Düsseldorf-based Hans-Peter Feldmann is a passionate collector of images and stories, an original thinker and one of the first conceptual artists. This is Feldmann’s most personal book, a racy parcours through images before and behind the retina: clouds and strawberries, women in graceful poses, pants that don’t fit, the longing of retired civil servants, flying people, Christmas decorations, soccer images, collections of country-code plates and much more. These images are at once common, strange, smart, stupid and human. Of his focus on the “poetic moments of the ordinary,” a 2003 review in Artforum said, “It is precisely this continual, ever-expanding reflection on and skepticism about the various functions and values of images, their truth content and modes of employment, that make Feldmann’s work now seem seminal. And his relevance to contemporary art practice derives not least from his acknowledgment of the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, the moments of displacement and projection inherent in every form of representation.”

Described as an “anthropologist of the avant-garde,” Michael Stevenson investigates the mythology that surrounds renowned and controversial events which have been significant in the spheres of both art and politics.

Stevenson revisits the site of an infamous week-long party held in 1971 by the Shah of Iran among the ruins of the ancient Persian city of Persepolis. Reconstructing part of the temporary architecture built for the celebrations (itself now a ruin), Stevenson looks at this pivotal moment in Iranian history which led toward the subsequent cultural revolution.

This publication is part of the series of artists projects edited by Christoph Keller. Personally selected by Keller, for Textfield, as one of his top five from the series.