Tuesday, 18 August 2015
Wednesday, 15 April 2015
Exhibition and Book Launch: Oslo, Norway
Oslo, Norway: Exhibition and Book Launch
In November 2011 Darko Dragičević and John Holten carried out ‘It’ s Already A Success!’, a weeklong reading of the entire novel The Readymades as part of an exhibition by The LGB Group at the legendary Gallery D.O.R. in Brussels. For the first international release of his follow up novel, Oslo, Norway, Holten will once more read a novel in full. Echoing not only the earlier performance, but also contemporary writer Travis Jeppeson, who has read his novel The Suiciders in full at various venues, the performance posits a total exposure of the literary work, allowing the audience to come and go, converse and drink a glass of wine over a period of several hours for durations of their choosing. This is not so much a comment on the contested audience expectation for free content, but an investigation into new modes of attention and readership, how one can go about performing a novel, as well as subverting the social expectations of a traditional book launch.
Alongside the reading will be a screening of ‘Blips’, a series of pseudo commercials Holten produced and screened over the last two years. These have been screened individually in Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, (Blip # 4); Extrapool, Nijmegan (Blip#3); Team Titanic, Berlin (Blip # 2) and Galerie Plan B, Berlin (Blip# 1). These will be slowed down to approach the length of the reading, a mixture of footage from Oslo and extracts from the novel, they counteract and draw out what the audience may or may not hear depending on the length they listen.
Oslo, Norway takes the form of a literary atlas, telling its stories over 39 sections titled after streets and places around Oslo and its environs. These are included at the beginning of each of the three sections of the book and the original drawings will also be on display, along with other totem like iterations of the book. In line with Holten’s practice, all aspects of the book and its creation are presented over the course of the performance and exhibition heralding, as does the form of the novel, a new mode of reading, one that is inherently based on life online and how the majority of textual matter is now read, bringing that into an offline, durational and haptic literary experience.
John Holten is a writer and artist as well as a publisher. Born in 1984 in Ireland, he studied at University College Dublin and the Sorbonne-Paris IV before obtaining an MPhil from Trinity College Dublin. In 2011 he published his first novel The Readymades to great acclaim, and the art group he created in the novel (with Darko Dragičević), The LGB Group, enjoyed exhibitions in many cities as well as being included in The Armory Show, New York in 2012. Known for his collaborative projects, Holten has written for many artists such as Natalie Czech, Mahony, Darri Lorenzen and Jani Ruscica, often working closely with them to produce immersive or participatory texts. His work has appeared in many international contemporary art settings such as Malmö konsthall, The White Building London, David Zwirner Gallery New York (with Aengus Woods), NGBK and Agora, Berlin and Villa Romana, Florence amongst others. Having co-founded Broken Dimanche Press as an international art press in 2009, he has overseen as Editor-In-Chief more than thirty publications and attendant exhibitions, projects and public events. In 2012 he travelled to the Congo with artist Richard Mosse for whom he edited A Supplement to The Enclave as part of Mosse’s 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize winning exhibition in London. In 2011 he received a Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland.
Alongside the reading will be a screening of ‘Blips’, a series of pseudo commercials Holten produced and screened over the last two years. These have been screened individually in Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, (Blip # 4); Extrapool, Nijmegan (Blip#3); Team Titanic, Berlin (Blip # 2) and Galerie Plan B, Berlin (Blip# 1). These will be slowed down to approach the length of the reading, a mixture of footage from Oslo and extracts from the novel, they counteract and draw out what the audience may or may not hear depending on the length they listen.
Oslo, Norway takes the form of a literary atlas, telling its stories over 39 sections titled after streets and places around Oslo and its environs. These are included at the beginning of each of the three sections of the book and the original drawings will also be on display, along with other totem like iterations of the book. In line with Holten’s practice, all aspects of the book and its creation are presented over the course of the performance and exhibition heralding, as does the form of the novel, a new mode of reading, one that is inherently based on life online and how the majority of textual matter is now read, bringing that into an offline, durational and haptic literary experience.
