rosascape
Rosascape is
an artist's books publisher, established 2009, based in Paris,
France:
Jewels from
the Personal Collection of Princess Salimah Aga Khan, Camille
HENROT, 2011-2012
Blaue Stunde
Raum, Katinka BOCK, 2012
Le La Mort, Fabien GIRAUD, 2011
Mad Marginal / Archives, Dora GARCIA, 2011
Aesthetics of Differends, Benoît MAIRE, 2011
Latent Images / Diary of a photographer, Joana HADJITHOMAS And
Khalil JOREIGE, 2010
Camille
HENROT
Jewels
from the Personal Collection of Princess Salimah Aga Khan

Camille
HENROT: Jewels from the Personal Collection of Princess Salimah
Aga Khan
Production
and publishing: Rosascape, Paris, France, 2011-2012
Size: 28 x 44 x 15 cm
Pressed plants and flowers, 200 plates, 27,5 x 43 cm (each).
5 copies signed and numbered + 2 artist's proofs.

Camille
HENROT: Jewels from the Personal Collection of Princess Salimah
Aga Khan
Like herbarium
sheets, the 135 plates featured in Camille Henrot's piece Jewels
from the Personal Collection of Princess Salimah Aga Khan present
various botanical specimens - plants and flowers - gathered by
the artist from the private flower-beds decorating building entrances
on the Upper East Side, New York City's wealthiest neighbourhood.
Roland Barthes argues(1) that flowers symbolise all things useless
and luxurious, yet the purpose of those planted in these ornamental
urban sites is to construct a border and figure - in the etymological
sense of the word - the image of "paradise on earth".
A "paradise for the living", echoing the paradayadâm,
an Old Persian term meaning "beyond the wall" and which,
when associated with the word djivadi, refers to that
which is "lively, living, belonging to the time of life(2)".
The flowers collected in this Upper East Side paradise for the
living, located on Manhattan Island, are brought together and
displayed here on the facsimiles of a Christie's auction catalogue.
The catalogue details the entire jewelry collection belonging
to Princess Salimah Aga Khan, auctioned by Christie's at the
Hotel Richemond in Geneva on November 13th 1995 jewels received
during her twenty-six-year marriage to the Aga Khan. The sale
took place following her divorce, while the Aga Kahn resorted
to the courts, that same year, in an unsuccessful bid to prevent
the sale.
According to Michel Leiris(3), everything that constitutes luxury,
surplus, accumulation and expenditure is connected to ecstasy
and, by extension, to excess. The flowers in Jewels might
be viewed as a metaphorical representation of this and, correspondingly,
the precise description of each jewel as an inventory of the
markers of domestic wealth.
The excess or overflow present in Jewels is also tied
to the symmetry and duplication between Princess Salimah Aga
Khan's gesture and that of the artist Camille Henrot: the former
is relieving herself of the heritage of several generations of
women from one of the most prosperous families in the world -
the Aga Khan dynasty - while the latter collects flowers gathered
by passing "beyond the wall". Both are overstepping
boundaries here (the boundary demarcating the paradise of the
living) and transgressing the codes imposed by the dictates of
a form of wealth focused on the markers of its own representation:
transcendence via use and via the détournement of
the codes of an archaic femininity, closed in on itself.
The notion of tonga (or taonga) discussed by Marcel
Mauss in his essay on The Gift_, published (in the original
French) in 1923-1924, might help elucidate this comparison. Indeed,
Marcel Mauss observes that in Maori, Tahitian, Tongan and Mangarevan,
the notion of tonga connotes "everything that may properly
be termed possessions, everything that makes one rich, powerful,
and influential and everything that can be exchanged, and used
as an object for compensating others: [...] exclusively the precious
articles, talismans, emblems, mats and sacred idols, sometimes
even the traditions, cults and magic rituals". In this way,
the jewelry and archetypal symbols of femininity featured in
Jewels could be considered "tonga-native"
objects, as 'uterine' gifts - possessions more connected to the
soil, the clan, the family and the individual.
(1) See Roland
Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble. Cours et séminaires
au collège de France, 1976-1977, edited by Éric
Marty and Claude Coste, Paris, Seuil, "Traces écrites"
series, 2002. Sound recording available on Ubuweb: <http://www.ubu.com/sound/barthes.html>.
(How to Live Together, Lectures at the Collège de France,
1976-1977).
(2) Clarisse Herrenschmidt
(3) Michel Leiris, Leiris Michel, L'Homme sans honneur, notes
pour le sacré dans la vie quotidienne, Paris, Jean-Michel
Place, 1994, p. 93.
_ Available in the original French on the website "Classiques
des sciences sociales": <http://classique.uqac.ca/classiques/mauss_marcel/socio_et_anthropo/2_essai_sur_le_don/essai_sur_le_don.
html>. English translation: Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The
Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, Routledge,
1990, p.13.

