Slow Movement oder: Das Halbe und das Ganze

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To accompany the exhibition "Slow Movement or: Half and whole", a book will be published which will, in text and image, search the peripheries for a movement of art towards an “outer world” as well as for a movement of the outer world towards art. Concerning the “half”, it will pursue the question: where do we think the corresponding parts will come from? To accomplish this, pictures of the works of art on exhibition will be combined with literary/theoretical texts that were written exclusively for the publication as well as with so-called “found” texts and images. These texts and images are quoted from literary and scientific publications of all genres, the press and informative and decorative messages. The aim of this is not a confrontation – of art and non-art, for example –, but to produce an actual compilation; a compilation of traces that are all “found”. The book functions as a well-founded, comprehensive program catalogue: it is not so much a compilation of texts and images “about” the exhibition, the works and the topics at hand, but rather a collection of contributions – often produced in completely different contexts and originating from different sources – that shed light on various aspects, reflect further on them and prompt the reader to do the same. In the context of this approach, the book is viewed as an “exhibition space”, a “showroom”, the arrangement of which unmistakably refers to movement and the fragment, more specifically even than the rooms of the museum do. For the exhibition Slow Movement or: Half and whole with its focus on movement and procedure, as opposed to “work” or object, the publication of a book specifically offers the possibility of a continuation of the project: reproducibility and “objectless” exhibition in text and image further de-emphasize the fact that the works of art are actually works and objects; instead, a temporal aspect is focused on by means of the linear sequence of the pages, the process of reading one word after the other and narrative structure. Thus, the book allows for a radicalization of the thesis that the exhibition is concerned with art that is willing to discard and shed the so-called “work” without further ado. The ultimate aim is not the documentation of a “real” exhibition, but rather its continuation; as a new space for the works on exhibition in which they test and situate themselves. This parallel venue, as it were, is shaped not only by the formal properties of the book, but also by the selected texts. This selection of works, images and forms of presentation will be developed in cooperation with the artists, just like the realization of the exhibition in the rooms of the Kunsthalle.