Mark Pezinger Books

In this play—a perpetual stew—the so-called “accessories” and “props” of artists take center stage. No longer silent or subordinate, these objects speak, question, and disrupt, revealing the often-invisible infrastructures that shape artistic production. Their conversations unfold across systems of value, labor, authorship, and spectatorship, casting light on the backstage economies of the art world.

What was once peripheral becomes protagonist, as the tools of making articulate their own agency and implication in broader cultural, political, and institutional logics.

The Tales series has accompanied Cramer for over 25 years, unfolding narratives through minimal means with just a few pages and photographs. Through the repetition of similar images, subtle changes gradually surface, allowing understated narratives to resonate. It is moments of suspension, captured just before something happens, leaving both the photographed subjects and the viewers suspended in a quiet tension.

“Every photograph I take is taken with the hope that a possible narrative will unfold. Later, in the studio, I can see whether a sequence can actually be found that will yield a small story from the various pictures – or from one individual photograph. It is through repetition of a similar image that these narratives begin to emerge. Often almost invisible changes can generate the most intense moments.”

Glossy on the outside, with a bright orange inside cover and a newspaper core, this publication has unconventional haptics which reflect the out-of-the-box curatorial approach of Cathrin Pichler (1946–2012) and her cross-disciplinary archive.

Upon the initial consideration from an archival perspective, something becomes clear: Cathrin Pichler and her work seem impossible to clearly pigeonhole with respect to either discipline, method, or format.

Projects and research interests are interleaved, interlinked, and continued, and adhere to an interdisciplinary understanding of scientific and curatorial research that resists archival categories. The index of the nearly 4,000 archival documents is printed in this book and accompanied by contributions from five artists who reflect on the written estate of this multifaceted curator and of its archiving, comment on items found, and thus bring Cathrin Pichler’s practice into the present.

Throughout the publication, handwritten text fragments by Cathrin Pichler make unexpected appearances, adding a personal layer to the book. These notes feel as though she is directly reflecting on the project itself. One such remark reads, 'Der Druck ist leider nicht so gut!' [Unfortunately, the print didn’t turn out well!], blending her candid critique with a sense of humor.

The title Architekturfotografie is intentionally misleading, as the Swiss artist Bianca Pedrina is never concerned with the monumental or the grand whole, but rather with seemingly insignificant details, traces, and fragments of urban spaces and their architectures.

The appearance of the publication is equally modest: designed as a paperback, it stands in contrast to traditional photography books. However, it is all the richer in content: it brings together photographs from Taipei, Seoul, Shanghai, Pisa, Andratx, Sofia, Leeds, Glasgow, St. Anton, Colmar, Zagreb, Brno, and Mödling—allowing them to blend into one another without commentary. Texts by Michiel Huijben run like a red thread through the book, reflecting on the concept of boundaries that shape our relationships, both to our surroundings and to each other.

In “On Slaugther”, artist Klara Hobza uses scientific drawings to accompany Markus, a dropout in the forests of Sweden as he slaughters a sheep. The best impression of the book is undoubtedly gained by quoting the table of contents: Bench; Knives; Sharpening; Whisk; Before we start; The killing; The skinning; The organs; Usage of intestines; The Slaughter will be finished now; Glue; Meat; …

“Every time I slaughter, I think it’s something, hmm ... it’s something ... it’s a feeling. The part where I feel nervous to kill the animal or some- thing, that has long ago gone away ... in a way. But I think the whole act in itself, with the taking off the skin and opening the body and seeing all this inside and ... I think the whole act – as a whole – is kind of beau- tiful, in a strange way.” – Markus

This book is a transcript of hours of bus rides through London. Conversations, soundscapes, and announcements are meticulously written down, with priority given to the loudest noise or the loudest voice(s).

The result is a dense textual fabric, a hybrid between documentation and poetry. In the process, Miggitsch creates a portrait of a sound environment that belongs to a particular place.It is not surprising that Susanne Miggitsch actually comes from photography. Her textual recording of what she hears is reminiscent of a photographic process and its attempt to depict what is seen one-to-one. Both, of course, capture only fragments: “I really tried, but I'm afraid I have to admit that I was not able to capture it all with just a pen in my hand.” The book is to be understood as a script/score and will be performed by several voices when it is presented.

The purpose of the em dash is wide-ranging —as an appropriation of silence, as acting dissonance, as interruption, as occupying space. This anthology zooms into the pointed use of em dashes in the poems of pioneering Dadaist artist, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874 – 1927).

Her poems; performances; costumes and life-style all made a point of challenging extremely bourgeois artistic and moral conventions with an unapologetically feminist, proto-punk aesthetic. The reader will find Elsa’s works in conversation with the likes of well-known dashers such as Gertrude Stein, Laurence Sterne, Heinrich von Kleist or the queen of dashing herself Emily Dickinson. Juxtaposed to Elsa’s expressive handwritten dashes the book connects her biography with the history and the stylistic usage of em dashes within the realms of bibliography, book history, literature, sociology and typography.

Peeing in public is a battle, played out on fields economical, political, technological and sexual. Moreover, it is one battle fought continuously within sphere of gender; gender equality, gender identity and gender-based violence. The question of when, where and how is certainly a preoccupation for all kinds of people.

These range from the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who discovered that there is money in urine; to Xi Jinping, who announced the Toilet Revolution; or Hillary Clinton, who upon returning late to a televised debate, simply stated “well, it takes women longer”.

The works of Swiss artist Sebastian Utzni uncover cultural, political and aesthetical parallels. They are conceptually strong, politically challenging and never lack a certain childishly playfulness, like his latest publication “A is for Allah”. The booklet appears like an oversized school notebook, with handwritten texts inside which are actually based on woodcuts.

The text is a series of writing exercises that has its origin in an Afghan schoolbook series, which was financed by the United States. The Education Program for Afghanistan of the University of Nebraska in Omaha published the books since the beginning of the 1980s with a 50 million dollar grant from United States Agency for International Development during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. For the Mujahidin, who were fighting against the Sowiets, the schoolbooks were a medium to spread political propaganda and to prepare a new generation of holy warriors with the ideas of a militant islamism for the fight against the enemies of islam. In 1992 there was a revision of the series, militant pictures and texts were removed. Anyway, even today a lot of the original copies of the books are used in the areas influenced by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

On October 6th 2020, Instagram celebrated its 10 year anniversary. Shortly after the social photo sharing app was launched in October 2010, Calypso's Cave on the Maltese island of Gozo was closed off to the public after a partial collapse due to geological movement.

While the “stabilisation and conservation project” announced by the Ministry of Gozo is still awaiting completion, the cave on the opposite side of the bay has become increasingly popular amongst the social media community – and is now also being tagged – as #calypsocave.

Swiss media artist Stefan Karrer approaches Calypso Cave through its photographic reception on social media platforms. In doing so he has tracked down a comedy of errors and humorously shows us how social platforms influence and change our travels and the way we consume landscape and its cultural heritage.