On Paper, a special collaborative project by A Prior Magazine and 5th berlin biennial for contemporary art
A Prior Ready to Hand
The publication A Prior Magazine developed in 1999 out of the Brussels based artists’ collective “Etablissement d’en Face”. From the outset, it has been the magazine’s aimto emphasize close collaboration with artists and authors and to create unique moments and documents, so as to bring forward the depth and breadth of artistic practice, rather than publishing short reviews or brief descriptive articles.
The publication has continued to expand its focus internationally, even if attention for ‘local’ artists (living and working in the Low Countries) always remains part of its focus. This internationalisation has in turn required an enlargement of the editorial board. A PriorMagazine currently engages authors and curators frommany corners of Europe: Andrea Wiarda (Milan), Monika Szewczyk (Berlin/Rotterdam) and Dieter Roelstraete (Berlin/Antwerp) form the core of the editorial team under chief editor Els Roelandt (based in Ghent), and are further supported by a larger board: Aneta Szylak (Gdansk), Anders Kreuger (Lund), Mai Abu Eldahab (Antwerp), Raimundas Malasauskas (Vilnius), Ann Demeester (Amsterdam), Dirk Snauwaert (Brussels), Annie Fletcher (Eindhoven), Philip Van den Bossche (Oostende) and Hilde Van Gelder (Leuven).
It may be said that any issue of A Prior involves intense collaboration and somehow practically engages with the idea. One thing that distinguishes A Prior from other publications is the team’s interest in defining content, not at an arm’s length distance from the artists featured (a ‘critical distance’ that has perhaps traditionally been thought of as a requirement of good journalism), but in close collaboration with these artists. Developing artists’ projects entails a degree of give-and-take, often requiring the editorial team to give up the pages to the artist, but also encouraging artists’ treatment of the magazine as a true work/exhibition space. Essays are also often understood as an extension of intense dialogue and further generate a sense of ‘critical proximity’. It should be noted that the Visions section of A Prior does not quite work in this way—instead it offers opportunities for other discursive approaches to enter the fray and offset the monographic essays. But it too is often sympathetic to writing that cuts against the grain of what we see available in other periodicals—many essays are the product of extensive research and/or daring speculation and tend to result in texts that are too unusual or simply too long to gain voice in the mainstream.
In collaboration with the 5th berlin biennial for contemporary art, A Prior Magazine has developed a two-fold project entitled On Paper.
‘Zuhandenheit’ [ready-to-hand]—a Heideggerian term used to explore the meaning and functionality of objects in relation toman/human beings—is activated throughout On Paper by making readable objects available to the visitors of the biennale; and by creating a tangible echo of the biennale works on paper. This ‘Zuhandenheit’ is not only grounded in the form of the project, but also in the content of the first part of On Paper: A Prior #17.
The 17th issue of A Prior brings together four participants in the 5th Berlin Biennial, who all hail from what were often deemed ‘problem’ zones within the European geopolitical sphere of Eastern Europe—Croatia, Estonia, Romania. The research-based artistic practices of Zagreb-based Croatian artist David Maljkovic, Kristina Norman from Estonia, and the Berlin-based Romanian artist Daniel Knorr, share a number of nteresting characteristics (needless to say that they are also, thankfully, wildly divergent), but foremost among them is perhaps a shared readiness to attend to the fragmented testimony of history’s material traces in their respective old or newly adopted home countries. As such, their work shares a distinct enthusiasm for things, be they minute scraps of paper or giant monuments left to rust in the wilderness of the post-political. These things are understood as active repositories of historicalmemory—an essentially optimistic, yet elegiac brand of dialectical materialism pervades these artists’ practice, one that thrives particularly well in a self-consciously nostalgic metropolis such as Berlin.
The authors and artists who have assembled in A Prior’s Visions section, though doubtlessly sympathetic—or even indebted—to this Benjaminian view of history, appear to be more sceptical; they more or less unanimously call for a more apprehensive and balanced reading of the world ofmatter and ‘stuff’, while also warning of the dangers of the particular brand of retro-materialismthat has long been called Ostalgie. This is certainly the case in the work of Alexander Vaindorf (not a participant of the Berlin Biennial), as well as in that of the Czech artist Katerina Šedá (a participant in bb5) who takes a surprisingly novel view of the social implications of state socialism’s dramatic demise, revealing how the despairing dream, shared by so many in the former ‘East’, of a return to discredited or otherwise abandoned forms of communal experience really speaks of a desire for another future—one in which the tremendous potential of human interaction can be thought and mined anew.
The second part of On Paper consists of six separate publications and limited editions, each conceived by artists participating in the 5th Berlin Biennial: Ahmet Ögüt, Kristina Norman, Manon de Boer, Susanne Kriemann, Cezary Bodzianowski and Paulina Olowska. Each of these editions forms a unique ‘object’ that, as paper, is tied to the dematerialized realmof conceptual art, but that also cannot be thought of outside its object status. As such theymay be the quintessential ‘things that cast no shadow’, thus sounding a tangible echo of certain works at the biennial.
Els Roelandt, Jo Roelandt, Dieter Roelstraete, Monika Szewczyk and Andrea Wiarda
A prior Magazine has offices in Ghent, Milan and Berlin :: www.aprior.org
A Prior Magazine is generously supported by the Flemish Community and The Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) of the University College Ghent
