Annotations

David Antin is a writer, critic and performance artist, based in the US. The excerpt of the text what am I doing here?, was originally published in full in david antin, talking at the boundaries. The layout follows the format of that book, and tries to emphasize the quality of this text as a spoken-word and performance work. Martin McGowan from Cabinet Gallery in London introduced us to his work.
Source: David Antin, Talking at the Boundaries, New Directions, 1976, p. 3–13, copyright with the author.

Tenzing Barshee is an independent writer and curator. The text and images published in Starship are a collaborative effort between the author and Mitchell Syrop. Tenzing Barshee is the publisher of the magazine Wandering, a collaboration with Dan Solbach who also realized the graphic concept for this issue of Starship. Wandering can be accessed and ordered via wanderingmagazine.tumblr.com.

Gerry Bibby is a Berlin based artist, working in the fields of performance, sculpture and writing. Bibby’s text in Starship is an excerpt from his novel The Drumhead, published by Sternberg Press and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution in November 2014. The book is available via Sternberg Press at www.sternberg-press.com, and in bookstores worldwide.

Hans-Christian Dany is a Hamburg based artist and writer and a founding editor of Starship. His text in Starship Ich werde Frau, ich werde Gott was originally conceived as a lecture–one which never took place. His latest book Morgen werde ich Idiot is available via www.edition-nautilus.de, and in bookstores worldwide (almost).

Nikola Dietrich is a Berlin based curator and co-editor of Starship since 2014. Until recently she was curator at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel where she produced a number of exhibitions and edited numerous publications, including Ariane Müller’s Handbuch für die Reise durch Afrika from 2013, and Henrik Olesen’s How Do I Make Myself a Body from 2011.

Stephan Dillemuth is a Munich based artist and professor at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts since 2002. His photographs are original contributions for Starship and were created in response to our initial request, posed to all artists invited: “This said, we may add that until now we have been thinking about machines, and mostly time machines, and maybe this had to do with social dystopias, and is still a construction site.”

Francesca Drechsler is a writer and critic who lives between London and New York. She began her career in Neue Zürcher Zeitung in the 1980s and since then has published in more than a hundred magazines and newspapers. Francesca has been a regular contributor to Starship since its inception.

Martin Ebner is a Berlin based artist and a founding editor of Starship. Together with Florian Zeyfang, he published Poor Man’s Expression in 2011, a comprehensive anthology on technology, experimental film and conceptual art that was based on an exhibition of the same title curated by Ebner and Zeyfang.

Haytham El-Wardany is a writer based in Berlin and Cairo. He is a regular contributor to Starship since 1998. His text Natural Law is published here for the first time, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger. The Arabic title refers to a famous Egyptian text and can only be approximated in English.

Yusuf Etiman is a Berlin based graphic designer, artist, and publisher. He is the editor of basso magazin, and founded the exhibition / performance /experimental collective space of the same name. His work for Starship investigates an architectural and social notion related to a new public space in Berlin that he is currently developing in cooperation with Mate Galic & Barbara Architekten.
Collage on page 94: Yusuf Etiman, Barbara Architekten, Martin Ebner.

Morgan Fisher, who was born in 1942, emerged as a prominent and continually influential figure within a generation of conceptual artists, filmmakers and writers based in Southern California. On December 9, 2014, while conducting the interview published in this issue, the United States Senate released its report on CIA torture. In response to it he wrote the following letter to President Obama: Dear President Obama; Under international law our country is legally obligated to prosecute the torturers. When will you announce that your administration will do so? Are or are we not a nation of laws? Don’t make me ashamed to have voted for you, don’t make me ashamed to be a citizen of a country that practices torture and compounds its criminal behavior by refusing its legal obligation to prosecute the torturers.
Sincerely yours, Morgan Fisher.