John Holten is a writer and artist as well as a publisher. Born in 1984 in Ireland, he studied at University College Dublin and the Sorbonne-Paris IV before obtaining an MPhil from Trinity College Dublin. In 2011 he published his first novel The Readymades to great acclaim, and the art group he created in the novel (with Darko Dragičević), The LGB Group, enjoyed exhibitions in many cities as well as being included in The Armory Show, New York in 2012. Known for his collaborative projects, Holten has written for many artists such as Natalie Czech, Mahony, Darri Lorenzen and Jani Ruscica, often working closely with them to produce immersive or participatory texts. His work has appeared in many international contemporary art settings such as Malmö konsthall, The White Building London, David Zwirner Gallery New York (with Aengus Woods), NGBK and Agora, Berlin and Villa Romana, Florence amongst others. Having co-founded Broken Dimanche Press as an international art press in 2009, he has overseen as Editor-In-Chief more than thirty publications and attendant exhibitions, projects and public events. In 2012 he travelled to the Congo with artist Richard Mosse for whom he edited A Supplement to The Enclave as part of Mosse’s 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize winning exhibition in London. In 2011 he received a Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland.
Monday, 30 March 2015
Oslo, Norway
It's been a while in the making, but finally my next book 'Oslo, Norway' is due for release next month. In celebratory anticipation and to help cover the costs toward remaining production processes, BDP are offering 100 signed copies for pre-sale over the next three weeks, with free shipping. It's a curious little book, three years of toil and inspiration have been condensed into its merry words and obtuse declarations and now I'm really looking forward to it finding a reading audience. Your support means everything.
/This is not a crowd funding campaign/
Please email me for a Media Kit/Review copy
Monday, 22 December 2014
Oslo, Norway: Four Blips
Commercial Broadcasts:
Blip # 4: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, 05.08.2014
Blip # 3: Extrapool, Nijmegan, 16.03.2014
Blip # 2: Team Titanic, Berlin 29.-30.11.2013
Blip # 1: Galerie Plan B, Berlin 28-30.08.2013
Blip # 4: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, 05.08.2014
Blip # 3: Extrapool, Nijmegan, 16.03.2014
Blip # 2: Team Titanic, Berlin 29.-30.11.2013
Blip # 1: Galerie Plan B, Berlin 28-30.08.2013
Thursday, 18 September 2014
Monday, 21 April 2014
In Lieu of an Editorial: Newspapers, the Infra-Ordinary & The Enclave
I’m a novelist
whose pastime is art, which as distractions go, and novelists can be extreme aficionados
of distraction, threatens often to overrun my writing time completely to the
point where often I feel I should just call myself an artist and be done with
it. When I was writing my first novel I distracted myself by making books with
other people: I became an editor and co-started with Line Madsen Simenstad, a
Norwegian journalist, Broken Dimanche Press, a self-avowed avant-garde platform that would publish
literary books by artists and visual books by writers. We would be political –
a tongue in cheek social democratic stance prevailed – and be European wide in
outlook. We called the endeavour after Yves Klein and his
one day newspaper – Dimanche – that
appeared on newsstands throughout Paris on Sunday 27 November 1960, a beautiful constellation of conceptual and performance art
intervention and design, all wrapped up in the form of the humble throwaway
newspaper. Our plan was to make newspapers and celebrate the Everyday through
ludic, artistic and academic interventions in this most commonplace of
publications.
Dimanche, Yves Klein, newspaper cover.
Source: Wikipedia
BDP started with a
journal The Kakofonie, but that
quickly started to take different forms (a PDF download, a poster, a video
selection, a bookmark etc) but never a newspaper. Next came our first book: an
anthology You Are Here. We found
kindred spirits in the designers FUK. We won the Charlemagne Prize. We made many books with some great artists and
writers. Exhibitions. Projects. Tours. Readings. But five years later and we had
yet to make a newspaper.
