We started making machines together in 2010. These machines consisted of a sensor and device couplet, by which a sensor would trigger a device to perform a simple task. We experimented with sensor inputs like passing cars and tasks like heat guns blowing up trash bags, or later we would connect the machines to trains and have them push little cardboard cars back and forth. Still triggered by trains, the machines now move clock parts.

We disassemble mechanical clocks, take their parts and combine them with L-brackets, screws, washers, nuts, motors, felt, rubber bands, fishing line, and heat shrink tubing. The characteristics of the clock parts constrain and guide our activities. As we reinvent their function, the parts become less and less recognizable, their movements more and more estranged.

—Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, 2023

Published on the occasion of Běla Kolářová: Neznámé Písmo–Fotogramy, derealizace, asambláže 1956–1996, at Galerii U prstenu, Prague, 11–30 March, 1998

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.

In recent years, Kolářová’s work was shown at the documenta 12 (2007), at the Raven Row gallery in London (2010) and in solo shows at the Museum Kampa in Prague (2008) and Muzeum Umění in Olomouc (2007).

Produced on the occasion of Tony Conrad’s retrospective at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2018), MIT List Visual Arts Center and Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University (2018/2019) and ICA, University of Pennsylvania (2019). With texts by Rachel Adams, Vera Alemani, Constance DeJong, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anthony Elms, David Grubbs, Henriette Huldisch, Branden W. Joseph, Andrew Lampert, Christopher Müller, Annie Ochmanek, Tony Oursler, Tina Rivers Ryan, Jay Sanders, Paige Sarlin, Christopher Williams.

Bar of soap as part of the exhibition Cut a Door in the Wolf by Jason Dodge at MACRO, Rome, 11 November, 2021–16 March, 2022.

Marina Xenofontos collects and catalogues the musings of an otherwise unknown inventor known as Christophoros Kyriakides. Born in Cyprus in 1949, he invented a board game called Six Continents Stars Compass that received little recognition and was printed in a very small number of editions. By chance encounter, Xenofontos stumbled across the game, and thus started a practice-based research into the inventor’s impressive archive—documented here in photocopies of complex scribbles, diagrams and drawings. Edition of 150.

Sven Stilinović was still a schoolboy when he started exhibiting with the Group of Six Artists on the streets of Zagreb in 1975. Photographic enlargements of small collages in which he recycled fragments of older photographs and tiny objects, as well as series where photographs of garbage interchange in a photographic sequence with photographs of cluttered shops raise the issue of photographic motif, while in “Comparison of the development of painting and non-development of photography” (1975) he concludes that that which is offered as a history of photography does not lead to its openness and creativity.

With texts from Ivana Bago, Branko Cerovac, Suzana Marjanić, Vlado Martek, Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Branka Stipančić, Raša Todosijević, Goran Trbuljak.