he works, Francis Alys often employs the basic human activity of walking to create performances, photo documentation, videos, slide projections and paintings. The artist first came to international attention with a performance work called “Narcotourism” (‘NowHere’, Lousiana Museum, 1996) in which he walked the city of Copenhagen over the course of seven days, each day under the influence of a different drug. Alys here underlined the wholly personal experience of artmaking, as well as the hyperreal and unnatural experience of contemporary tourism, reducing his travels to completely interiorized, personal ‘trips’. A very independent artist belonging to no particular group, Alys’ is a unique and truly international voice in today’s global art world.

Francis Alys is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists and was born in Belgium in 1959. After studying architecture in Venice he moved to Mexico City, where he has lived and worked for almost two decades. Alys works in many media, including performance, painting, animation, slides, video and drawing, and at scales from the humblest work on paper to the monumental staged performance. Much of his work draws on the life in the streets around his studio, where people sleep, eat, and make a living. He closely observes these activities while making walks through the city, which are often the genesis of future ideas. His collaborations have involved participants as varied as Mexican sign-painters and British Guardsmen. In 2002, he enlisted the help of 500 volunteers for a performance entitled “When Faith Moves Mountains”, in which an attempt was made to move a large sand dune one foot from its original position with the aid of shovels. Featuring an introductory essay by Mark Godfrey, an interview with Alys by Klaus Biesenbach and descriptions of works in the exhibition written by Alys and Cuauhtemoc Medina, the book will also include responses from a wide range of critics and commentators. Published to accompany the largest and most important retrospective exhibition yet staged of Alys’ work, this will not be a conventional monograph, but will, in the spirit of Alys’ wandering practice, more closely resemble a guidebook than an exhibition catalogue.

In a given situation/Numa dada situação é um projeto desenvolvido pela Cosac Naify em parceria com um dos principais artistas plásticos contemporâneos, o belga Francis Alÿs (Antuérpia, 1959). O livro tem como ponto de partida a obra que o artista apresentará na 29ª edição da Bienal de Arte de São Paulo, o filme Tornado. Nele, Alÿs reúne o resultado de dez anos de filmagens de furacões no sul da Cidade do México, onde vive. O livro é uma reelaboração poética do universo desse filme, recentemente apresentado em retrospectiva sobre Alÿs no museu Tate Modern, em Londres. Além de contar com stills da obra e com desenhos do artista feitos no processo de realização dela, a edição reúne as mais diversas referências de Alÿs, sejam elas fragmentos de textos de Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin ou Guimarães Rosa, sejam fotografias tiradas do jornal e outros impressos. O volume, editado em inglês e português, é enriquecido com dois textos feitos especialmente para o livro, um do curador mexicano Cuauhtémoc Medina e outro do matemático brasileiro Ton Marar, e conta ainda com um precioso ensaio do mexicano Alfonso Reyes.

The rise of globalism has created tremendous challenges to old economic, political, and cultural paradigms, changes that are increasingly reflected in diverse artistic practices across the planet. If disciplinary boundaries are now crossed as easily as geographic ones, how does the new internationalism that we are facing affect aesthetics and artistic production? Is there a link, for example, between the rise of video works and the global availability of digital media? Does the global information age facilitate an international language of art and an alternative reading of history, from art history toward art histories?
From the perspective of a museum of modern and contemporary art–a purely European construct–the art institution has to overcome a major contradiction, one that exists between its mission of permanence and its mission of change. How can cultural institutions contribute to the revamping of their own structures now that the hegemony of Western modernity is being challenged? How can museums connect with new audiences through different practices, different scholarships, and different interpretive strategies that grow out of the sedimentation of their own history? To invite and encourage such dialogue, How Latitudes Become Forms looks at current scholarship on globalism and changing curatorial practices, and identifies critical models provided by artists themselves, featuring thought-provoking essays and conversations by curators, critics, and cultural programmers from across the world, as well as multidisciplinary artworks by more than 40 artists from Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States.

Edited by Philippe Vergne.
Essays by Paulo Herkenhoff, Hidenaga Otori,and Hou Hanru.
Introduction by Kathy Halbreich. Conversations with Cuauhtemoc Medina & Vasif Kortun, Kathy Halbreich & Vishakha Desai, Steve Dietz & Raqs Media Collective, Philip Bither, Baraka Sele and Philippe Vergne.