Camille
HENROT: Jewels from the Personal Collection of Princess Salimah
Aga Khan

Camille
HENROT: Jewels from the Personal Collection of Princess Salimah
Aga Khan
Camille
HENROT: Jewels from the Personal Collection of Princess Salimah
Aga Khan
Katinka BOCK
Blaue Stunde
Raum

Katinka
BOCK: Blaue Stunde Raum
Production
and publishing: Rosascape.
Size: 47 x 47 cm.
8 copies signed and numbered + 3 artist's proofs.
For each edition:
6 monotypes on Photo Rag Bright White paper 310 g, 190 x 46 cm.
2 monotypes on Photo Rag Bright White paper 310 g, 100 x 20 cm.
+ 1 original print signed and numbered, 190 x 46 cm or 100 x
20 cm.

Katinka
BOCK: Blaue Stunde Raum
Blaue Stunde
Raum is
an edition which is apprehended as a paper sculpture: a sculpture
which invites the public to handle it and unfold, in space, the
urban landscapes the object contains. This edition of eight monotypes
stems from an installation that Katinka Bock put together for
her exhibition at Rosascape which ran from December 2011 to February
2012, in which she covered the eight windows of one of the exhibition
rooms with blue paint. The artist then applied various fragments
of vegetation, pieces of cardboard, debris and refuse found in
the street to the layer of paint: fragments as the traces and
the memory of urban space, as the prints of a landscape and a
temporality. The surface of the window panes and the paint(ing)
punctuated by these scattered elements gleaned across the city
came to form a support and a tool for making the monotypes (one
of the simpler engraving techniques in terms of realisation).
Katinka Bock applied several sheets of paper to each window pane
until she obtained the desired result, and then finally selected
one monotype per window. The book presented here brings together
all of the works selected by the artist. The relationship between
interior space - that of Rosascape - and the exterior space of
the street, together with the artist's use of humble materials
and the poetic dimension that derives directly from the very
process of the work, all combine to make this edition a work
which is both singular and perfectly exemplary of Katinka Bock's
project as a whole.

Katinka
BOCK: Blaue Stunde Raum
Katinka BOCK: Blaue Stunde Raum
Fabien GIRAUD
Le La Mort

Fabien
Giraud: Le La Mort
Published and
Produced by Rosascape, Paris, 2011
Co-produced with Forde.
15 unique pieces.
Size: 32 x 37 cm
Le La Mort
HD digital printing on Mondi 160g paper.
Each book presents fifty-nine photographs reproducing at scale
1:1 the sculptures from the first part of the exhibition Du
Mort qui Saisit le Vif (La Maison du Dehors) at Forde in
2011.
Split by:
Metaxu - a conversation about La Maison du Dehors.
Fabien Giraud and Vincent Normand, 2011.
Metaxu is the script of an eponymous film (Metaxu,
Fabien Giraud and Vincent Normand, 2011, HD
video, 107 min). The script is interrupted by fragments of the
film set (Metaxu (Fond de la parole), 2011,
digital printing 240 x 1 300 cm).
Metaxu was set in Linotype Times and printed on Freelife
Vellum 170g paper at the Moulin du Got,
Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.

