This record brings together the three components from a major body of work by Ruth Buchanan. Here, the forms of performance, exhibition and film are compressed through and into audio; the record becoming both the documentation of the work at the same time as proposing a script for future versions. Buchanan’s texts and graphics are rendered into paired back dense sound pieces where the capacity of language as a system that is both employed by and defines the subject is emphasized. Buchanan explores the examination of subject and system by language, where language itself constitutes a contested field of interaction between the two.

Or, a building was recorded in part at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe. Or, a screen was recorded in part at the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Berlin.

This record is released on the occasion of the exhibition Or, a camera Or, a building Or, a screen by Ruth Buchanan at the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, September 19 – December 13, 2015 curated by Anna Sabrina Schmid.

The exhibition and the record act as the epilogue to the body of work commissioned by the Badischer Kunstverein, Karslruhe and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.

You can here an audio sample here.

Libraries are generally perceived as storehouses, spaces of stable accumulation and containment. While the architecture may attempt to operate in this stable tone, the material contained within them is often far wilder. Histories, biographies, loose thoughts, detailed notations, bodies, and objects are all temporarily suspended, cataloged, and organized, creating relationships where perhaps previously there was none. An example of where the tension between what is contained in libraries and how it is contained emerges in a highly palpable way in the trajectory of the Staatsbibliothek Berlin. This new artist book by Ruth Buchanan charts three narratives associated with the life of this particular library. The anecdotes become both concrete examples and metaphors through which to interrogate the production, situating, and sharing of meaning.

With texts by Ruth Buchanan and Ian White. Designed by David Bennewith.

An artist publication produced by gerlach en koop, “Two seconds from the film ‘Close-up’ by Abbas Kiarostami (1990), starting from the moment the aerosol can is being absentmindedly pushed with the tip of the shoe. Because the street slopes down the empty can rolls on for about half a minute, further and further away from the camera, until it is stopped by the curb…”

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition ‘The Autumn of Modernism’ at De Vleeshal, Middleburg.

An artist publication produced by gerlach en koop, “One and a half second from the film ‘Late Spring’ by Yasujiro Ozu from 1949, shortly after one of the two main characters leaves the house of her friend in a hurry, and just before we see her walking down the street.”

Invitation produced on the occasion of gerlach en koop’s exhibition :, at the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 15 April–27 November, 2016.

Exhibition guide was produced on the occasion of Choses tuées, held at de Appel arts centre in Amsterdam, 2015.

The collective artist gerlach en koop renders things visible by repetition, copying or reuse, by displacement and misplacement, by omissions, erring and making mistakes. The smaller the distance between two identical things—differences that sometimes can only be conceived of—the more interesting.