Jean Genet was a novelist, poet and playwright. His drawing (and perhaps the only known drawing of his) was on display at the Statens Museum in Copenhagen as part of the exhibition Abandon the Parents (May to Sept. 2014), curated by Henrik Olesen together with Christopher Müller and Daniel Buchholz.
Jean Genet, Trois Visages et deux Oiseaux, n.d. Doublesided drawing,
India ink, pen, wash on printed paper, 29 × 37 cm.
Collection of Daniel Buchholz and Christopher Müller, Berlin/Cologne.

Julian Göthe is an artist based in Berlin, and since 2010 is professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As contributor for Starship, he is responsible for the column Apologies, inspired by WET—The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, 1976–81, which he conceived originally for a unique presentation at Udolpho in Berlin in 2014. See www.udolpho.org.

Ulrich Heinke is a Berlin based artist and a regular contributor to Starship since 1998. He also manages a blog accessible at erich.linkheu.de. His text builds on his blog entries, and the protagonists (the cast) have a regular appearance in his texts.

Judith Hopf is a Berlin based artist and columnist for Starship, and in this issue continues her series titled Tales of Stupidity. She teaches at Städelschule in Frankfurt. Her initial inspiration for her contribution was the painting at the SMK Copenhagen by Joris van Son, Stone Cartouche with Fruit and Flower Garland (1664).

Karl Holmqvist is a Berlin based artist and poet. It may have been late in the evening at the bar when we asked his permission to reprint his poem In The Doctor’s Office (originally published by JRP|Ringier in his book ’K in 2012). Starship considers this sort of verbal contract in perfect harmony with the dissonance of Holmqvists impressive artistic work.

Chris Kraus is a filmmaker and writer. She is a co-editor of the periodical and publishing house Semiotext(e), under which most of her books have been released. They are available via semiotexte.com, and in bookstores worldwide. Her text Chinese notebook is published in Starship for the first time.

Sam Lewitt is a New York based artist. In response to our invitation to contribute to this issue he wrote: Basically the contribution will deal with a work I’m finishing now for a museum in the Rheinland (the Leopold-Hoesch in Düren). The project is called ’Verbrannte Erde: Second Salvage.’ It’s a work that takes its title and format from an eponymous 1948 publication, which is an administrative plea to rebuild and reconstruct after the destruction of allied bombing raids on the administrative districts of Düren and Jülich. The museum was the only municipal building to partially survive; half of it was destroyed and it was promptly reconstructed not long after. The work tries to produce a kind of semantic shift in the logic of salvage and administered memory that is an overriding component of that site. It essentially consists in reconstructing the layout of the ’Verbrannte Erde’ document by melting down DIMMs or so-called ’memory pins’ from electronic devices, which are regularly salvaged from circuit boards of overheated communications devices in order to extract the small amounts of precious metal they contain.

Mikhail Lylov is an artist currently based in Berlin, and originally from Voronezh (anecdotically the city with the highest recorded number of UFO sightings in the world). He is one of the artist to answer and discuss our invitation to think about time, time machines and machines.

Crispin Oduor Macachia lives in Dandora, Nairobi. He has been writing for Starship on several occasions, mostly about the situation in Kenya.

Ariane Müller is a Berlin based artist and a founding editor of Starship. She also writes a regular column, Kinderkommunismus, in this magazine. Très riches heures, is a series, its first part having been printed in Starship 11.1.1., an interim issue released on the occasion of the Berlin art book fair Miss Read in 2011. Müller’s book Handbuch für die Reise durch Afrika was published by Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel and Starship publishers in 2013, and is available via starship-magazine.org, and in bookstores worldwide.

Christopher Müller is an art historian and runs a gallery together with Daniel Buchholz in Berlin and Cologne. Starship asked him for a contribution–a text, an image, or something that would indicate some of the issues and ideas that occupies him at the moment.

Henrik Olesen is an artist based in Berlin. He was a guest editor of Starship No 11 and is now co-editor of Starship. The collages appearing in this issue are a part of his project about companion species from 2014.

