Blacktivist – EP vinyl edition

EP, 2016 special transparent vinyl edition with Music by Flatbush ZOMBiES, cover art by Mario Pfeifer, mastered and manufactured by Handle with Care

FBZ_MP_KOW_001, available at KOW, 2016

The EP was produced in tandem with the 2-channel-video installation #blacktivist.

Approximation in the digital age to a humanity condemned to disappear

edited by Mario Pfeifer and Thomas Seelig, form by Markus Weisbeck, funded by Museo Nacional de Belles Artes - Museo sin Muros Artes Santiago de Chile, Goethe-Institut, Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony, Circa Projects, Newcastle and KOW, Berlin,  published in Spanish and English by Sternberg Press.

180 pp., Spanish / English, Softcoverr, ISBN 978-3-95679-088-1, 2015

Mario Pfeifer developed his latest project, Approximation in the digital age for a humanity condemned to disappear, in Puerto Williams, the southernmost settlement in the world on the Chilean archipelagos of Patagonia bordering Argentina. The publication, designed by Markus Weisbeck equally as an artist’s book and research compendium, engages—through essays, annotated texts, and a conversation between Thomas Seelig and Mario Pfeifer—discourses of cultural production from an anthropological-artistic approach about indigenous representation, territorial politics in the postcolonial age, and the traces of German missionary and anthropologist Martin Gusinde in Chile and beyond. Included is Hugo Palmarola’s essay, “Folding Culture,” the first in-depth investigation published on the Yagán—a jeep built in cooperation with Citroën in the 1970s—as a socioeconomic and political symbol of Chile’s turbulent coup d’état and relationship to its indigenous population in the far south.

This publication documents Mario Pfeifer’s multiple-screen video installation and production process as well as his archival research at the Martin Gusinde Estate at the Anthropos Institut in Sankt Augustin and in the ethnomusicology department of the Museum of Ethnography in Berlin. A special edition LP was released with the bilingual publication on the occasion of Pfeifer’s first institutional solo exhibition in Latin America and further presentations in Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Brussels, Concepción, Newcastle, New York, Seoul, Santiago de Chile, and Winterthur.

A Formal Film in Nine Episodes, Prologue and Epilogue– A Critical Reader

edited by Susanne Gaensheimer and Bernd Reiß, form by Markus Weisbeck in collaboration with Kurnal Rawat and Anand Tharanay of Grandmother India with contributions by Suprio Bhattacharjee, Kaushik Bhaumik, Amira Gad, Susanne Gaensheimer, Nikolaus Hirsch, Ranjit Hoskote, Shanay Jhaveri, Kurnal Rawat, Bernd Reiß, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Anand Tharanay, Ragunath Vasudevan and Markus Weisbeck, funded by Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main and KOW, published in Hindi and English by Spector Books

300 pp., Hindi / English, hardcover, ISBN 978-3-940064-60-8, 2010

Mario Pfeifer’s book »A Formal Film...« is a critical reader that is part of his film project of the same name—an innovative expansion of the genre. The complex exploration of the intercultural, film-historic, political and urban issues that are discussed in Pfeifer’s film not only surface on the level of texts, they also become manifest in the materiality of the book itself and its production process. The artist’s book was produced in Mumbai and created using six different local printing techniques. In March 2012 Mario Pfeifer and designer Markus Weisbeck set out the formal aspects of the publication in collaboration with local manufacturers and the authors of the texts.

Reconsidering The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California by Lewis Baltz, 1974

edited by Mario Pfeifer, designed by Devin Dailey
with contributions by Chris Balaschak, Lewis Baltz, Martin Hochleitner, Julia Moritz, Vanessa Joan Müller, and a conversation between Lewis Baltz and Mario Pfeifer, published in English by Sternberg Press

96 pp., English, softcover, ISBN 978-1-934105-29-0, 2010

The book discusses Mario Pfeifer’s recent 16mm film installation Reconsidering The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California by Lewis Baltz, 1974. This installation, consisting of two synchronized, looped, and parallel projected films, takes its point of departure from the first monograph of Baltz’s work, published by Castelli Graphics, New York in 1974.

Over the last four decades, Lewis Baltz has continuously produced high quality photographic books. This publication functions as a critical reader, reevaluating “New Topographics” as representations of landscapes. Looking at Pfeifer’s installation, which revisits a Baltz’s photographic site, Vanessa Joan Müller negotiates the terms realism/reality and the way Pfeifer discovers the misrepresentation of a modern industrial building in Irvine’s Industrial Park in 2009. Martin Hochleitner contextualizes Pfeifer’s film installation within the context of the original “New Topographics” exhibitions (1975), which, since 2009, are being shown throughout the United States and Europe. In addition, this publication consists of film stills, production stills, and a rare interview by Mario Pfeifer with Lewis Baltz. It was published on the occasion of Mario Pfeifer’s contribution for the “New Topographics” exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Landesgalerie Linz in 2010.