*
In September 2012 I was in Milan putting on an exhibition of LGB art
derived from that novel I finally managed to finish in between distractions, The Readymades, when I got a phone call from Richard Mosse. He was
in Denver, I think he said, just off a plane and had been reading my novel when
the idea came to him that maybe I could travel with him to the Congo when he
was making The Enclave. I could try
and do something similar to The
Readymades – use found material, witness testimonies to war crimes, art
historical intrigue and gossip – to compliment the fictive landscape as
portrayed in his Infra series. I
could help him make his catalogue, his book, something beyond the pale. I said
yes, sure thing. Three weeks later I was with him carting beer coolers full of
expired infrared film through airports and up and down mountains. We arrived
into Goma sometime passed midnight, the streets eerily deserted; even to me who
was there for the first time, it was clear that the town was under curfew, in
lockdown because of recent grenade attacks and the proximity of the rebel group
the M23’s enclave. There was a UN battalion in heavy armoured vehicles. Gun
towers along every fence. The roads where barely what you could call roads, made
mountainous from the lava from the Nyiragongo volcano, glowing red in the
background. The place suffered a kind of doom laden inevitability that kept me from
asking myself what I was doing there and now two years later, thinking about this first entry into Congo exhausted from 15 hours of travel, I’m left thinking
how funny the places are to which the creation of books can bring you.
*
I don’t really know why I’m drawn to this unit we can call the day, the
Everyday, and which the newspaper is the representative form. The newspaper is
a durational publication and yet it has a stake in history, its details make up
the small details that become building blocks to historiography. Our lives are made up of the day and everyday
routines are what ground us to this earth and yet they slip away, get lost so
easily: what must it take for you to remember this day in ten year’s time?
Borges’ unfortunate Funes, a character I think of often, has a memory of a
recall scale 1:1: he takes a whole day just to pass over the memory of one day.
A heavy burden and yet so much art and literature chase exactly this burden, to
remember, to recall, to dwell and resurrect from the tides of amnesia crashing
against the defenseless shores of anamnesis. In The Readymades I invented an art collective, a roaming group of
artists called The LGB Group – who have adopted their own reality and have
embraced the world with a modicum of success – and their interest, what they
strove to exalt in their art was this thing, unit, aspect of life, that they
called the Everyday.
Richard Mosse climbs a mountain on the Rwandan-Congolese border,
October 2012. Photograph: John Holten
In A Supplement to The Enclave it becomes fascinating to read the
conversations between Mosse and his collaborators, even to me who knows all
three well and was there for much of the recording and events discussed. One
fascinating part of these conversations is how one sequence of The Enclave toward the end is referred
to in both conversations, indeed Ben Frost says it may be his favourite at one
point, while Mosse states that it could be ‘the crux of the piece’. It’s a complicated
scene of disjunction, the soundtrack is made up of a loud hammering and arguing
voices, a fast rhythm grows: it seems it’s made up of the very disparate
elements that make up the chaotic thing that is life. When I was there we
developed the idea of luring the viewer into the enclave with long panning
shots that would lead the spectator into new spaces. And what does the viewer
find when they enter this space? During their first two trips together in the
Congo, Mosse and Tweeten had developed a method in which they worked with the
present participle verbs of the world of eastern Congo that they encountered,
and in so doing they hoped to capture a diurnal impression – such a word seems
strangely inadequate – of this land and its people suffering an on-going,
shifting war and who are almost incapacitated by a western infrastructure of
well meaning NGOs and the UN’s biggest peacekeeping mission. To shelter, to
move, to give birth, to die, to bury, to eat.
Mosse: A very complicated scene.
Tweeten: To me, I love that scene, because it’s
the most chaotic.
Mosse: It’s a complete disjunction with the
previous scene.
Tweeten: I love it because it’s the real version.
There are these different versions of violence
throughout the piece: there’s the
simulation of violence, there’s the sound
of violence, there’s the visual aftermath
of violence, but then there’s also this moment
of
violence which is the lives these people
(the refugees and IDPs) are forced
to live which means having to move all
the time to escape war. Which is being
born into these conditions. Which is eating
food on the go, lacking resources and
access to education. these sort of things
which go into making a violent sort of
existence,
violent in terms of the everyday
struggle to survive. And to me the chaos
of that whole scene – there are all these
things going on from daily life, birth,
death, eating food – perhaps it’s cliché
but at the same time I think it’s really
interesting
because it’s so disjointed.
