With a foreword by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, a text by Defne Ayas, a conversation between Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Füsun Onur, and a chronology by Burcu Pelvanoğlu. Spanning five decades, the oeuvre of Füsun Onur has retained a fiercely independent spirit. Born in Istanbul in 1938, Onur studied sculpture in the atelier of Ali Hadi Bara at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Art from 1956 to 1960. Upon receiving a Fulbright scholarship in 1960, she studied at American University in Washington, D.C., and then at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Since returning to Turkey in 1967, she has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Turkey and abroad. This book guides its reader through Onur’s artistic development by way of her own documentation, as it includes two hundred facsimile-reproduced pages from her photo albums and scrapbooks from 1970 to 2011. Photographed while sited in often remarkable settings, such as on the banks of the Bosporus and in seemingly domestic surroundings, Onur’s elegant yet playful works are revealed from a unique point of view and with surprising intimacy. This subjective account is accompanied by an extensive chronology, by art historian Burcu Pelvanoğlu, which for the first time compiles a comprehensive history of Onur’s career.

With prefaces by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Madeleine Grynsztejn, essays by Michael Darling, Matthew Jesse Jackson, and John Preus, and a conversation between Theaster Gates and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Ballads and Visual Thoughts by Theaster Gates. In his 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, artist and cultural planner Theaster Gates chronicles his ambitious project to unite two disused buildings—one in Chicago and the other in Kassel, Germany—by dismantling parts of each to reuse in the rebuilding of the other. The forgotten and thus dilapidated Huguenot House, built during the early nineteenth century in Kassel, attracted the attention of Gates, who associated the histories of the migrant workers who built it so many years ago with those of black and Hispanic builders in his own neighborhood in Chicago today. Meanwhile, across the ocean, Gates eyed a large, decaying building in Chicago, whose architectural details have remained intact. Gates envisioned an exchange and ultimately proposed to bring materials from the Chicago building to reconstruct the Huguenot House. The process will also be reversed: materials from the Huguenot House will later be reused to reconstruct the building in Chicago. In the pages of this book, Gates documents his plans for the exchange through images and text, organized into twelve thematic “ballads.”

A Report on the City is a new collection of interrelated essays and short stories by the artist and writer John Menick. The city in question, Mexico City, provides a setting for the book’s assorted protagonists: a tongueless hypochondriac, mad travelers, a dissolute garbage baron, a snuff-film dealer, and an incognito film director. Part journalism, part invention, part folly, A Report on the City is an investigation into the bewilderments of contemporary Mexico.

With conversations between Nalini Malani and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Arjun Appadurai, and an essay by Andreas Huyssen. This publication delves into the multifaceted background of a visionary artist whose work holds a mirror to six decades of tumultuous history, while significantly changing the course of modernist practice in India. This artist’s book reveals Malani’s influential thought and engaged ways of working through the making of her latest video/shadow play produced by dOCUMENTA (13). In conversation with Malani, Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev discusses the possibility of purging and healing within art while exploring her artistic, political, and feminist history. With socio-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, Malani contextualizes their collaboration for the dOCUMENTA (13) publication series 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts on the misuse of Gandhi's ideas as a perversion of ideology in order to perpetuate atrocities. In his essay, Andreas Huyssen focuses on the artist’s multimedia work in relation to the structure of political memory, combining this with the vicissitudes of cultural transfer and the circulation of visual and literary images in an increasingly global art scene. An extensive biography illustrates how Malani’s art has been influenced from the very start by a cinematic approach, from her experimental films of the sixties to her current paintings, theater, and video/shadow plays. The book includes Nalini Malani: Cassandra’s Gift, an experimental documentary on DVD by the young award-winning filmmaker Payal Kapadia.

Conversation with Shahab Fotouhi, Reza Haeri, Molly Nesbit, Oya Pancaroglu, graphic design by Farhad Fozouni and image-shift.
Artists’ book produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory and institute for incongruous translation.
Seeing studies investigates the ways we learn ‘to see.’ Departing from a schoolbook—published by the Iranian Ministry of Education to teach art in the first year of Iranian public middle school—this bilingual publication (English/Farsi) embarks on a collaborative journey, visiting different ‘schools of seeing.’ The institute for incongruous translation has invited contributors and interlocutors to make proposals to the problems posed by dissonant visual languages. These proposals take shape as words, pictures, numbers, objects, practices, and concepts—in sum, ‘things’ coexisting in multiple configurations. Tenuous relations are drawn up between things as they take up positions in relation to a problem. Throughout this voyage, seeing is understood as a radical and expanded process of translation. How to look, read, and depict come together to form systems of ‘common sense’ that constantly extend, transform, and re-assign ‘meaning.’

dOCUMENTA (13)’s first artist book records the first stage of a project by Guillermo Faivovich (*1977 in Buenos Aires) and Nicolás Goldberg (*1978 in Paris). Since 2006, the artists have been researching Campo del Cielo, field of impact of a meteorite shower that occurred in northern Argentina four thousand years ago. El Taco, one of those meteorites, was divided in half in an intricate procedure at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany—halves which have since been located in Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution and Buenos Aires’s planetarium. The two parts of El Taco will be reunited for the first time at an exhibition at Portikus, a step in their journey toward dOCUMENTA (13), where a future stage of the project A Guide to Campo del Cielo will take place in 2012. This publication documents the meteorite’s long story, which involves the artists approach to bibliographical inquiry, archival research, and oral history through interacting with people who have been engaged in the region’s history and worldwide fieldwork.