Commerce by Artists documents a fascinating and sweeping range of artists’ projects produced since the 1950s by Canadian and international artists who have sought to engage, rather than merely represent, the commercial world of which they are a part. Encompassing canonical works such as Yves Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1958), Seth Siegelaub’s Artist’s Contract (1971), and Lee Lozano’s Strike Piece (1969) — as well as innovative and rarely-documented works like Keith Obadike’s Blackness for Sale (2001), Kelly Mark’s In & Out (1997-ongoing until 2032), and Ben Kinmont’s Sometimes a Nicer Sculpture Is to Be Able to Provide a Living for Your Family (1998-ongoing) — Commerce by Artists is a comprehensive document of artworks that take the form of transactions and exchanges of value. Edited by Luis Jacob Includes contributions by: agent.NASDAQ aka Reinhold Grether, Zeigam Azizov, Clegg & Guttmann, Carole Condé & Karl Beveridge, Isabelle De Baets and Hendrik Tratsaert, Jorge di Paola, Hu Fang, Elizabeth Ferrell, Gerald Ferguson, Andrea Fraser, Coco Fusco, Hans Haacke, Jens Hoffmann, Luis Jacob, Mary Kelly, Yves Klein, Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi, Jane Crawford, Frances Richard, Richard Manning, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Helen Molesworth, Keith Obadike, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Beatrix Ruf, Andrea Rosen, Martha Rosler, Reid Shier, Julian Stallabrass, Julia Steinmetz, Heather Cassils, Clover Leary, Neil Thomas, Calvin Tomkins, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Cédric Villate

With the hotly discussed resurgence of painting at the dawn of the new century, it is clear that reports of the medium’s death have been greatly exaggerated. “Painting at the Edge of the World” explores the possibilities of a redefinition and ”hybridization” of painting begun in the 1960s, examining the manifestations of these new artistic vistas in the present day. This full-color catalogue features illustrations and a variety of critical texts by some of the most exciting established and emerging critical voices working today, in addition to work by an international and intergenerational group of artists hailing from places as diverse as Brazil, Ethiopia, Germany, South Africa, Scotland, Japan, Belgium, Iran, Italy, and the United States. Designed in two sections–a gatefold plate section containing reproductions of the work, and a french-folded section containing critical essays–the book brings together a wide range of contemporary views on painting from a diverse array of disciplines, including the visual arts, film, architecture, design, and music in an attempt to assess the relevance of painting in the contemporary global context. In addition, “Painting at the Edge of the World” includes documentation of each artist’s work and an examination of their artistic methodology. Essays by: Daniel Birnbaum, Paulo Herkenhoff, Midori Matsui, Jorg Heiser, Frances Stark, Andrew Blauvelt, Reindaldo Laddaga, Yves-Alain Bois, Helio Oiticica, Takashi Murakami, Mike Kelley, and Cuauhtemoc Medina. Introduction by Douglas Fogle. Featuring artworks by: Franz Ackerman, Haluk Akakçe, Francis Alÿs, Kevin Appel, Marcel Broodthaers, John Currin, Marlene Dumas, Andreas Gursky, Eberhard Havekost, Arturo Herrera, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Udomsak Krisanamis, Jim Labie, Margherita Manzelli, Paul McCarthy, Lucy McKenzie, Julie Mehretu, Takashi Murakami, Nader, Chris Ofili, Helio Oiticica, Michael Raedecker, Thomas Scheibitz, Rudolph Stingel, Hiroshi Sugito, Paul Thek, and Richard Wright.

On 11 April 2002, 500 volunteers gathered in front of an enormous dune on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, with spades in their hands. Their aim was to move the dune a few centimetres. This gigantic action, thought up and orchestrated by the artist of Belgian origin, Francis Alÿs, and the art critic, historian and writer, Cuauhtémoc Medina, is captured now in a book with a large number of photographs and texts by Susan Buck-Morss, Gustavo Buntix, Lynee Cooke, Corinne Disserens, Gerardo Mosquera and Augusto Monterroso. Interviews with Alÿs and texts by Medina round of this book-testimony, which is also a reflection on the mythical potential of collective actions, strength of will and the capacity to create stories that end up forming part of the oral tradition of nations. Accompanied by a 15-minute dvd.