The Apple
Concept
A supplement to exhibitions at Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach and Muzeum Sztuki Łódź, this book center saround the apple as an art object and case study in biodiver sity under threat. Developed in the course of a five-year, ongoing correspondence between artist Antje Majewski and elusive, legendary Polish conceptual artist Paweł Freisler, the project explores the idea of diversity in all its possible meanings and manifestations, tying together collaborative and associatively connected works by Antje Majewski and Agnieszka Polska, Paweł Freisler, Piotr Życieński, and Jimmie Durham in a museum exhibition with various activities dealing with the apple. The remarkable range of ornaments in Freisler’s collection of carved, dried apples is echoed in the diver se colors and shapes in Antje Majewski’s paintings of different apple varieties, while Majewski’s film The Freedom of Apples traces the fruit’s genetic reduction to a handful of commercially profitable varieties, an undertaking that requires making sense of the complex relationships behind global food production in capitalism, (gen)-technical developments in the agricultural sector, politics and legislation, but also of dissenting voices in favor of another kind of community economy and the preservation of diversity. Paweł Freisler and Antje Majewski founded a new tradition of planting apple trees in the city space as a communal activity that brings diverse groups and individuals together. So far, two hundred local-variety apple trees have been planted by tree adopters in Mönchengladbach and Łódź.
Colophon
- Berlin, 2016
- Edited by: Aleksandra Jach, Anje Majewski, Amy Patton, Joanna Sokołowska, Suzanne Titz
- Published by: Sternberg Press
- Language: English, German
- ISBN: 978-3-95679-190-1 (English), 978-3-95679-207-6 (German)
- Book concept and design: Noviki (intern: Edvin Thungren)
- Softcover, 230 × 306 mm, 264 pages (278 pages German)
- Print: Mdruk, Warsaw