THE BEAUTY OF THE FOLD

An Interview with Joan Sallas

Charlotte Birnbaum

This second book in the ground-breaking On the Table series about the culture of gastronomy as artistic expression – edited by Charlotte Birnbaum – delves into the art of napkin folding. It features German master Joan Sallas, whose folded napkins graced the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibit of 1780 Viennese royal table silver. (Watch him fold a “water lily” napkin on YouTube.) Birnbaum interviews Sallas on the history of napkin folding, stretching back to the Renaissance and Baroque, and contributes a short essay on the art’s complex history; the remainder of the book is an illustrated catalog of Sallas’s ornate folding techniques.

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More from the On the Table Series

ZARINA BHIMJI

Landscapes and buildings haunted by their layered histories are the protagonists in British artist Zarina Bhimji’s photographs and large-scale film installations, with India and East Africa the repeat locations for her forays into the archaeology of place. This catalog of a major survey exhibition spanning 25 years presents the first overview of Bhimji’s work. Sound and picture combine to transform image into metaphor, politics into poetry. Spans early installation pieces from She Loved to Breathe: Pure Silence (1987), to her critically acclaimed film Out of Blue (2002), first shown at documenta XI, and her much-anticipated latest work, Yellow Patch (2011). Includes an in-depth conversation between the artist and the exhibition’s curators, Achim Borchardt-Hume and Kathleen Bühler plus an essay by art historian and writer TJ Demos in which he analyses what he calls Bhimji’s ‘Cinema of Affect’.

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