Fight: Center - Sandra Mujinga, Mark Soo & John Holten

Center

Kurfürstenstrasse 174

10785 Berlin

www.center-berlin.com

send@coeval.gen.in

24.01.14

Sandra Mujinga, Mark Soo
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.

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

Voyelles, Natalie Czech

Installationsansicht Natalie Czech, Kunstverein Hamburg, Foto: Henning Rogge

Office Party at Kinderhook & Caracas Berlin

Kinderhook & Caracas presents:

OFFICE PARTY: Multidimensional Spectrum of Voices
a project by Lorenzo Sandoval with writing by John Holten, María Ptqk, Eirik Sørdal, and Anna-Sophie Springer. 

Opening April 24, 2013 6-10pm

OFFICE PARTY is a narrative experiment that unfolds in the form of multiple objects, texts and activities. The project stems from a series of images found in an unmarked Ilford Photograph box. The box contains a group of black and white photographs taken at a party in an office in West Berlin in the late sixties. Or maybe the early seventies. The images were taken by the same person, surely the official photographer of the celebration. There are multiple prints of certain photographs, which were likely made to be sold or given to the employees of the office as a reminder of the event.

Four writers were selected to interpret the photographs narratively, and to install their texts within an architectural device that provides a discursive space to host them along with the original photos. The exhibition is developed in conjunction with a series of collective writing workshops and performances taking place at Gallery Rosa Santos in Valencia and Kinderhook & Caracas in Berlin. A resulting publication will be compiled and released by Broken Dimanche Press.

Exhibition runs from April 24 - May 24

Workshop on collective narration: April 25, 26, 27.
Please contact us to take part or for more information. Space is limited.


KINDERHOOK & CARACAS
Kreuzbergstraße 42e
10965 Berlin

Open Fr & Sa 2-6pm
and by appointment.

The Kakofonie 007 Otto Zoo Milano

The Kakofonie 007 Otto Zoo Milano

Residency for Oslo, Norway on Costa Blanca, Spain

Workshop in Galeria rosa.santos with artists Rafa Tormao and Lorenzo Sandoval

Wednesday 16 is the first day of the workshop which is part of the exhibition "Office Party: Multidimensional Spectrum of Voices", with Lorenzo Sandoval, John Holten and Rafael Tormo. On collective writing and narrative strategies, it is totally free and will be held in the sala 1 Gallery. More information at:http://rosasantos.net/pages/expo_actual.htm

The Congo with Richard Mosse

 In October and November I went to the Congo with Richard Mosse, to help in the making of The Enclave, "an immersive multimedia installation specially produced for Ireland’s national pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale" and accompanying book.

All Photographs Copyright Richard Mosse 

The LGB Group in Milan at Otto ZOO gallery for Milano START

Sunday newspaper on Irish Berliners

Joana Bértholo - Havia

"The Readymades / Holten Art / Dragicevic Bluff"

Matias Faldbakken, SEARCH in The Book of Books, Documenta calalog 1, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Cologne, 2012. Page 259 

The LGB Group discussed by Aengus Woods at David Zwirner, New York

1. 'The Appearance of a Conversation about the LGB Group in the David Zwirner Gallery Inventory'
   Aengus Woods with John Holten
   Video, 36:34, 2012
   

   
   

   
   

   PEOPLE WHO WORK HERE

   Curated by Rawson Projects

   David Zwirner 525 West 19th Street New York, NY  10011

   July 11 – August 10, 2012

   Opening reception: Wednesday, July 11, 6 – 8 PM

   Cy Amundson, Justin Davis Anderson, Ben Berlow, Josh Brown, Aidan Sofia Earle, Joel Fennell, Brent Harada, Sam Martineau, Chris Medina, Dave Miko, Clive Murphy, Liz Nielsen, David Ording, Justin Phillipson, Ramon Silva, and Aengus Woods with John Holten.

   
   |Press release|