It’s very
hard to capture a place, any place whether it’s familiar territory or another
continent, this is the challenge laid down by realism. There are layers, many
layers to be peeled back, starting with oneself and your own blinkers that you
may not even be aware exist. Georges Perec was aware of this when he tried to
explore himself and his surroundings by examining what he called the
infra-ordinary: literature doesn’t need to worry about the grand themes of a
Hegelian geist moving ineluctably
toward its own concrete manifestation, played out in characters and environments
woefully predetermined. Rather the ordinary give and take of the everyday holds
worlds entire and reading Perec you realise this. Just as in Joyce, who set an
entire episode of Ulysses in an newspaper office and whose modern day Ulysses
is a newspaper adman, we find that the unit of the day is chosen as the form to
fit the universal into, made up of all those tidbits of throwaway life. I spent a lot of
time with Mosse wondering what the literary equivalent could be to his infrared
photographs. One possible suggestion could be Perec’s infra-ordinary, all that
is opposite to the extraordinary. One
night after many Tembo beers I started to discuss this with Mosse out on a
mosquito plagued terrace on the shores of lake Goma. Mosse uses beauty and
reaches toward the sublime, yet The
Enclave is composed pretty much of everyday stuff, it may not be his
everyday or even his everyday when in the Congo, but having been there with
him, running behind Tweeten as he entered into these spaces with the Steadicam,
I can attest that it’s run of the mill stuff, even the shocking scenarios, or
those that come out in the art gallery as extraordinary; even soldiers and their maneuvers,
strutting with guns is normalised (sadly a lot of men join the army or rebel
groups just to gain a gun and what that offers them), and even, sadly for that
matter, invading a town (around six weeks after my wearied midnight arrival into Goma, the M23 invaded the town which Mosse captured in film). It’s not
staged, or even extraordinary, it’s the opposite: terribly mundane, a murderous
mundanity in some cases, and Mosse captured it with his tools of choice, an
infra red film that sought to look below surfaces, of the visible spectrum of
light and the surface of our own expectations of what the journalistic everyday
should be.
You could say one goes to the Congo to fail, in
a way, which sounds like an indictment, but I’m not talking about the
honourable intentions of charity workers, peacekeepers, journalists (and one
thing I noticed very quickly was a strange form of possessiveness over Congo
and its troubles, more than just a concerted interest). The non-Congolese there
all had an opinion and were very proud of the place, in a kind of displaced,
paternalistic way which was somehow unsettling and which comes up often in
people who have spent time there when responding to Mosse’s work. I failed in one aspect of what I went to the Congo to do, but I
also think I will return to finish that aspect of writing a fiction borne out
of the place. Like Tweeten talks about how he had to return, twice, thrice, in
order to find a working method that was in tune to how the place works and what
it means to go there and make work in it.
What then of editing a newspaper out of Mosse’s
work set in the Congo? It feels, having travelled there with him and Ben and
Trevor, working with his fixers and drivers, negotiating with the rebels captured in his film, making some very good friends as well as battling with the all that the place propositioned, this form matches the dream I’ve cosseted
since I started to work with artists. Working with Mosse, Tweeten and Frost has been a truly unique experience, a game changing experience in the creation of an artwork. After five years and many books and
exhibitions, as well as a trip to the Congo, I’m very happy that I finally made
what I hope is the first of many newspapers.
A Supplement to The Enclave by Richard Mosse. Photograph: FUK Graphic Design
Saturday, 19 April 2014
The She The Same by Dafna Maimon
>> PERFORMANCE DAY
Dafna Maimon
"The She The Same" [Nominated for the Berlin Art Prize 2014]
8th April, 2014 (Tuesday), 6 pm
Sala Widowiskowa, Laboratory CCA
Curator: Katia Krupennikova
Coordination: Paulina Kowalczyk
'The She The Same' is a part of a bigger homonymous project consisting of a short film, performance, and paintings in which the experience of our “true other” is set parallel to phantom limb pain. By looking back at mythologies in which each human was once separated from his or her “other half” in the beginning of times, this “lost other” could be considered to be a phantom limb or body. This research project, developed with the help of a neuro scientist, explores the way in which we construct our own bodies and those of our lovers. How does the perception of these constructed "bodies" manifest in reality and affect our psychology even after their disappearance? Simultaneously the idea of a double body or our true other half is a convenient tool for the production of expectation, desire and the romantic industries (i.e. the capitalist ventures that profit from societal construct of romance and love).
