Produced on the occasion of Josef Strau’s exhibition A Turtle Dreaming (… Echoes from an Encapsulated Space Exiled Sounds of Letters Requiring Symphonic Treatment) at Secession, Vienna, 24 April – 21 June, 2015.

Josef Strau’s experimental artistic practice developed out of the written word. In his installations he relates texts and objects to each other in manifold ways. On the surface, the texts are characterized by the typographic interplay of printed word and blank space. At another level their distinctive feature is Strau’s idiosyncratic style of writing, which nimbly and playfully tracks his stream of consciousness. Oscillating between the meaningful and the meaningless, he interweaves everyday stories and urban scenes with personal revelations and literary motifs. Both in his exhibition at the Secession and in the accompanying publication, Josef Strau references an old-established motif of literature and film—the artist as dreamer, resembling a turtle, an encapsulated observer and recorder of his urban surroundings.

With her “notebook of dreams” Dineo Seshee Bopape transports you into the world of African scents. The book has been left mostly unprinted, but each right-hand page is coated with a scented print varnish manufactured using a traditional hydro-distillation technique out of the material of earthenware clay vessels to simulate the fragrance of parched soil and withered plants after a rainstorm. Reinforcing this sense perception associated with powerful emotions and memories, a QR code opens an audio file recorded by Bopape that enhances the experience of rain with an acoustic dimension.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Anna Daučíková at Secession, Vienna, 16 September–6 November 2022. Anna Daučíková is a pioneer of feminist-queer art in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Teaching for many years at art academies in Bratislava and Prague, and in recent years at the Salzburg Summer Academy, she counts to the most influential forward thinkers in the area of queer theory and practice.

Produced on the occasion of Manfred Pernice’s exhibition sculpturama at Secession, Vienna, 26 November, 2010–13 February, 2011. With texts from Verena Dengler, Klaus Gölz, Axel Jablonski, Bettina Klein, András Pálffy, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Hemma Schmutz and Annette Südbeck.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition RINO at Mai 36, Zurich. The exhibition and the catalogue present a collaboration between Manfred Pernice and Martin Städeli and deal with Marino Marini and the Marino Marini Museum in Florence.

On the levels of both form and content, Breath Holding Spell unmistakably harks back to Bruce Nauman’s 1970 artist’s book LA AIR, whose eight monochrome pages present photographs of the atmosphere, illustrating the widely varying hues of the air over L.A.

It inspired this artist’s book by Nairy Baghramian, which features variations on a single photographic motif: no more than a cropped detail of a tightly packed standing crowd of people is visible in Tight Sluice. Monochrome pages that reprise the colors of their attire appear in rhythmical alternation with the pictures.

The artist has autographed the books on the back cover, again quoting Nauman, though his signature was a printed facsimile.