The Book To Come
‘The Book to Come’ Session IV (Vilnius). ‘Martin Ebner and Nicolas Siepen’.
Saturday 11 June 2016
‘Session IV’ (Vilnius)
3pm / Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius / Session IV (Vilnius) / CAC Reading Room.
In Berlin, between 1995 and 1998 Martin Ebner and Nicolas Siepen co-organized a collective art space and the experimental music project Zigaretten Rauchen. At the time they also independently started to develop their interest in making publications and publishing as an artistic practice. Martin Ebner, together with Ariane Müller, Nikola Dietrich and Henrik Olesen is part of the editorial team of STARSHIP, an artists run art magazine based in Berlin which was founded in 1998. Starship Magazine currently is published twice a year and brings together texts and image contributions by writers and visual artists focusing on contemporary art, literature and poetry. Nicolas Siepen became co-founder of the publishing house b_books, that publishes books on art, performance, urbanism, queer theory, film studies, activism, art history and politics.
For the reading group session they proposed to discuss How to Disappear by Haytham El-Wardany, which relates to a post-revolutionary Cairo. It designs a set of aural exercises that shows the readers how to disappear, reappear, join a group, leave a group, and other necessary skills. Its Annex is a lexicon of some of the sounds that dwell in or are banished from the Egyptian middle class household.
Martin Ebner is a Berlin based artist, filmmaker, publisher, and a founding editor of STARSHIP. He is currently developing an exhibition together with Berlin based artist Kitty Kraus that will open at the CAC Vilnius in September, 2016.
Nicolas Siepen is a Berlin based artist, filmmaker, writer and publisher, co-editor of the magazines A.N.Y.P. and Assembly International, a co-founder of the Performing Arts Forum (PAF) St-Erme, France. Since January 2009 he is Professor of visual arts and film at the Academy of Contemporary Arts in Tromsø, Norway.
Haytham El-Wardany is a Berlin-based Egyptian writer. He has published short stories and literary works and has participated in a number of art projects in Berlin and in Cairo. In 2016 he presented at the 46th Berlinale Filmfestival the book The Hanging Garden of Sleep, a literary undertaking that cautiously seeks to approach sleep through inflecting three broad questions: the question of identity, the question of politics, and the question of language. For further reading of Haytham El Wardany—Natural Law in STARSHIP no.12.
The presentation of the project The Book to Come at CAC Vilnius is supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.