Fabien
Giraud: Le La Mort
What strikes
one at first glance is the object's sobriety - for the only element
to mark the white surface of the cover is the black lettering
of the title Le La Mort. Looking through the pages of
the book, the reader will discover the blackand-white photographs
that reproduce at scale 1:1 a series of carbonised wood sculptures
made by Fabien Giraud for his 2011 exhibition at Forde, Geneva.
The photographs are enigmatic - sometimes only showing great
black surfaces with no significant detail, sometimes revealing
certain aspects of the sculpture and its texture. The book is
divided, in the middle, by another book. The latter emerges in
the midst of Le La Mort as if to rip out its very substance.
The pages of Metaxu present a text divided into 48 chapters.
The text is a technical saga and the narrative kicks off on a
plain in
the Indus Valley a few centuries before our time, ending in 2010
in the diffuse site of our contemporary culture, in the to-ing
and fro-ing between the image culture and cutting-edge technology.
In this work, as if to echo this technological saga, Fabien Giraud
confronts two radically different printing techniques: digital,
industrial printing for Le La Mort, and
hand-crafted, linotype printing for Metaxu. He offers
a forceful reflection - at once poetic, theoretical, literary
and visual - on the relationship between art (and the artist)
and its relationship to the different technologies that have
developed throughout history.

