Jan-Ole Schiemann (*1983) belongs to a young artist generation, subjecting painting to a critical actualisation. On the fringes of figuration and abstraction, he extracts fragments of advertisement, comics, architecture from their original context. Almost transparently, he interweaves and layers structures, logos, topographies, graffiti, and everyday textures. This complex surface mesh, always full frontal, yet equally deep, dissolves the fabric of reality as a flashing, constantly renewed and self-generating hyper-text, into which one can actively immerse oneself or trace the origins of individual elements. Exhibition: Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (15.02.-13.03.2020).

As sites of turbulence and transformation, cities are machines for forgetting. And yet archiving and exhibiting the presence of the past remains a key cultural, political and economic activity in many urban environments. This book takes the example of Berlin over the past four decades to chart how the memory culture of the city has responded to the challenges and transformations thrown up by the changing political, social and economic organization of the built environment. The book focuses on the visual culture of the city (architecture, memorials, photography and film). It argues that the recovery of the experience of time is central to the practices of an emergent memory culture in a contemporary 'overexposed' city, whose spatial and temporal boundaries have long since disintegrated.

This monograph presents five of Glaswegian artist Hayley Tompkins' (born 1971) major exhibitions from 2011 to 2013, including Scotland + Venice and her show at Aspen Art Museum (both 2013), alongside recent works in her Digital Light Pool series.

Tall, skinny, short, round, squat, awkward, slouched, tanned, bashful, and sometimes unknowingly beautiful, the adolescents in Rineke Dijkstra's "Beach Portraits" stand alone, the ocean rolling behind them. Clad in little more than bathing suits, these young people are striking to behold. Remarkably clear and formally classical, each subject is frontally posed and shot straight on; the resulting photographs participate in a cold, quasi-scientific categorization reminiscent of the work of August Sander and Thomas Ruff. Yet Dijkstra's pictures are not just that--there is also something of the eccentric in them, something that comes closer to Diane Arbus's images. Seen together, the complete series of 20 "Beach Portraits" creates a kind of collective portrait of the existential insecurity and awkward beauty of youth.

Memorylands is an original and fascinating investigation of the nature of heritage, memory and understandings of the past in Europe today. It looks at how Europe has become a ’memoryland’ – littered with material reminders of the past, such as museums, heritage sites and memorials; and at how this ‘memory phenomenon’ is related to the changing nature of identities – especially European, national and cosmopolitan. In doing so, it provides new insights into how memory and the past are being performed and reconfigured in Europe – and with what effects. Drawing especially, though not exclusively, on cases, concepts and arguments from social and cultural anthropology, Memorylands argues for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the cultural assumptions involved in relating to the past. It theorizes the various ways in which ‘materializations’ of identity work and relates these to different forms of identification within Europe. The book also addresses questions of methodology, including discussion of historical, ethnographic, interdisciplinary and innovative methods. Through a wide-range of case-studies from across Europe, Sharon Macdonald argues that Europe is home to a much greater range of ways of making the past present than is usually realized – and a greater range of forms of ‘historical consciousness’. At the same time, however, she seeks to highlight what she calls ‘the European memory complex’ – a repertoire of prevalent patterns in forms of recollection and ‘past presencing’. The examples in Memorylands are drawn from both the margins and metropolitan centres, from the relatively small-scale and local, the national and the avant-garde. The book looks at pasts that are potentially identity-disrupting – or ‘difficult’ – as well as those that affirm identities or offer possibilities for transcending national identities or articulating more cosmopolitan futures. Topics covered include authenticity, temporalities, embodiment, commodification, nostalgia and Ostalgie, the musealization of everyday and folk-life, Holocaust commemoration and tourism, narratives of war, the heritage of Islam, transnationalism, and the future of the past. Memorylands is engagingly written and accessible to general readers as well as offering a new synthesis for advanced researchers in memory and heritage studies. It is essential reading for those interested in identities, memory, material culture, Europe, tourism and heritage.

Anything is possible in installation art. The typically short lifespan of the materials and techniques used and the intended experience can be endless, often to the despair of the custodian of the work. The processes involved in preserving this complex form of art, reinstalling it, finding ways to recreate the experience over and again, as well as the decisionmaking that underlies these processes, form the backbone of this book. What did the artist originally intend and how has that concept been realised in the past? How can one preserve and document the installation? What relation exists between the components and the space, and what is the spectator's part in the work? Questions of this kind are examined in connection with a number of case studies. At the same time, it reports on the results of an extensive research project Inside Installations (2004-2007) carried out by an international group of custodians active in the conservation of contemporary art. Tatja Scholte is programme manager at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE) and specialised in the theory of contemporary art conservation. Dr. Glenn Wharton serves as Media Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is also on faculty in the Museum Studies Program at New York University, and was the founding Executive Director of INCCA-NA, the North American group of the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art. Publisher's note.