Finnish/Israeli Artist Dafna Maimon b.1982 works with video, performance and sculpture. Her work explores human dramas through constructed autobiographical characters that battle with the configuration of individuality, alienation and the perception of reality. Her projects showcase the economy of close personal ties as well as materialize through them, placing value on the idea of community on a grassroots level. Equally central within Maimon’s practice is the research and employment of the constructs of cultural artifacts such as cinema, theater and science.
Dafna Maimon holds a BA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, and an MFA from The Sandberg Institute. She has been a resident at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council New York, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Maine and is a future resident of IASPIS Stockholm 2014. Maimon has shown her work internationally in venues such as PS1 Moma New York, Kunst-Werke Berlin, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Based in Berlin, W139 Amsterdam, Annie Wharton Gallery Los Angeles and Project Native Informant London. Maimon currently lives and works in Berlin.
Lisa Marie Becker was was born in Siegen, Germany and studied acting at European Theaterinstitute Berlin. Since then she took part in several theater productions, such as Germania.Tod in Berlin which was directed by Patrick Schimanski at Concordia Theater Bremen and Christoph Schlingensief's Eine KIrche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir at Haus der Berliner Festspiele as well as Keren Cytter‘s I Eat Pickles At Your Funeral which was shown at HAU Berlin and Images Festival Toronto.
She has had several appearances in independent flm productions, TV series and works as a voice actress. Lisa Marie Becker lives and works in Berlin.
John Holten's (b.1984, Dublin) novel The Readymades was published in 2011. He has performed or given talks in many venues including David Zwirner Gallery New York (with Aengus Woods), NGBK and Humboldt University Berlin. In 2011 he received a Literature Bursary from the Irish Arts Council. His video commercials for his forthcoming novel Oslo, Norway have been exhibited in Plan B Gallery, Team Titanic, Berlin and Extrapool, Nijmegen. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Broken Dimanche Press.
Jakub Falkowski graduated acting at Theater Acedemy in Krakow in 2007. He continued studies at the Academy of Fine Arts - Intermedia Dept. and and Stage Directing at Theater Academy, as well as Religion Studies at Jagiellonian University. Since then he works as an actor, video-projections maker, performer, stage designer, coach and group workshop leader. Recently working on bodymind issues, conscious movement and art of presence (Art of Presence Project). Influenced much by working with Robert Wilson. Art and peace lover.
The performance is made possible with kind support of
the Arts Promotion Centre Finland / Finnish National Arts Councilhttp://www.taike.fi/en/
and Anna Stelmaszczyk / Art Engineers www.artengineers.org
Thursday, 20 March 2014
Sunday, 26 January 2014
Fight: Center - Sandra Mujinga, Mark Soo & John Holten
Center
Kurfürstenstrasse
174
10785 Berlin
send@coeval.gen.in
24.01.14
Sandra Mujinga, Mark Soo
John Holten
John Holten
A Recipe (Found Upon Falling Asleep,
Remixed)
It was a lone tree burning on the dessert. A heraldic tree
that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it
had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed
hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser
auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched
silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and
vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and bearded lizards with mouths
black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet
blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the
same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring
of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had
set back the stars in their sockets.
Tina lives in Berlin. Her voice so seldom on my machine, is
here tonight. And I’m on the market and when I’m on the market words move
faster. Wire and clouds move thin between us like a skin. Like a salty skin of
a seed. A fat circle. A smiling, smiling, her voice so intentionally smiling and
a cloud between us. And these are my intentions:
Always the same unchanging upon waking up with someone I still love in my bed. I proceed to the pantry for whatever meager victuals are at hand. The recipe is a variation of one two or three eggs beaten strongly with a sore hand some dijon mustard salt and pepper perhaps a dash of water or cream and a grate or two of parmesan and then some lardons fried on a smidge of butter and into the worn skillet with it all. Some slices of emmenthal and a destitute salad with olive oil and balsamic and basil leaves to cover all. This is what you get and what speaks from the dessert of sleep to nudge you awake.
