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August 30, 2008
Urbanomic Studio Event
NATURE MORTE
Work by
Paul Chaney
and
Sam Bradbury
Saturday 6th September from 6pm
Sunday 7th September from 12-6pm
Urbanomic
The Old Lemonade Factory
off Windsor Terrace
Falmouth
TR11 3EX
07977 449416
office@urbanomic.com
August 04, 2008
Anomalous Publication
Coming soon...
Cyclonopedia is theoretical-fiction novel by Iranian philosopher and writer Reza Negarestani. Hailed by novelists, philosophers and cinematographers, Negarestani's work is the first horror and science fiction book coming from and written on the Middle East.
'The Middle East is a sentient entity-it is alive!' concludes renegade Iranian archaeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the 'lubricant' of historical and political narratives.
A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along.
Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil ...
At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archaeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. CYCLONOPEDIA is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth's tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun.
August 03, 2008
New DIVUS show
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DIVUS UNIT 30 and UMELEC MAGAZINE invites you to
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FOUNTAIN
new sculpture by Lenka Klodova
PRIVATE VIEW Thursday 7 August at 6pm
Incredible black book PREGNANT SONGS and other publications from the artist will be available
Open until 31 August 2008
"The woman, put on a pedestal by Western culture, is usually beautiful, naked and defenseless. Klodova argues against this ideal model of womanhood found in museums, galleries, advertisements and in European art history publications. Although Klodova demonstrates the absurdity of such presentations of womankind, her "ideal" is by no means an asexual woman warrior wearing blue stockings. The nakedness of a woman is not the opposite of freedom; motherhood is not the opposite of erotic desire and intellectual maturity."
From text by Martina Pachmanova, Oh God, a woman!
(Klodova's "black book" Pregnant Songs).
"Since 1999, Lenka Klodova has been investigating the theme of women
through the sensitive material of the pornography industry. Fascinating are the variety of ideas anchored in that one theme, the simplicity of the material, and constant invention in the field of method. Lenka devotes herself with the same seriousness to sculptural work as to paper-cutting; her works range from monumental realizations, like Miluji (I Love, 2001) in Neratovice, to flat "sculptures" made out of cardboard dressed up in tailored clothes, but there are also samizdat mystifications and body performances. All these methods of creation mingle with and complement each other. The work with porno-magazines is developed further in the samizdat magazines, Briza (Birches, 2000) and Kominy (Chimneys, 2001). The new magazine Krasnas holky v akci (Beautiful Girls in Action, 2004) complements the Miluji installation by rendering it ironic; it is a
photo-essay in which Lenka and her friends, Helenka and Lucie, work on
this sculpture while dressed as prostitutes. Wearing high heels and
workers' goggles they hammer wedges into monumental stone blocks, move
them with a crane and grind at them with a hand grinder. It was as if they were constructing an advertisement for their erotic service. That adds another slightly ticklish dimension to the multivalent outcry "I love!" and the photo-documentation shifts the realization of a sophisticated art work to the level of a student prank. This is not the first time that such self-irony, something that seems to undermine artwork's seriousness, appears in Lenka's work."
From text by Pavlana Morganova, When Everybody finally Somehow Fell
Asleep... (Klodova's "black book" Pregnant Songs)
Invitation drawing by Lenka Klodova & Milos Novotny (2008)
still running:
AZBUKA OF MOSCOW FLAT
by Asya Flitman & Lyusya Voronova
curated by Alena Boika
Divus Unit 30 is open Wed - Sat, 2 - 8pm
and by appointment.
Divus Unit 30
3rd Floor, North Entrance
37 Cremer Street, Shoreditch
London, E2 8HD, United Kingdom
Speculative Heresy
Speculative Heresy is a new collective blog devoted to pursuing the nascent issues surrounding speculative realism, with the intention of providing a platform for these emerging issues to gain more widespread academic recognition, beyond traditional disciplinary confines. As well as the ongoing discussions underway on the blog, the authors have made an impressive start to assembling an archive of relevant original and translated texts, including some all-too-rare translations of works by Laruelle.
New Stockist - Berlin
Berlin's wonderful PRO QM bookstore is now a stockist of Collapse.
