Martha Rosler
Service: A Trilogy on Colonization
Martha Rosler Library
Launch of Two Martha Rosler books, with Printed Matter and e-flux
Saturday, September 13, 2008, 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Printed Matter is pleased to announce the launch of two Martha Rosler publications: Printed Matter’s facsimile edition of Service: A Trilogy on Colonization and e-flux’s Martha Rosler Library. The launch will take place at Printed Matter on Saturday, Sep¬tember 13, 2008. Printed Matter is located at 195 Tenth Avenue at 22nd Street, New York City.
Martha Rosler’s Service trilogy was originally published by Printed Matter in 1978, our third year of operation. The publication consists of three short postcard novels that address the social uses of food (with the third told in both English and Spanish). The stories were distributed via postcards typed and mailed every few days by the artist in 1976 before being compiled in this now-rare artist book.
Martha Rosler Library was opened to the public by Anton Vidokle in November 2005 as a storefront reading room on Ludlow Street in New York City. Comprising approximately 7,800 titles from the artist's personal collection, the Library has since traveled to Frank¬furt, Antwerp, Berlin, Paris, Liverpool, and Edinburgh. Martha Rosler Library, the publica¬tion, has been produced to mark the presentation of the project at Site Gallery in Liverpool and Stills in Edinburgh. It includes interviews by Stephen Wright with Martha Rosler and Anton Vidokle about the Library and an essay by Elena Filipovic, which places the Library in the context of the artist's larger body of work.
Martha Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, sculpture, and performance, and writes on aspects of culture. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homeless–ness to systems of transport. Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennale of 2003; the Liverpool Biennial and the Taipei Biennial (both 2004); documenta 12 and Skulptur–Projekte Münster (2007); as well as many major international survey shows, including several Whitney biennials. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including "Great Power," on view through October 11 at Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s contemporary art space in Chelsea. A retrospective of her work, "Positions in the Life World (1998-2000)," was shown in five European cities and at the New Museum and the International Center of Photography concurrently. Rosler has published fifteen books of photography, art, and writing; books of her photographs include Passionate Signals (Cantz, 2005), and In the Place of the Public: Airport Series (Cantz, 1997). Rosler has been awarded the Spectrum International Prize in Photogra¬phy for 2005, the Oskar-Kokoschka Prize in 2006, and an Anonymous Was a Woman award in 2007.
Service: A Trilogy on Colonization is published in an edition of 1050 and retails for $10. The publication is 128 pages and can be purchased at www.printedmatter.org. Martha Rosler Library is 40 pages long with 21 color images and can be purchased here for $14.95.
For additional information, please contact AA Bronson at aabronson @ printedmatter.org.
Printed Matter, Inc. is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 1976 by artists and art workers with the mission to foster the appreciation, dissemination, and understanding of artists' books and other artists' publications.
Printed Matter, Inc. has received support, in part, through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Altria Group Inc, the Milton & Sally Avery Arts Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, The Gesso Foundation, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Schoenstadt Family Foundation, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and individuals worldwide.