The concept of transcorporeality (Stacy Alaimo) builds on the thesis that all bodies are permeable, open-ended systems in constant exchange with their environment and other biological, technological, economic, and sociopolitical realities. With works by Jesse Darling, Flaka Haliti, Trajal Harrell, Paul Maheke, Nick Mauss, Park McArthur, Oscar Murillo, and Sondra Perry, Transcorporealities critically examines the permeability of bodies-including the museum-at the interfaces between subject, object, and space. It focuses on urgent (institutional) questions of visibility and accessibility as well as the possibilities and limits of representation: What is inscribed and attributed to bodies? Who is looking at whom? What is meant when we say “we” and “they”?

With texts from Stacy Alaimo, Yilmaz Dziewior, Park McArthur, Leonie Radine & Nora Sternfeld.

German artist and 2017 Turner Prize nominee Andrea Büttner examines depictions of beggars in visual culture in an artist’s book about poverty, art history, theology, and the politics of social benefits. Büttner, whose work addresses notions of shame, vulnerability, and dignity, presents a recent series of woodcuts, as well research conducted at the Warburg Institute in London, including sixteenth-century vignettes from the “Liber Vagatorum” and a visual essay on the iconography of shepherds and kings in nativity scenes.

With contributions by Andrea Büttner, Anne Carson, Christopher P. Heuer and Linda Nochlin.

Mathias Poledna’s film Indifference (2018) further advances the artist’s ongoing inquiry into modernity’s visual imaginary. The film unfolds as a series of brief, hallucinatory scenes set in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at the cusp of World War I. It details in elegant restraint the seemingly mundane routine of a single protagonist played by French actor Alain-Fabien Delon. His character—an Austrian officer/aristocrat—is drawn from types common in German-speaking fin-de-siècle literature, as well as from historical dramas and period films produced in the Cold War era. While evocative of the larger backdrop of traumatic modernization and conflict in early 20th century European history, Poledna’s film forgoes a broader narrative focusing instead on the transient and disjointed.

Joachim Bandau’s early sculptural works from the years 1967–1974 remain as strange and singular today as when he first made them. At once technoid and bodily, minimal and monstrous, often with couplings or hoses that resemble weirdly organic orifices and tentacles, these works address questions of agency, control, technology, and history in a way that is increasingly relevant to the present.

With texts by Joachim Bandau, Alexandra Bircken, Elena Filipovic, Martin Herbert, Renate Wagner. Designed by Petra Hollenbach.

The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’ is Martin Kippenberger’s (1953–1997) largest and most complex work. The artist spent several years preparing, researching and producing it. The installation, set out on a stylised football pitch, is made up of 50 table and chair ensembles. Alongside classic design icons and found pieces, it also includes furniture especially produced by Kippenberger as well as pieces by numerous befriended artists, including Cosima von Bonin, Tony Oursler, Ulrich Strothjohann, and Jason Rhoades.

This publication examines the work from various perspectives. It is the first time, thanks to extensive research, that the ‘biographies’ of the individual objects and the contexts of their creation and collection have been documented in such a detailed way, offering a new way to approach Martin Kippenberger’s life and oeuvre.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition at Museum Folkwang, Essen (2021).

The Austrian Günter Peter Straschek belonged to the very first cohort of students at the Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie in West Berlin – alongside Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki and Helke Sander. He and many of his fellow students participated in the New Left movement, recording demonstrations and supporting campaigns. Straschek’s Western für den SDS (1967/68, cinematography: Holger Meins) depicts the development of the left as a learning process for women, whose consciousness grows through the movement, but who continue to have no say in it. It was seized by the governing body of the film school in 1968, never screened and consequentially became legendary. Western für den SDS was finally given its premiere in 2018 at Museum Ludwig, as part of an exhibition dedicated to Straschek. This book publishes previously unreleased work material related to the film, which is a key work of the student movement and of Günter Peter Straschek’s oeuvre. Includes a photo gallery from the Christopher Williams class, Köln, 2019.