Trolley at London Book Fair 2007
Trolley will be presenting the first two titles to be distributed by Prestel:
Mario Mandala Party
Saturday 14th April
Meet at Trolley Gallery 6pm
To celebrate the launch of Mario Tauchi’s Mario Mandala Colouring Book.
Featuring live music from MISO SOUP
Mario Tauchi will also be signing books at the Prestel stand during the fair.
Mario Mandala – Colouring Book
Mario Tauchi
Released Europe Mid April 2007
Released US End of April 2007
Mario Tauchi invites you to join a transcendental trip through the deepest parts of the artist’s brain with his incredible Mario-mandalas, 108 free-floating cosmic forms in white space, that the reader brings the final dimension to by colouring them in.
Psychiatrist Carl Jung saw the mandala as “a representation of the unconscious self,” and believed his paintings of mandalas enabled him to identify emotional states and disorders and work towards wholeness in personality. For Jung, this identification of the id, and its transience, was a fundamental tool in his understanding of personality.
Dynamically, this volume of Mario-mandalas goes beyond a passive recognition of the intricate mandala designs, leading readers to develop their own interpretation of their personality and contribute towards the entity of the mandala form. Once a mandala has been coloured in it can be detached from the book, as each becomes a unique work of art that has been created in their own design, the final mandala is thus a creation of personal interaction with the artist, and a wider connection with the universal language of colour and shape through the unconscious.
This book can appeal to nearly anyone with an interest in art either as a technique or as a finished work, and to adults and children alike, as the mandalas return generous rewards, regardless of technical ability.
Author Details:
Mario Tauchi is a Japanese artist living and working in Tokyo.
Related Titles:
Doodle Book (Thames and Hudson)
Art Forms in Nature – The Prints of Ernst Haeckel (Prestel)
Mario Tauchi is an artist living and working in Tokyo.
Philip Jones Griffiths
Lecture / Book Signing
27 March 2007, 7pm
Royal Geographic Society, London
Speaking at the prestigious Royal Geographic Society, Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths will offer a gripping view of war and peace in South East Asia, from the time of his seminal publication Vietnam Inc. (1971) to today. Philip will also be signing copies of his books Agent Orange (Trolley 2003) and Viet Nam at Peace (Trolley 2005) following the lecture. Guests will also be invited to view an exhibition of images taken by street children in Vietnam and orphans in Cambodia, trained in photojournalism skills by PhotoVoice. All proceeds of the talk will go to Photovoice to help them continue with their work running similar projects around the world.
Limited tickets available: to book visit call 020 7033 3878 or
www.photovoice.org
Philip Jones Griffiths
Lecture / Book Signing
27 March 2007, 7pm
Royal Geographic Society, London
Speaking at the prestigious Royal Geographic Society, Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths will offer a gripping view of war and peace in South East Asia, from the time of his seminal publication Vietnam Inc. (1971) to today. Philip will also be signing copies of his books Agent Orange (Trolley 2003) and Viet Nam at Peace (Trolley 2005) following the lecture. Guests will also be invited to view an exhibition of images taken by street children in Vietnam and orphans in Cambodia, trained in photojournalism skills by PhotoVoice. All proceeds of the talk will go to Photovoice to help them continue with their work running similar projects around the world.
Limited tickets available: to book visit call 020 7033 3878 or
Worldwide Reading in memoriam of Anna Politkovskaya
March 20, 2007
An appeal for a worldwide reading of Anna Politkovskaya’s reports on Chechnya. The journalist and critic of Putin was assassinated on October 7, 2006.
For a second time the Peter Weiss Foundation for Art and Politics, based in Berlin, makes an appeal for a worldwide reading on March 20. The aim of these interconnected events is to raise awareness of matters and forms of political communication. Because the lie as instrument of political formations also belongs to the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is imperative that the powers that combat it don’t weaken.
In her reportages Anna Politkovskaya described the catastrophe of the Chechen war, which was begun for paltry reasons and has since gone on, conducted far from the public eye. Her texts portray scenes of torture, reconstruct cold blooded murder, condemn the cynicism of bureaucrats, depict the misery and desperation of a civilian population that is being torn between the army and rebels, and offer a nightmarish picture of the climate of state-fueled fear and repression in Russia.
The selection of texts “Machkety: A Concentration Camp with a Commercial Streak” and “Special Operation Zyazikov” (from the book “A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya” by Anna Politkovskaya, translated by Alexander Burry and Tatiana Tulchinsky, © 2003 The University of Chicago) should be used for the one-off reading on March 20, 2007. You can find these texts on www.literaturfestival.com/upload/pdf/Politkovskya_texts_Eng.pdf as a PDF document. For the sole purpose of the worldwide reading, the texts may be used free of charge on March 20, 2007.
This year, on March 20, 2006, the Peter Weiss Foundation initiated its first worldwide reading on the occasion of the third anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. This event was marked as the first “Anniversary of the Political Lie” on which Eliot Weinberger’s text “What I Heard about Iraq” was read out at forty-seven venues worldwide, in Australia, the US, Germany, Greece, Lebanon, the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, Luxembourg, Switzerland and India.