Fabien
Giraud: Le La Mort

Fabien
Giraud: Le La Mort
Dora GARCIA
Mad Marginal
- Archives

Dora
García: Mad Marginal - Archives
Production
and publishing: Rosascape, Paris, 2011
Size: 33 x 28 x 7 cm.
This edition is limited to 10 French-language, 10 Spanish-language,
10 Italian-language and 10 English-language copies.
Each edition is numbered from 1 to 10 and signed by Dora García.
The artist's
book MAD MARGINAL developed in parallel with the eponymous project
Dora García has been working on since 2009. In the form
of an archival box file, this artist's book compiles 27 documents
(texts, photos, a DVD, a CD, emails, interviews and conversations,
leaflets, etc.) which have fueled Dora García's research
these past two years. These documents are identical facsimile
reproductions of the originals. Dealing with marginality as an
artistic and political position, Dora García attends to
the different meanings involved in such a position, considering
both the contradictory character and the beauty of the artist
as marginal figure. Her research first developed out of her reading
of texts by the Italian psychiatrist and essayist Franco Basaglia
(in the 1960s, among other things, the latter established and
ran the 'therapeutic communities' in Trieste and Gorizia that
campained for the rights of 'psychiatrised' people. In Italy
his struggle lead to Law 180 (1978) which aimed at abolishing
the psychiatric hospital). The Mad Marginal project is essentially
inscribed within the Trieste context, where the «Basaglian
revolution» gained momentum between 1971 and 1978. Dora
García's research for Mad Marginal also includes texts
by thinkers such as Fernand Deligny, Michel Foucault, David Cooper,
R.D. Laing, as well as writers and artists such as Jack Smith,
Antonin Artaud, Lenny Bruce,
James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Robert Walser, etc.
In resonance with this project, the artist's book reproduces
a large number of the archives Dora García has been putting
together since 2009. From the very outset Mad Marginal - the
artist's book and the material it contains, that is - were conceived
of as a whole that would bring together, document and fuel the
research process and the artistic project. The rendering of the
various topographies attached to the various documents (texts
exerpted from websites, a tract, educational leaflets, emails,
etc.), to their original context (documents both from the 1970s-80s
and the present) and printing format and method (digital photographs,
DVD, CD, photocopies, books, digital prints, etc.) affords a
deep immersion into the complex network of documents grounding
Dora García's work.
The book was
part of the show as Dora García presented at the Spanish
Pavillion in the 2011 Venice Biennale (June 4th - November 27th
2011).
Dora
García: Mad Marginal - Archives
Dora García: Mad Marginal - Archives
Benoît
MAIRE
Aesthetics
of Differends
Benoît MAIRE: Aesthetics of Differends
Production
and publishing: Rosascape
Size: L 230 mm x H 330 mm.
Produced in a limited edition of twenty-five English-language
signed and numbered copies
The book also comprises a black and white photograph of a sculpture
entitled Object for Measuring (2010), signed and numbered, printed
on a Baryte paper (20 x 30 cm).
The eight sixteen-page sections to date (January 2011) are printed
on Cyclus paper 110grs.
Benoît MAIRE: Aesthetics of Differends
Aesthetics
of Differends (2008 -) is an artist's book documenting Benoît
Maire's ongoing research on the 'differend' - a concept borrowed
from philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. Produced in a
limited edition of twenty-five French-language and twenty-five
English-language signed and numbered copies printed on Cyclus
paper, each of which comes with a specially created fabric-covered
box, Benoît Maire's book is a work in progress comprising
eight sixteen-page sections to date (January 2011). It constitutes
an art object in its own right, while doubling up as both a philosophical
and an artistic investigation into the key questions of postmodernity
and the significance of the postconceptual artwork.
The dialectic between art and philosophy has always been the
cornerstone of Benoît Maire's artistic practice, but in
Aesthetics of Differends it is explicitly formulated for
the first time: images of the corpus of artworks he has realized
on the subject of the differend are confronted or fleshed out
by largely unpublished philosophical reflections that expand
on Lyotard's ideas. Whereas the latter applied the term 'differend'
to conflicts in which the opposing parties use incommensurable
modes of discourse, Benoît Maire emphasizes the importance
of the concept for grasping the discrepant forms of expression
making up the postmodern artistic landscape. Likewise, Benoît
Maire's texts are classified according to different categories
- each corresponding to a specific writing style - and in some
cases feature numbered paragraphs, thereby echoing the theme and lay-out of
Lyotard's landmark 1983 book.
Each of these categories is printed in a different typeface,
so as to assist the reader in navigating Benoît Maire's
dense and consistently thought-provoking work. The first category
consists of 'Sections' comprising both texts and images.
These address the incommensurability of seeing and saying - which
constitutes the primary differend underlying Maire's system of
aesthetics. Section 1 features works exhibited at the Vitrine
de Cergy. Here, images and texts coexist alongside one another,
while Section 9, which corresponds to one of the pieces shown
in Benoît Maire's exhibition at De Vleeshal, opens with
an image of a crowd in the place of the word. The process of
substituting images for words and vice versa becomes more abstract
in the following sentences: for instance, the phrase 'in such
a way that his' is followed by a rectangle with a chipped-off
corner. For Benoît Maire, words are no more informative
than images and the value of what is said and seen resides in
the different affects these modes of expression engender.
A more formal presentation of the concept of the differend is
to be found under the category heading 'Didactic', while the
texts assembled under the heading 'Talks' include an introductory
presentation given in Amsterdam on the same concept. Repetition,
a notion that has been explored by philosophers ranging from
Nietzsche to Deleuze, enables Benoît Maire to validate
his ideas, while intensifying and enhancing their impact. Another
feature of his work is order reversal. For instance, he describes
Aesthetics of Differends as a body of work in which the
answers come before the questions - a notion borrowed from Lacan. Likewise, the transcript
of a question and answer session following one of his lectures
precedes the transcript of the lecture itself. In this lecture,
given in Amsterdam in 2010, Benoît Maire defines the artwork
in terms of two conflicting approaches, the analytic and the
synthetic. The first can be defined as the in-depth exploration
of a question or object, carrying with it the attendant dangers
of redundancy and unintelligibility, whereas the second approach,
which consists of establishing connections between different
ideas or objects on the basis of common themes, runs the risk
of banality and generalization. Benoît Maire's thesis is
that these two tendencies constitute the dialectic at the heart
of the contemporary postconceptual artwork and that a successful
piece strikes a balance between them.
The questions
of order reversal and succession are further explored under the
category heading 'Figures', which consists solely of images.
The photographs of the bronze sculpture The Nose (2010)
making up Figure 1 do not portray the work in its finished state,
but during its construction, thereby referencing Benoît
Maire's system of aesthetics, a work in progress. Confirming
this impression of unreadiness, the photographs are blurred,
while their subject, the nose in the process of being built,
never occupies centre stage, but is photographed amid the clutter
of the foundry, awaiting the moment when it will take up its function as an artwork.
The phrase 'Giacometti's nose verifying the true hole in the
Real', which is classified under 'Axioms', provides a further
indication as to the sculpture's meaning. Its extraordinarily
long nose points beyond the space surrounding the head to something
that the subject can neither see nor hear - the true hole in
the Real, a reference to Lacan's Symbolic Order.
The 'Burdens', which constitute yet another category, represent
answers to which the questions have yet to be found, while the
category heading 'Methodology' features images and texts pertaining
to the video Organisation of the Narrative and Structural
Models Conjugated in the Sections. Based on affect rather
than logic, the video explores the space between seeing and saying
with reference to the structure of the 'Sections'. Finally, the
text featured under the heading 'Ingress' looks at the artist
Dash Snow, whose work exemplifies issues that Benoît Maire
addresses in his book, namely the psychoanalytic concept of the lack and Derrida's notion
of the cut.
The book also comprises a black and white photograph of a sculpture
entitled Object for Measuring (2010), which will be examined
in forthcoming supplements. These supplements will also include
essays on the work of Tino Sehgal and Adrian Piper and will be
sent to individuals and institutions who purchase the book until
such time as the project is brought to a close.
When completed, Aesthetics of Differends will constitute
not only a contemporary aesthetics as seen through the eyes of
an artist, but also a work of art that materializes aesthetic
concepts. Associating lucid analyses with pertinent references,
it is likewise a perfectly balanced example of a postconceptual
artwork.

