This e-book is a digital record, documenting the gathering of materials and the process of creating the project The Scream of the Strawbear. In his photographs, videos, installations and performances, visual artist Matthew Cowan surveys European customs and traditions and their continuing social function today. This interest originally stemmed from learning English ritual dances in New Zealand and has sparked an ongoing exploration of folklore and its contemporary connotations in a wider European context. A sequence of rituals, materials, costumes, plants, and museum artefacts form the central staging point of his artistic research.

In The Scream of the Strawbear, the New Zealand-born artist documents selected traditions from the German city of Giessen and the surrounding countryside, placing them in the context of contemporary art. The publication includes texts that reveal the process of artistic research involved in the work. It covers diverse yet connected themes of folklore originating from traditions in Hesse as well as historical links that cross the world from New Zealand to Europe and the United Kingdom.

Matthew Cowan collaborated with communities whose annual traditional ritual customs, such as the Strawbear and Maimann, take place close to Giessen. These community rituals provide a focus for the aesthetic material of the project. Straw, eggs, leaves, tobacco, cameras, and sound recording devices all feature as artistic motifs in the resulting exhibition at Kunsthalle Giessen.

The e-book contains extensive photographs and documents from the research and exhibition and five performance videos produced over the course of the project.

The Scream of the Strawbear was exhibited at Kunsthalle Giessen and the Oberhessisches Museum from September 7 to November 17, 2019.

The post The Scream of the Strawbear Edition T-shirt appeared first on EECLECTIC.

This e-book is a digital record, documenting the gathering of materials and the process of creating the project The Scream of the Strawbear. In his photographs, videos, installations and performances, visual artist Matthew Cowan surveys European customs and traditions and their continuing social function today. This interest originally stemmed from learning English ritual dances in New Zealand and has sparked an ongoing exploration of folklore and its contemporary connotations in a wider European context. A sequence of rituals, materials, costumes, plants, and museum artefacts form the central staging point of his artistic research.

In The Scream of the Strawbear, the New Zealand-born artist documents selected traditions from the German city of Giessen and the surrounding countryside, placing them in the context of contemporary art. The publication includes texts that reveal the process of artistic research involved in the work. It covers diverse yet connected themes of folklore originating from traditions in Hesse as well as historical links that cross the world from New Zealand to Europe and the United Kingdom.

Matthew Cowan collaborated with communities whose annual traditional ritual customs, such as the Strawbear and Maimann, take place close to Giessen. These community rituals provide a focus for the aesthetic material of the project. Straw, eggs, leaves, tobacco, cameras, and sound recording devices all feature as artistic motifs in the resulting exhibition at Kunsthalle Giessen.

The e-book contains extensive photographs and documents from the research and exhibition and five performance videos produced over the course of the project.

The Scream of the Strawbear was exhibited at Kunsthalle Giessen and the Oberhessisches Museum from September 7 to November 17, 2019.

The post The Scream of the Strawbear Edition Tote Bag appeared first on EECLECTIC.

In The Scream of the Strawbear, the New Zealand-born artist documents selected traditions from the German city of Giessen and the surrounding countryside, placing them in the context of contemporary art. The publication includes texts that reveal the process of artistic research involved in the work. It covers diverse yet connected themes of folklore originating from traditions in Hesse as well as historical links that cross the world from New Zealand to Europe and the United Kingdom.

Matthew Cowan collaborated with communities whose annual traditional ritual customs, such as the Strawbear and Maimann, take place close to Giessen. These community rituals provide a focus for the aesthetic material of the project. Straw, eggs, leaves, tobacco, cameras, and sound recording devices all feature as artistic motifs in the resulting exhibition at Kunsthalle Giessen.

The e-book contains extensive photographs and documents from the research and exhibition and five performance videos produced over the course of the project.

The Scream of the Strawbear was exhibited at Kunsthalle Giessen and the Oberhessisches Museum from September 7 to November 17, 2019.

The post The Scream of the Strawbear appeared first on EECLECTIC.

Fixed in corporate and state systems more firmly than numeric tax IDs or IP addresses, names are generally no longer treated as language, but as lexically opaque formulas. In their indifference to language diversity, authorities are known to rephrase, reorder, and re-alphabetize names when they don’t fit their administrative standard. They are also known to deny rights to people who have no “name label.”

In the fictive worlds represented in this book, society is not centralized, not oversized, and self-naming is brought forward as a form of self-empowerment and resistance.

Scriptings’ reader format “Political Scenarios” is published in collaboration with Archive Books and the e-book publisher EECLECTIC. The aim is to publish carefully selected scripts and texts by artists that refer neither to academic nor to purely literary forms of writing, but embed “text” as an integral part of a contemporary political art practice.

The post My Name Is Language appeared first on EECLECTIC.

Newspaper — »Archäologie autonomer Zeitungen in den 90ern: scheinschlag und A.N.Y.P.« — conversation with Ulrike Steglich and Stephan Geen

Archive — »Es wird gewesen sein: (Über)Leben und Arbeiten im post Futur II-Zeitalter.« — conversation with Bettina Allamoda

Office — »Wir wollten, dass auf der Ebene der Produktion miteinander gesprochen wird.« — conversation with Waling Boers

Sound carrier — »Diese Verweigerungshaltung, die kann ich total nachvollziehen.« — conversation with Mo Loschelder

Video — »Wie besetzte ich ein Haus, und wie berichte ich darüber?« — conversation with Manuel Zimmer

Poster — »So inszenieren wir die Stadt!« — conversation with Carl Hegemann and Bernd Frank

The series of talks took place as part of the research project Autonomy and Functionalisation — a Cultural-Historical-Aesthetic Analysis of Art Concepts in the Visual Arts in Berlin from the 1990s to the Present at the Berlin University of the Arts, funded by the Einstein Foundation.

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