We welcome any ideas for “The Second Anniversary of the Political Lie – in memoriam Anna Politkovskaya”, to be held on March 20, 2007.
Please contact: info@peter-weiss-stiftung.de
Best wishes,
Ulrich Schreiber
Director
Peter-Weiss-Stiftung für Kunst und Politik e.V.
Linienstraße 156/157
10115 Berlin
Anna Politkovskaya
Anna Politkovskaya, the daughter of Soviet UN diplomats, was born in New York in 1958. She studied Journalism at Moscow University and worked for various newspapers such as “Izvestia” and after the fall of Communism for independent papers, among them “Obchtchaya Gazeta”. Most recently she was a special correspondent for the small opposition paper “Novaya Gazeta”. Politkovskaya had been working for this newspaper since 1999, when Putin became Prime Minister and the so-called second Chechen war began: two closely-tied events which would trigger a disastrous chain of developments, as Politkovskaya demonstrated in her articles and books such as “A Small Corner of Hell” and “Putin’s Russia”.
The North Caucasus mountain region of Chechnya proclaimed its independence from Russia in 1991, and finally obtained it through the peace treaty set up after the first war (during which the media could still report freely). From the Russian side, the independence of the secessionist Kazakhs was perceived as a defeat, if not as a bitter dishonor. In 1999, when a Chechen commando led by the rivals of the then president Maskhadov fell in Dagestan, in Russian territory, the Russian rule of the North Caucasus seemed imperiled. Shortly afterwards two bloody bomb attacks were carried out in Moscow. The Chechens were immediately accused as the perpetrators, a suspicion which to this day has yet to be confirmed. Putin, then the head of the KGB’s succeeding organization the FSB, reacted with an “Anti-Terror Operation”: the start of the second Chechen war. As response to Russia’s humiliation and with the pledge to bring back former greatness, Putin used the war for his own political advancement. In 2000 he was elected as President of the Russian Federation.
Since then organizations such as Reporters Without Borders have observed a growing dissolution of free and independent media in Russia. Economic networks with ties to the Kremlin exercising tremendous influence, bureaucratic obstructions and a general climate of menace have seen to it that Russia numbers 140 (from 167) on the “RWB ranking list of worldwide positions of freedom of the press”. Now as before, no freedom of coverage from Chechnya is possible.
Ever since the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 Putin has felt part of an international alliance. He associated himself with Bush’s propagandized “War on Terror”. That same year the war in Chechnya was declared officially over. “Putin’s begun to try to prove on the world stage,” claimed Anna Politkovskaya in an interview in The Guardian, “that he’s just a part of a fashionable war. And he’s been successful. When, after Beslan, he began to state that we were seeing virtually the hand of Bin Laden, it was appalling. What’s Bin Laden got to do with it?”
With all her reporting Politkovskaya tried to show how the war was far from over, but rather how acts of violence and human rights violations continued unabated. She focused above all on the civil population which was slowly being torn between the two warring parties, and described self-perpetuating cycles of violence. Her depictions shed light on the perverse mechanisms of war, exposing the terms on which they operate, while condemning the beneficiaries.
She ends her final book with a critique directed towards both deceptive political groups and society: “They always say only ‘Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda’. A cursed slogan. It is the easiest thing to say, the answer with which to brush aside every new bloody tragedy. It is also the most primitive, with which one can lull the consciousness of a society, one which dreams of being lulled.” (from “Putin’s Russia”)
Politkovskaya was awarded many foreign prizes for her work. In 2003 she received the first “Lettre Ulysses Award” for best reportage as well as the Hermann Kesten Medal. In 2004 she was given the Olaf Palme Prize, and one year later the Prize for Freedom and Future of the Press. In Russia she was awarded the Prize of the Journalists Union in 2001. In her native country, however, she also faced threats and intimidation. Yet she refused to have a bodyguard in the same way she refused to go into exile. In 2004 she was the victim of a poisoning attempt. On October 7, 2006 she was shot by an unknown gunman in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment block. The documents used for her last article have gone missing. Anna Politkovskaya left behind two children.
GAZA UNDER SIEGE
11/8/2006
A week-long non-stop Israeli bombardment of Gaza towns and villages left over 70 Palestinians, mostly civilians, dead, with Beit Hanoun the focus of the Israeli offensive.
“They (Israeli forces) put explosives at the doors of the houses – and then they enter on the women and children. Everybody is terrified in their homes.”
Wednesday 27th March at 7pm
School of Visual Arts amphitheater
209 East 23rd Street, NY.
The author of ‘51 Months’ (Trolley, 2005) will be giving a talk on the book and her recent work and exhibition.
Free to CCNY members, SVA students, faculty, and staff
General admission $10, $5 for other students with ID. Tickets available on the door.
‘Chechnya: God, Nation and the Native Land’
Saturday 10th March 2007 12-6pm
Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck College, 27-29 Torrington Square, London, WC1E 7JL.
The programme will bring together footage and images from inside Chechnya, documentaries, films, Chechen-friendly organisations and personalities and books and literature on Chechnya.
Doors open at 12pm and the programme will begin at 1pm. Stanley Greene’s award-winning exhibition, ‘Open Wound’, will be on display during this time.
Above: Image taken from Open Wound