Room & Book is an online secondhand art bookshop based in West London, specialising in Modern British art and International Modernism between 1909 and 1969; particularly sculpture and studio ceramics. The shop stocks rare, hard-to-find and out-of-print art books and vintage exhibition catalogues, as well as periodicals and “Little Magazines” with an emphasis on the Bauhaus, British Constructivism, Bloomsbury, the Neo-Romantics, New Generation Sculpture, St Ives and Surrealism.
B. Wells Douglas is a visual artist based in Bloomington, IN. His work uses his archive of vintage vernacular photographs to explore and examine social and political issues that the United States faces – historically and contemporarily.
Since beginning his collection, Wells has acquired more than 50,000 35mm slides dating from the 1940s into the 1990s. The slides come from donations, thrift stores, estate sales, and online. Wells hopes to one day make his archive of photographs available to the public for researchers and other artists to use.
Wells’ work has been shown across the world. Most notably at the Incheon Open Port International Photo & Film Festival in Incheon, South Korea, the International Center for Photography in New York, New York, and at the SE Center for Photography in Greenville, South Carolina.
(b. 1970, Johannesburg) is an artist, activist and educator. He currently lives and works in Berlin. He is a professor of photography at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg and teaches in the MA Photography & Society program at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. For two decades, he was one half of the critically acclaimed artist duo Broomberg & Chanarin.
Life is the dark unresolvable jumble, the mysterious and chaotic bundle of incomprehensible sensations, all tied and mixed together. Demons keep occurring behind, throughout and beyond the objects of the so-called “real world”; they invite the eyes and all the other senses to further proceed, to go into the realm of exceedance they give way to, to discover the inner nature of appearance. They are the faces of that terror implied in the direct sensorial approach to reality, in the full experience of the world surrounding us. They’re expressions of the trauma, the bolt shaking and ravaging the ground of ordinary perception, exceeding it, paving the way to an unprecedented and unknown dimension we’re given access to: infinite, unresolvable, incomprehensible. The grotesque and violent element they often exhibit is mostly linked to an expressive characteristic which is typical of the sensations of terror and anguish one can encounter being participant of an over-whelming experience, one that can submerge and overflow the senses, abruptly throwing them into a state of irreversible and unstoppable chaos. This makes the consciousness feel as if it was part of something incredibly bigger than itself, enormously more complex, profound and alive than what it’s capable of understanding. They also have this feature of fickleness, being both metamorphic and shapeless, inorganic, being direct expression of that relentless force of mutation, the ever-flow of heraclitean becoming, which eventually sums up all of the entropic changes, the hybrid mutations, the inexplicable reciprocity they borrow one from the other, meeting up, then undoing themselves, disappearing and then recovering in different, unexpected forms and states. For in the darkness looming over from this in-between folded dimension, it is most importantly required to be present, sharp focused and to listen very carefully. If one is able to plunge into it without any preconception or preview of sort, things startlingly regain their inner core of pulsating chaos. Then the observer is continuously melted into it, so that polarity of the paradigm of reality gets shifted, or maybe even nullified, giving way to a void paradigm, or non-paradigmatic condition in which everything of what is “exceeding” is real and nothing of what is “imaginary” is no more unreal.
Barbara Levine is an artist/collector of offbeat vernacular photography and most known for using her collection (recently acquired by the MFA Houston ) as the foundation of my artistic practice which includes books, archive projects and exhibitions. My wife, Paige and I built the collection together and one of our favorite themes is defaced and captioned snapshots
Nocturnia Book is a project of visual research, archive and archeology of the photographic image. At a time in history when the body is seen as the form of content, Nocturnia remains anonymous by the author’s choice. Being in obscurity allows one to resist in a security zone where the alter ego is not necessarily a lie.
The Newsletter is the result of a stream of consciousness which various individual and collective narrative, culturally determined, are explored. These nocturnal projects, all coming from visual culture, communicate with each other through a fundamental component: relativism.
Link Newsletters:
# 1https://mailchi.mp/fe7e11cf680e/the-nocturnia-book-newsletter-1?e=3f00ed2765
# 2https://mailchi.mp/70a1c0a31e95/the-nocturnia-book-newsletter-2?e=daf4a29ac8
# 3https://mailchi.mp/8e13c64f7fe0/the-nocturnia-book-newsletter-3?e=daf4a29ac8
# 4https://mailchi.mp/493140975979/the-nocturnia-book-newsletter-4?e=daf4a29ac8
Ali Beşikçi (1997, Istanbul) is an artist and publisher. His first book “In Between” was published by Ofset Yapımevi in 2017. Beşikçi participated in a collaborative project between Fabrika Zine and Fail Books in 2018 with a photozine comprising 31 photographs. The same year he founded Zone Magazine, a contemporary photography platform that aims to cultivate dialogue among artists and their audience. He edited and published “Z-ONE” in 2020 and “The Halcyon Days [A Dialogue Between] Isabella Nitto and Luca Baioni” in 2021.
