In 1995 Cornelia Parker put actress Tilda Swinton in a vitrine, sleeping on display at London's Serpentine Gallery. (Unlike Damien Hirst's lamb under glass there, the artist had the subject's full cooperation.) Parker's brand of conceptual art takes iconic and historically powerful objects, such as a feather from Freud's pillow or soil removed from under the Leaning Tower of Pisa to prevent its collapse, and transforms it into art that both resonates with that power and becomes something new--and often beautiful. In the case of the Pisa dirt, the suspended clumps, exposed to air for the first time in 800 years, float as if released from gravity. Perpetual Canon features Parker's installation in the historic cupola hall of the Wrttembergischer Kunstverein art center in Stuttgart, along with a number of her works on paper. In this collection, the artist again and again unearths the subconscious within the familiar and the clicha, causing us to see them anew. Whether drawing out a filament from dental-filling gold or splitting objects with the same guillotine used to decapitate Marie Antoinette, Parker constantly challenges what we know and what we think we know.

The Arts of Contemplative Care collects the voices of pioneers in the emerging domain of vocational Buddhism. This anthology captures the richness and diversity of practices being developed by socially engaged Buddhists in the fields of chaplaincy and ministry. This volume outlines a robust intellectual and spiritual foundation for the discipline and establishes the methods for practicing contemplative care on college campuses, in hospitals, prisons and the military, and in hospice environments. The Arts of Contemplative Care, the first comprehensive overview of Buddhist chaplaincy of its kind, is sure to become a touchstone work for engaged Buddhists as they forge their place in the world of pastoral care.

In the late sixties German artist Anna Oppermann (1940-1993) began creating installations, which she called Ensembles, containing references to Pop Art, Arte Povera, and Conceptual Art. Assembled using found objects, photographs, sketches, personal texts, quotations, and colored photographic screens, these installations were often misinterpreted by contemporaries as purely biographical statements. The artist's intention, however, was to use these highly complex works to trigger the viewer's thought process, and to show that they could always be understood in new and different ways. Her Ensembles allowed viewers to imagine aesthetic and theoretical decision-making processes, and it is precisely the postmodern ambiguity and performativity that make her open-ended works seem so intriguing today.This publication, featuring a complete index of the Ensembles, re-evaluates Oppermann's oeuvre. It provides a comprehensive documentation of the Stuttgart venue, and examines the works from various theoretical perspectives, keeping the state of contemporary art in mind. Exhibition schedule: Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, April 17-August 12, 2007 · Generali Foundation, Vienna, August 28-December 16, 2007

Presents a survey of Scandinavia's art, exploring the works of 22 Nordic artists who focus on video sculpture in particular.