Produced on the occasion of Mathias Poledna’s participation at the 55th International Art Exhibition—Venice Biennale, representing Austria.

A 35mm colour film roughly three minutes in length, Imitation of Life was produced using the historic, labor-intensive technique of handmade animation and is built around a cartoon character performing a musical number. Its buoyant spirit and visual texture evoke the Golden Era of the American animation industry during the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the preceding years, the time of the Great Depression, the medium had evolved from a crude form of mass spectacle into a visual language of enormous richness and complexity that shaped and continues to resonate in our collective imaginary.

Designed by the artist in collaboration with Martha Stutteregger.

A portion of the film can be viewed here.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Ketty La Rocca, at Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, 6 June–10 August, 2003.

Ketty La Rocca (1938–1976) was an important proponent of Conceptual and Body Art in Italy in the 1960s and 70s. Based on a visual poetry, she dealt radically with the sociopolitical limits of the meaning of language and images in her collages, performances and photographs. A central aspect is the examination of the bodily gesture as an “original means of communication”.

This series of 23 new (Soma)tic poetry rituals and resulting poems by CAConrad create what we can refer to as an “extreme present” set to reveal the creative viability of everything around us. Poetry rituals such as riding escalators and showing photographs of himself to strangers asking, “Excuse me, have you seen this person?” In another he pollinates flowers for security cameras, exclaiming, “I’M A POLLINATOR, I’M A POLLINATOR!” One was written with a ghost, another by stargazing to build his own constellations. (Soma)tic rituals are a practice of unorthodox steps aimed at breaking us out of the quotidian and into a more political and physical spiritual consciousness of The New Wilderness.

Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Poetry. After his boyfriend Earth’s murder, CAConrad was looking for a (Soma)tic poetry ritual to overcome his depression. This new book of 18 rituals and their resulting poems contains that success, along with other political actions and exercises that testify to poetry’s ability to reconnect us and help put an end to our alienation from the planet.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition, Isa Genzken—Works From 1973 To 1983, at the Kunsthalle Basel, 5 September, 2020–24 January 2021, which is dedicated to the artist’s early oeuvre. The publication opens with works from her time as a student at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts (1973-1977) and details the evolution of her art up to 1983. The works shown include sculptures, computer printouts, extensive series of drawings, photographs and films. The artist blends conceptual approaches with personal themes; many works that initially seem to be exercises in geometric abstraction prove upon closer examination to be traces of her own existence, telling stories of personal relationships and the vagaries of desire.

Edited by Marja Bloem, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Sara Martinetti & Jo Melvin.

Better Read Than Dead was the title Seth Siegelaub had chosen for an anthology of his own writing—one of the projects for which he never found the time, busy as he was running his global one-man operation. The selected writings, interviews, extended bibliography and chronology in this source book fill historical gaps in the sprawling network of exhibitions, publications, projects, and collections that constitute Siegelaub’s life’s work. “Siegelaubian paperwork” comprises Siegelaub’s writings, which are reproduced as scans in order to convey the variety of the documents and to give a sense of archival immersion.