Our love we share. I may be your everything. Yeah I still
care, our love we share, you may be mine. It seems that it may get worse: I
thought that I would remain the same. It gets worse again and again.
When the sun rose he was asleep under the smoldering
skeleton of a blackened scrog.
Monday, 21 October 2013
Marketing
Preview screening of the expanded version of the commercial trailer with a reading as part of the exhibition languageleaps at Galeria Plan B, curated by Adriana Blidaru.
GALERIA PLAN B Potsdamer Strasse 77-87, 2. HH 10785 Berlin languageleaps Opening: 28. August, 19 h 28th - 31st of August An exhibition with: John Holten, Saskia Noor Van Imhoff, Calla Henkel and Max Pitergoff, Matei Cioata, Hanne Lippard Lorenzo Sandoval, Marius Engh. Readings by: John Holten at 20 h Hanne Lippard at 21 h
Blips: Oslo Norway, an Aside
My next novel will be called Oslo, Norway and it is the second installment in a three-part roman-fleuve called Ragnarök. When drafting this novel I began to imagine it in the hands of an unseen audience, a fictive future readership. To better enable me to do this, I decided to actively explore some of the roles I carry out in the publishing house that will facilitate the book in the world, to deepen, in a celebratory way, my role in the publishing of my own work.
Oslo, Norway is about love and the creation of fictions. And like any relationship, it wills itself to be read in a new way, to do something different: there can’t be anything hidden about how it comes into the world. No secrets. Regrets come later.
So I have conceived of four video commercials – blips – that will precede the event ofOslo, Norway. Built into the conception of these blips is the dual belief in the necessity for carving out a space for a new novel in the minds of a potential audience, as well as the acceptance of the failing status of commercial literary publishing to confidently mark out its territory. Video trailers for books made in the past for online dissemination feel like still-births in the minds of lost and slightly stunned marketing departments.
These blips are fragments of my dreams as I finish drafting my next novel, they are incantatory, vatic companions to the fictional, made-up worlds I inhabit as I edit and rewrite the novel called Oslo, Norway.
Shot on my mobile phone, they are unadorned, silent. They are expanded video commercials born to live on the Internet. They are introductions to an event yet to happen. They represent freedom, where conclusions and conceits don’t show their faces, not until a future time, in the turn of the page or the fold of a metaphor. They are intended for non-literary contexts and settings.
I no longer read in a way that is similar to how I read when I first started writing fiction and novels. I do not want to write in a way similar to how I wrote when I first started to write fiction and novels simply because I cannot: I am unable to.
As a novelist first and foremost I carry out my duties in relation to Broken Dimanche Press in a social and artistic way: I see the creation of books in the world as an artistic fiction that mirrors how the best metaphors operate, turning abstract bodies of work into real, tangible objects in the hands and minds of unseen, imagined audiences through the use of convincing, well designed, haptic similes and metaphors. It often feels that there isn’t anything approaching the entrepreneurial with regard to Independent Publishing, that if anything it feels more like a creative endeavor. The stages of publishing a book can be as artistic as the writing of the book: the ambitions remaining the same during both activities.
Lastly, these blips are introductions to fiction, they are images that house words which in turn add up to approximations of love and telling stories. Disappointing relationships, misleading advertisements? Most certainly. In the words of a man of greater imaginative power than I, they should declare: I’m going to deceive you and for that you will be grateful to me.
Blip #1 (Them): John Holten
Written / shot / edited by John Holten for Oslo, Norway, 2014.
A Broken Dimanche Press commercial video 2013
ISBN: 978-3-943196-22-1
With thanks to Ashiq Jahan Khondker, Adriana Blidaru and Plan B Gallery, Berlin
www.johnholten.com
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