DABF23 Opening Talk: Polyphonic
07 December 2023, 6pm
Part talk, part tour, join Dublin Art Book Fair’s Guest Curator Wendy Erskine in exploring this year’s theme, Polyphonic.
Design as an Attitude: Nominated books by Hans Ulrich Obrist, invited by Alice Rawsthorn
06 December 2020
Guest Curator Alice Rawsthorn invites twelve of her friends from the fields of contemporary art, design and other areas of contemporary culture to nominate books for Dublin Art Book Fair 2020.
The list includes twenty titles nominated by Alice and a further seventy-seven books suggested to us by her invitees. Collectively these books add another incredible, fascinating and diverse dimension to the books that DABF 2020, Design as an Attitude gathers together. The nominated books are available to purchase on our Shop and come with short notes of recommendation, written by their nominees.
Alice Rawsthorn (writer and design critic), Paola Antonelli (Senior Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA), Alvaro Barrington (artist), Hilary Cottam (social designer), Michael Craig-Martin (artist), Es Devlin (artist and stage designer), Conor Donlon (owner Donlon Books, London), Marie Donnelly (philanthropist), Andrew Durbin (writer and editor of frieze), Helen Marten (artist), Hans Ulrich Obrist (Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London), Zoé Whitley (Director, Chisenhale Gallery, London).
Selection by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London
Édouard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole World (The Glissant Translation Project, Liverpool University Press)
Édouard Glissant, Poetic Intention (Nightboat Books)
Édouard Glissant, The Collected Poems of Édouard Glissant (The Glissant Translation Project, Liverpool University Press)
Édouard Glissant, Sun of Consciousness (Nightboat Books)
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (University of Michigan Press)
Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse (University of Virginia Press)
Édouard Glissant, Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity (The Glissant Translation Project, Liverpool University Press)
Hans Ulrich Obrist (ed.) and Asad Raza, Mondilaité: Or the Archipelagos of Édouard Glissant (Éditions Skira Paris)
“Édouard Glissants books are my daily toolbox, when I wake up I read 15 minutes of Glissant every single day, its one of my rituals. When Alice Rawsthorn invited me to be part of the Dublin book celebrations I decided to select all books of Edouard Glissant we can find in English. Sadly many books have not yet been translated and I hope we can through Cliodhna's festival convince more publishers to translate Glissant. Why is Glissant so urgent?
His activities as a poet, philosopher, public intellectual, and curator not only encompassed literary and theoretical work, but he consistently said that what matters is the production of reality. First as a member of the resistance who spoke out in favor of Martinique’s independence from France and then, from 1967 onwards, through the Institut Martiniquais d’Études, a school which was an agent for change, intervening in political issues and implementing Creole into a school system mostly dominated by French.
Later Glissant imagined and prepared a museum for Martinique, which is unrealized but remains a source of many ideas. Glissant imagined the museum as an archipelago; it would not house a synthesis but a network of interrelationships. Glissant wanted to create a museum which would not only point at urgencies but also find agency to respond to these urgencies. He imagined it to be a quivering place which transcends established systems of thoughts and which is looking for the utopian point where all the world’s cultures and all the world’s imaginations can meet and hear one another.”
Hans Ulrich Obrist (born 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is a curator, critic, and art historian. He is Artistic Director at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Before this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. He has curated more than 300 exhibitions including the Swiss Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, where he presented Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price, ‘A stroll through a fun palace’.