Published to accompany an exhibition at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, this volume, which gathers scientific contributions from leading researchers, art historians, along with in situ installation views, pays tribute to the greatest set designer of the modern era. Viewing theater as a total artwork in which choreography, music, costumes and sets were of equal importance, Léon Bakst worked closely with artists such as Serge Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, Jean Cocteau, Isadora Duncan, Ida Rubinstein and Igor Stravinsky, transforming the perception of the ballet. Designing Dreams: A Celebration of Léon Bakst highlights Bakst’s finest achievements in stage design, while also revealing his decisive influence in the field of textile design. Conceived especially by Nick Mauss, in parallel to the exhibition design, Designing Dreams presents in detail Bakst's drawings, costume and textile designs, previously unpublished writings on ornament and fashion, new scholarship on Bakst’s sources and the impact of his vision, as well as exhibition views of the scenography realized in situ by Mauss.

Available in five different colors, cloth covers stenciled by Nick Mauss.

Calendoola: UTU is the pilot episode of Calendoola, an ongoing series of works that avails itself of the structure and production processes of a TV series. Invernomuto’s first foray into fiction, the twenty-minute-long UTU was developed and filmed entirely at Gluck50, Milan. Within it, acting (the work is shot in Italian, English, and Spanish) and performance are parasitized and coexist seamlessly.

The narrative framework and screenplay stem from a loose adaptation of the Ngati Dread trilogy of books, in which the journalist Angus Gillies closely—if somewhat biasedly—reports on the events that took place in Ruatoria, New Zealand, between 1985 and 1990. This true story of conflict between the inhabitants of the village and a group of Maori Rastafarians encapsulates archetypal clash dynamics between natives and settlers, the displaced and the presumed landowners. In UTU, the exaggeration of the mise-en-scène (thanks in part to the massive use of postproduction effects) adds layers of complexity to the interpretation of real events. The result is a hybrid of the two, or an intermittent sequence in which one seamlessly gives way to the other. Calendoola also breaks free of the frame to generate props, costumes, sculptures, and installations.

The Calendoola series aims to depict particular events, and at the same time be a context-specific organism permeable to the influences (historical, aesthetic, political, linguistic) peculiar to different situations. Upcoming episodes will be produced in different informal and institutional circumstances, with the overarching plot and characters proceeding, but contextual specificities leaking in.

The Belgian artist Walter Leblanc (1932-1986) was an outstanding figure in post-World War II European art, whose importance is drawing international attention. This exhibition at Cortesi Gallery (London, 1 June – 21 July 2017), curated by Francesca Pola and realized in collaboration with the Walter and Nicole Leblanc Foundation of Brussels, brings together pivotal examples of his work from the 1950s to the 1970s, presenting the significant periods of his creative activity.

This fully illustrated catalogue includes an essay by Francesca Pola, images of all of the works exhibited, installation views of the exhibition, and a bio-bibliographical appendix. Based on extensive archival and iconographic research, it offers a more complete understanding and further international studies of Leblanc’s work.

“The paintings of Julie Mehretu captured the spirit of our fragile, new century. Monumentally scaled and visually explosive, they resonated with a perception of the world irrevocably impacted by an accelerated consciousness of the simultaneity of events in time and place and the intersecting flows of economies, geopolitics, and people that were their engine.” –Suzanne Cotter

Published on the occasion of Julie Mehteru’s exhibition A Universal History of Everything and Nothing at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto and at Centro Botín in Santander, this book reflects the formal, pictorial, critical and poetic overlays that are fundamental to the artist’s work. It includes newly commissioned essays by renowned authors Amin Maalouf and Marina Warner and a curatorial overview by Suzanne Cotter, Director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. New photography documenting Mehretu’s process in the studio, together with details and large scale reproductions of paintings and drawings are accompanied by images selected by the artist as part of a richly layered and urgent visual universe.

This manual accompanies the installation The Aalto Natives realised for the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia by Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen. It reveals the full story of Geb and Atum, two terraforming mythical creatures who are floating through space in a vessel shaped not unlike the structure of the Aalto Pavilion.

Exercising the all-encompassing knowledge that egg-borne mystical beings are typically blessed with, Geb and Atum mediate between the banal reality of objects and creatures, and the infinitely more advanced structures that lie beyond it. Along their mission of rebuilding Finland Geb, the wise father, and his rational-empirical son Atum, struggle to deal with the persistent faults, glitches, and transcendental mistakes they encounter in the formative stages of New Finland’s national development.

In the experience of Geb and Atum, culture presents itself as an eternal feedback loop of trial and error, a scatological dialectic of production and consumption, of shiny façades and vulgar essences, of bad mantras and glitchy technology, of sophisticated neanderthals and cosmic ducks. In all its grotesque display of failing social contracts and polarizing populism, it is surprisingly similar to the world we are living in today.

In short, this manual will guide you towards a more transcendental understanding of the human spirit. Please use it.

The Aalto Natives - A Transcendental Manual is designed by Studio Remco van Bladel, Amsterdam and published by Mousse and Frame Contemporary Art Finland.