Benoît
MAIRE: Aesthetics of Differends
Benoît
MAIRE: Object for Measuring
Joana HADJITHOMAS
and Khalil JOREIGE
Latent Images
/ Diary of a photographer
Third section of the Wonder Beirut project
Joana
HADJITHOMAS and Khalil JOREIGE: Latent Images / Diary of a photographer
Third section of the Wonder Beirut project
Production
and publishing: Rosascape, Paris, 2009
Size: L180 x H240 mm, 1312 pages.
Latent Images / Diary of a photographer comes in two editions:
- The French language edition, seventy five numbered and
signed copies;
- The English language edition, seventy five numbered and signed
copies.
The two editions were printed in offset on 90gr Vega paper and
300gr Arcoprint paper for the cover.
The photographs of the two letters are silver based and have
been printed on a 250gsr Fuji Frontier paper.The photographs
of the reels which introduce each board are silver based and
have been printed on a 220gsr satiny Fujifilm paper.
Joana
HADJITHOMAS and Khalil JOREIGE: Latent Images / Diary of a photographer
Third section of the Wonder Beirut project
The «Latent
Images / Diary of a photographer» book brings together
38 contact print photographs selected from the hundreds of films
used and never developed, taken by photographer Abdallah Farah
between 1997 and 2006. This book of 1312 pages, published in
a limited edition - two editions of 75 numbered and signed copies,
one in French and the other in English - offers an immersion
to the very heart of these latent images. The description of
the images replaces the photographs themselves; short fragments
of text describe the invisible images while creating a new imagined
space.
The original photographs of two letters, also numbered and signed,
open the book; one is written by Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas,
the other by Abdallah Farah. This exchange of correspondence
between the artists and photographer sets the scene for the ties
and project that form a link between them.Each film is presented
to be seen and read in the form of a chapter: an original photograph
of these films appears at the head of the chapter in the same
way as photographs in a family album. The reader can thus move
around freely in this assembly of photographic fragments, invent
his own situations through the history of Abdallah Farah, read
the story in chronological order or haphazardly.
The book as a support to creation and circulation thus offers
a new space for discovering these latent images. Some pages,
closed, do not allow the vision of the images they contain; the
reader is given the freedom to keep them closed or to open them
and this influence their reading.Abdallah Farah is a character
imagined by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. «Latent
Images / Diary of a photographer» is thus a project signed
by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.
Joana
HADJITHOMAS and Khalil JOREIGE: Latent Images / Diary of a photographer
Third section of the Wonder Beirut project
We are interested
in purchasing artist books, multiples, prints and unique works of art
by these artist.
Please contact us.
Nous sommes
intéressés par l'achat de livres d'artiste, estampes,
multiples et oeuvres uniques de ces artistes.
Merci de nous contacter.
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