Sam Pulitzer is an artist based in New York. His contribution is a response to our request for image and/or text contributions dealing with the idea of time machines and dystopias. We got very excited when we saw his work at his exhibition Nine scarlet eclipses for ’them’ at the Lars Friedrich gallery in Berlin in 2013.

Gunter Reski is a Berlin based artist, writer, and a founding editor of Starship. He is professor at the art academy in Offenbach. In 2014 he, together with Hans-Jürgen Hafner, published the painting anthology The Happy Fainting of Painting at Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.

Mark von Schlegell is a science fiction writer and cultural critic. He was among the first persons we thought about inviting after reading Realometer, a book Schlegell published with Merve Verlag in 2009. Houston, Houston, Do You Read, reprinted in this issue, first appeared in Kopernikus 4, ed. Hans Joachim Alpers in 1981. His latest book Sundogz is published by Semiotext(e) at semiotetexte.com.

Nora Schultz is an artist currently based in New York. Her contribution for Starship has its origin in a series of performances. The centerfold is a photograph from the performance, entitled Terminal +, developed for Tate Modern in 2014. The pages 11–13 were developed for Starship from the same series. The performance may be seen at: http://youtu.be/v-LaPy1329Q

He-Ji Shin is an artist and photographer who recently moved from Berlinto New York. Her contribution for this issue of Starship is a photograph showing a portrait of the artist with her mother’s pills placed on her face. Her work can be viewed at her website: www.hejishin.com.

Dan Solbach is a young graphic designer who also co-founded the exhibition space New Jersey (2008-2013) in Basel together with Daniel Baumann, Tobias Madison and Emanuel Rossetti. He designed the exhibition catalogue of Robert Gober, a show that Nikola Dietrich curated at the Museum für Gegenwart skunst in Basel, and most recently the publication Kerstin Brätsch, Unstable Talismanic Renderings, to only name a few. His work can be seen at dansolbach.ch.

Vera Tollmann is a Berlin based writer, curator and critic. She was an editor of Starship No. 7, the Y (feminism) issue, and is a contributor ever since. Her text is the first of a regular column she is writing for Starship, together with Stephanie Wurster.

Annette Wehrmann was a Hamburg based artist. Her texts were originally written for her performance installations, typed on paper streamers (Luftschlangen). Annette Wehrmann, Luftschlangentexte was published by Starship and Ort des Gegen e.V. in 2013.

Amelie von Wulffen is a Berlin based artist. We asked her permission to reprint some of her drawings, originally shown at Portikus in Frankfurt and Kunstverein Munich, published as a graphic novel-like book entitled Am kühlen Tisch, by Koenig Books in 2014.

Stephanie Wurster is a Berlin based writer, editor and translator. She was an editor of Starship No. 7, the Y (feminism) issue, and is our columnist on literature ever since. Recently she translated Chris Kraus’ book Torpor into German (originally published in 2006), which was released in December 2014. It is available at www.b-books.de, and at bookstores.

Florian Zeyfang is a Berlin based artist, filmmaker and writer who teaches at the Art Academy in Umeå. He is a regular contributor for Starship since 1998. His text for this issue, Dear Aaton 35-8, was written for the upcoming book Godard/Boomerang edited by Caspar Stracke, to be published by the Finnish Art Academy / Taideyliopisto, Helsinki, Spring 2015.

Thank you
Friederike Gratz (for stepping into the Buchholz archive during Christmas to provide us with the documentation of Morgan Fisher’s work), Fabian Harb (for working on the typefaces after New Year’s Eve), Shahira Issa (for being the first to read Haytham El-Wardany’s text in Arabic), Dennis Kuhlow (for planning the Starship release party at Südblock, Berlin), Sebastian Lütgert (especially for finding some abject spelling mistakes), Scott Cameron Weaver (especially for writing some of the artists’ blurbs)