Produced on the occasion of Kazuna Taguchi’s exhibition I’ll never ask you at MUMOK, Wien, 13 June–16 November, 2025.

Taguchi’s meticulously composed monochrome photographs convey body fragments, gestures, and gazes that resonate with the surrealist tradition concerning the questioning of the photographic representation of the female body. This can be moments of the phantomic or Yūgen*-like, images that capture a figure in a state between appearance and disappearance.

*According to the Japanese poet Kamo no Chōmei (1155–1216), yūgen is a feeling that is not openly expressed in words, but symbolically indicated by images.

Designed by HIT.

Ellen Cantor (1961–2013) combined ready-made materials with diaristic notes and drawings to probe her perceptions and experiences of personal desire and institutional violence. This book is concerned with, and a document of, Cantor’s work through the lens of Pinochet Porn (2008–16) and its making—an epic experimental film embodying and radically extending her multifaceted artistic practice.

A history of the world as it has become known to me brings together writings and archival materials of Cantor’s, including a reproduction in full of her drawing-based script Circus Lives from Hell (2004), alongside contributions by writers, artists, collaborators, and friends reflecting on Cantor’s practice, Pinochet Porn, and a singularly transgressive vision.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

A monograph on the work of Jiří Kovanda, on which Markéta Stará writes about the book’s production: “(Kovanda’s) aim to dissolve the line between art and life brings him to manipulate familiar objects from the outside world and incorporate them into works that, outside of the gallery context (and sometimes even within it), could easily be overlooked. This near invisibility resonates with Kovanda’s efforts to escape artistic trends and avoid any reductive framing. Although it could be argued that his oeuvre hovers on the border between kitsch and high aesthetics, his goal is to test the possibility of their equivalence and thus to deconstruct the distinction between art objects and utilitarian objects. It is exactly this endeavor that brought Kovanda to use the occasion of the publication of a catalogue to transform the book into an art object and make it the subject of his latest exhibition.”

A monograph on the work of Jiří Kovanda, on which Markéta Stará writes about the book’s production: “(Kovanda’s) aim to dissolve the line between art and life brings him to manipulate familiar objects from the outside world and incorporate them into works that, outside of the gallery context (and sometimes even within it), could easily be overlooked. This near invisibility resonates with Kovanda’s efforts to escape artistic trends and avoid any reductive framing. Although it could be argued that his oeuvre hovers on the border between kitsch and high aesthetics, his goal is to test the possibility of their equivalence and thus to deconstruct the distinction between art objects and utilitarian objects. It is exactly this endeavor that brought Kovanda to use the occasion of the publication of a catalogue to transform the book into an art object and make it the subject of his latest exhibition.”

A monograph on the work of Jiří Kovanda, on which Markéta Stará writes about the book’s production: “(Kovanda’s) aim to dissolve the line between art and life brings him to manipulate familiar objects from the outside world and incorporate them into works that, outside of the gallery context (and sometimes even within it), could easily be overlooked. This near invisibility resonates with Kovanda’s efforts to escape artistic trends and avoid any reductive framing. Although it could be argued that his oeuvre hovers on the border between kitsch and high aesthetics, his goal is to test the possibility of their equivalence and thus to deconstruct the distinction between art objects and utilitarian objects. It is exactly this endeavor that brought Kovanda to use the occasion of the publication of a catalogue to transform the book into an art object and make it the subject of his latest exhibition.”

Prague-based artist Běla Kolářová (1923–2010) began experimenting with photographic techniques in the early 1960s, creating photograms and X-ray photographs that continued the Bauhaus tradition of photography as an abstract medium. Thus, for a series of photograms she called vegetages, she produced miniature “artificial negatives” by pressing natural materials into soft paraffin and using them for the exposure of the photographic paper instantaneously as “negatives.” In the late sixties Kolářová increasingly began creating assemblages out of found objects including household items such as snap fasteners, needles and safety pins. Kolářová arranged these objects according to conceptual grids, and thus they are somewhat akin to the work of Nouveaux Realistes as well as to various conceptual practices. The work she produced in this way defied the aesthetic canon of Socialist Realism, and Kolářová developed a remarkable conceptual feminist style that was all her own.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.