Karen Marta Bücher

The varied practice of Paul Chan (born 1973) includes paintings, drawings, video animations and font design, as well as critical writing. The characters in his works are animated beings, jerking and stuttering as they are violently thrust into the clumsy reel--or -real---of history. Chan explores the intellectual and sexual animus that courses through our collective language and consciousness, drawing on sources as varied as the King James Bible, Marquis de Sade and Samuel Beckett. Part of the 2000 Words series, conceived and commissioned by Massimiliano Gioni, and published by the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, 2000 Words: Paul Chan presents the entirety of the artist's works in the Dakis Joannou Collection and includes an essay by Stephen Squibb that reveals the solitary image and its uncanny animation in Chan's work.

Charming, riotous paintings from the celebrated, multitalented author of My Young Life and Tintin in the New World Working on cardboard and canvas, the acclaimed New York-based novelist, short story writer and essayist Frederic Tuten (born 1936) creates dream-like landscapes in places as far-flung as Tangier and Tuscany. His works, which use recurrent motifs such as sombreros and inverted cups, play host to a parade of characters, objects and shapes that converge in fascinating, often mysterious compositions. This book compiles a vibrant selection of Tuten's recent paintings and drawings alongside short stories written by the artist to accompany each and every picture, in addition to an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist. In Tuten's world, rendered in ink, colored pencil, crayon, pastel and, more recently, oil paint, imagination reigns supreme.

In 2003, after returning from a monthlong stay in Baghdad, American artist Paul Chan was given a gift from a colleague in the human-rights group Voices of the Wilderness: a copy of three speeches on democracy written by Saddam Hussein in the 1970s, before he became president of Iraq. The speeches, compiled here for the first time in English, are politically perverse, yet eerily familiar. The then vice president of Iraq characterizes social democracy as demanding authority, and defines free will as the patriotic duty to uphold the good of the state. This volume takes the speeches as an opportunity to ask what democracy means from the standpoint of a notorious political figure who was anything but democratic, and to reflect on how promises of freedom and security can mask the reality of repressive regimes. With drawings by Paul Chan, including a new suite in its entirety, and essays by Bidoun's Negar Azimi, philosopher and artist Nickolas Calabrese and journalist Jeff Severns Guntzel, this book is the inaugural copublication of the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art and Chan's own Badlands Unlimited.