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This is not a House

Shot in sixteen different locations, across eight separate states, this work catalyses and reunites fresh experiences of a new form of American architecture by summoning a disquieting conjunction of realism and fiction. In a  study that goes beyond pure formal investigation and documentation Martins creates a poignant commentary on the financial ruin and bankruptcy that struck the lives of many thousands of people.
According to the author Peter D Osborne (who contributes an essay to the book), “This is not a House  plays on the borders between what Ranciére calls, ‘the logic of facts and the logic of fictions’; it is itself formed from that relationship, a product of another crisis in which the categories of Art Photography and Documentary Photography have not so much fallen apart as fallen into each other. Martins’ work is the bearer of the crisis it engages with, a crisis that is only in part economic. More immediately the manifest theme of This is not a House places it at a point where parallel themes converge, each governed by a fear of the loss of reality: the concern that digitalisation has undermined photographic realism and compromised any truth-telling facility in the medium and beyond; and the fear of Wall Street’s undermining of what is interestingly referred to as the real economy”. This is the real context in which This Is not a House appears, the ruins of the house-economy.


Book published by Dewi Lewis Ltd.
Limited number of signed copies available through The Moth House.

 


Date: May 2011
ISBN: 978-1-907883-02-6
Dimensions: 270mmx335mm
Pages: 109
Book edition: 1000
Quarter binding cloth hardcover
English
Essays by Peter D. Osborne, Sacha Craddock

About the Author
Edgar Martins is visual artist woking across different media. His work is represented in several high-profile collections, such as those of the V&A, RIBA, the Dallas Museum of Art; MAST , MUDAS, Modern Art Centre Lisbon, MAAT, Fondation Carmignac, amongst others. He has published over 16 books which were met with critical acclaim and exhibited internationally. He was selected to represent Macau (China) at the 54th Venice Biennale.

About the Writers
Peter D. Osborne is the author of Travelling Light, photography, travel and visual culture,Manchester University Press, and of a number of articles, papers and catalogue essays on photography and landscape; art, photography and travel; and on Latin America photography. He is presently working on a book titled, Commemorating the Present – photography and the contemporary cultural condition. He is on the editorial board of the New Zealand art theory journal, Z/X.
Sacha Craddock is an independent art critic and curator. Co-curator for Bloomberg Space and respected post-graduate tutor, she writes numerous articles and catalogue essays, gives public lectures and makes television appearances. Craddock serves in many consultative and official capacities; she is the Chair of New Contemporaries, chair of Braziers International Workshop, co-founder of Artschool Palestine and Pubic Art Advisor for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

£35.00

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