On the occasion of the VIII Berlin Biennale, Kunstverein celebrates its five-year
collaboration with design studio Zirkumflex.
Kunstverein Publishing is an independent collective Publishing house shared by
Kunstvereins, Amsterdam, Milano and New York, founded in 2009 it has published over
twenty titles, artist’s books, monographs, artistic projects and magazines.
The Kunstverein publications will be on display in Berlin accompanied by “Fellow
Traveler” a project by Michelangelo Consani.
Startingpoint for “Fellow Traveler” is the “The Caspian Depression”, a publication
reflecting on Consani’s work (curated by Matteo Lucchetti and published by KV Milano in
2012) in which three important projects on ‘degrowth’ are elaborated. With theoretical
contributions by Serge Latouche and critic Paolo Emilio Antognoli Viti, this book
became a small manual on how artistic practice may contribute to (re-) designing a
sustainable future.
Michelangelo Consani presents a paper mache sculpture built up of images he
downloaded from the Internet, these pictures account the historical period from 1957 (the
launch of the Soviet Sputnik) to the present.
The artist chooses two representative images for each consecutive year, ‘appropriating
emblematic events’ that have marked history and pastes all 114 images together, giving
them a new shape on each occasion. The result is an itinerant sculpture that changes
shape in every place in which it is housed. At the Convert Glassbox in Paris it took
the form of a Red Army star, in Berlin the sculpture will undergo a metamorphosis:
questioning the transmission of memory and strategies for the fabrication of new forms
of knowledge through contemporary art.