Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Not Working, Artistic production and matters of class at Kunstverein München, 12 September–22 November, 2020.

Not Working brings together the contributions by artists, theorists and writers who in their work examine the interdependence of artistic production and social class. The complex structures and substantial rise in social inequalities, particularly visible in light of the current pandemic, have given the concept of class a wide range of connotations. Despite the ongoing attempts to view contemporary art in the sense of “class homogeneity”; it remains complicit in the reproduction and masking of existing conditions which it often claims to overcome. The texts in this book form a ground were class can be mediated with respect to artistic practices and other structures in the art world.

With contributions by Annette Wehrmann, Dung Tien Thi Phuong, Josef Kramhöller, Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky, Leander Scholz, Lise Soskolne, Mahan Moalemi, Marina Vishmidt and Melanie Gilligan, and Steven Warwick.

More information on the exhibition can be found here.

Produced on the occasion of Group Material: Market at Kunstverein München, 6 May–18 June, 1995. From the early 1980s, Group Material worked on complex social and cultural issues: in 1988, for example, they developed a four-part project on today’s understanding of democracy, followed by a so-called AIDS timeline. For Kunstverein München they developed a new project about consumption. The space was modelled after a shopping mall and contained products of the commodity world, which were collected by Group Material and commented on in the exhibition.

Produced on the occasion of Henrik Olesen’s participation in the group exhibition No Swimming at the Kunstverein München (2000).

Produced on the occasion of Motion, a major exhibition by Dutch artist, graphic designer, and educator Karel Martens at Kunstverein München. Co-edited by Martens and Julie Peeters, the bulk of the content for this book comes from the video Not for Resale—a sequence of photographs from Martens’ studio wall in Hoog Keppel in 2000. The videos Lost & Found (2004), and Tol (2008) are also included in the book, as well as a transcription of a conversation between Martens and Kunstverein director Chris Fitzpatrick.

Designed by Julie Peeters.

In 1993 the US-American artist Andrea Fraser realised the exhibition project Eine Gesellschaft des Geschmacks with and at the Kunstverein München. In the run-up to it she interviewed Helmut Draxler and board members of the Kunstverein on questions of self-conception and taste. She arranged the answers into an audio collage that could be heard in the Kunstverein’s exhibition rooms, the written version was printed in a publication. Artworks borrowed from the board members that were partly mentioned in the audio installation were also part of the exhibition and publication.

Designed by Andrea Fraser and Anahita Krzyzanowski.

Exhibition booklet roduced on the occasion of Pati Hill: Something other than either at Kunstverein München, 7 March–16 August, 2020, Pati Hill’s first posthumous institutional solo exhibition in Europe. Hill left behind an artistic output spanning roughly 60 years and encompassing various disciplines. Untrained as an artist, she began to use the photocopier as an artistic tool in the early 1970s and continued to do so until her death, leaving behind an extensive oeuvre that explores the relationship between image and text.

The exhibition also considers her writing, publishing, and editing as practices that both question and accompany the visual work. As a fragmentary, necessarily incomplete index of her engagement with image and text (re-)production, the show includes published novels, poems, sketchbooks, unpublished manuscripts, and letters in addition to the xerographs.

A PDF of the booklet can be found here.