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ART

The Currency – Elom 20ce, Musiquiqui Chihying, Gregor Kasper. LP Times Art Centre
Berlin
Sternberg Press 2020 ISBN 9783956795787 Acqn 30882
LP 31x31cm £21.50

The Currency by Elom 20ce & Musquiqui Chihying & Gregor Kasper is a vinyl record whose
golden color is reminiscent of a wafer, one of the thin silicon discs used in the production of
microchips. The rap song of the same name on the A-side is a collaboration between artists
Musquiqui Chihying (Taipei, Taiwan/Berlin) and Gregor Kasper (Berlin) together with rapper Elom
20ce (Lome, Togo), who positions himself as a griot, a traditional West African storyteller, oral
historian, and singer.

The lyrics in French, Mandarin, and German offer a poetic take on various aspects of
contemporary cultures and economies that are blocked out and go almost unnoticed: the
entanglement of digital payment services in China (WeChat and AliPay) with the everyday lives of
their users, whose every movement and action becomes visible to the state and the market and
can thus be monitored; the new currency ECO, which is set to replace the current CFA franc in
eight West African countries at the end of 2020, representing a first step toward monetary
independence for these countries; the widespread belief in a clean, free, and fair digital cloud that
relies on a systematic disregard for its material foundations, such as the industry geared to the
production of wafers and other electronic hardware and the working conditions that prevail in it.

The B-side contains the sound piece "The Hubs," a conversation with the architect,
anthropologist, and FabLab founder Sename Koffi Agbodjinou (Lome/Paris), accompanied by
music composed by Elom 20ce. In the WoeLab "open hardware" workshop in Lome in Togo,
Agbodjinou introduced an alternative digital barter currency that relies on social activities and
local service as a medium of exchange.

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ART

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary - The Commissions Book


Sternberg Press 2020 ISBN 9783956795558 Acqn 30810
Pb 15x21cm 1336pp col ills £25

"What survives after the artwork?" asks curator and researcher Natasha Ginwala in one of the
essays in Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary: The Commissions Book, a new and
comprehensive publication by the art foundation Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary
(TBA21), founded by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza in Vienna, Austria, in 2002. "The artwork is
not just the thing in itself, but also the metaphysical infrastructure and unfinished relationships
that produce it," Ginwala writes. In that sense, this anthology of texts, visual material, and
research on TBA21's commissions and the foundation's vast collection of over 700 artworks
serves as vivid testimony to the processes and relationships that enabled them.

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ART

Isabelle Graw - In Another World Notes, 2014-2017


Sternberg Press 2020 ISBN 9783956795367 Acqn 30809
Pb 11x17cm 180pp col ills £21.50

In this book, Isabelle Graw lays hold of all the experiences and thoughts that don't flow in her art-
historical texts, merging memoir and social criticism in an original fashion. In elegantly written
miniatures, Graw captures radical political, social, and cultural changes that occurred between
2014 and 2017, analyzing how these macro-shifts reach into her own life. She addresses topics
ranging from the general turn to the political right, as seen in Brexit and Trump, to #MeToo, men
with beards, and Balenciaga. While registering the symptoms of a world that clearly feels
different, Graw also meditates on irretrievable personal losses. She describes how we find
ourselves literally in another world after the death of our parents. With the theme of mourning as
a leitmotif, In Another World is an attempt at exposing and analyzing painful emotions. Never
before has Graw spoken to the reader as directly and openly as she does in these 159 notes.

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