Heike Munder Books

Based on an exhibition of the same title, this book focus on self-confident, non-conformist feminist positions, and points out that new role models and strategies are being requested. * * In her essay, Amelia Jones contests the notion of a current post-feminism and, using the example of Pipilotti Rist's works, develops a model of parafeminism. Refering to Mary Beth Edelson and Annie Sprinkle, Maria Elena Buszek compares two generations and their respective strategies, and Katy Deepwell questions the role of female artists within art history. Mercedes Bunz looks at femininism in relation to flexibilized capitalism and diagnoses a new form of oppression. The exhibition's curator, Heike Munder, presents a survey of the exhibition's different positions and makes an appeal for new role models. * * With contributions by artists such as Anat Ben-David, Patty Chang, Mary Beth Edelson, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Manon, Yoko Ono, Pipilotti Rist, Katharina Sieverding, Annie Sprinkle, and Mathilde ter Heijne. * * Published with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich. * * Awarded in the competition „The most beautiful Swiss books.“

The origins of the collection of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst date from the late 1950s, it initiated by the migros founder Gottlieb Duttweiler; and, in the late 1970s, began concentrating on collecting international contemporary art. This publication offers a wide overview focusing on the core pieces of the collection, which consists of around 400 artworks by international and Swiss contemporary artists such as Art & Language, Maurizio Cattelan, Christopher Wool, Katharina Sieverding, Rachel Harrison, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Christoph Büchel, Paul Thek, and Douglas Gordon. * * The large-scale illustrations are accompanied with texts by writers such as Tom Holert, Tirdad Zolghadr, and Jan Verwoert, reflecting different museums and collection strategies, and referring in particular to the history of the museum which was founded in 1996. Further texts by Philip Ursprung, Heike Munder, and others, outline the main thematic focuses of the collection as political art, participation strategies of the 1990s, glamour and Pop, and the psychological meaning of space and architecture in contemporary art. Short texts by Raphael Gygax, Judith Welter, and Bettina Steinbrügge highlight a selection of specific works and artists in the collection. * * Published with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

Art has always been the sensorium of the all that is fragile, brittle, and porous in the human. In this book, based on an eponymous exhibition, however, human break lines are not treated directly in terms of the human body, but instead through the surrogate of architecture. For at the fractures and interfaces of buildings, the cracks and fissures of human existence are registered analogously. The notion in the title, Displaced Fractures, is taken from the medical world. It describes how bone fracture sites reveal themselves elsewhere than at the major stress site. The publication discusses installations, spatial interventions, and sculptures working with the displacement of symptoms. What predominates is the field of tension between the refusal of form and monumental creations, between subjective and formal rational gestures. * * The book includes works by Phyllida Barlow, Tacita Dean, Emilie Ding, Klara Liden, Ulrich Rückriem, Kilian Rüthemann, Oscar Tuazon, and Klaus Winichner, as well as newly commissioned essays. * * Published with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, and Siemens Stiftung. * *

The artist Tatiana Trouvé works with staged rooms, architectonic interventions and snake-like metal sculptural objects, which seem to be in motion but at the same time strangely frozen. Her staged rooms often use the parameters of interior and exterior, working with the principle of inversion. Psychic spaces are externalised, becoming concrete, sinister “interior” rooms. Trouvé’s pieces become visualisations of “unconscious” conditions that are continuously affected by uncertainty—while her module-like “mental landscapes” circle around issues such as living space, memory, architecture and the construction of reality. This publication is the first devoted exclusively to Trouvé’s drawn work, which can also been seen in this context: at first they look like classical architectural sketches, yet, on closer inspection, they breakdown time and again in the definition of vanishing lines and their interior architecture often remains ambiguous.

The publication presents new works by painter Christoph Ruckhäberle (*1972 in Pfaffenhofen, lives and works in Leipzig). The visual world of Ruckhäberle, who studied animated film at the California Institute of the Arts before attending the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, is peopled by odd, hard-edged figures standing in front of colored rhythmic backgrounds. Colorful drawings of faces recall carved masks, and are composed from a rich and playful vocabulary of forms. These forms, and the wealth of colors in Ruckhäberle's works, are broken not only by skewed visual angles or perspectival inconsistencies, but also through the use of Cubist borrowings. * * The book assembles linocuts and offset pages held together by a Japanese binding. Beautifully produced, this artist's book is published in a limited print run. * * Published with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich. *

An artist, filmmaker, and documentarian, Mika Taanila integrates (and goes beyond) the various planes of contemporary art. His films, video clips and installations are built according to the principles of connection, interaction and collaboration. * * Between sound and image, between the latest electronic culture and technological aspirations of the 1960s, between documentary film and advanced experimentation, between fiction and reality, Taanila is working out a novel and protean approach to our representations of modernity and progress through his futuristic techno-utopias. * * Mika Taanila (*1965) lives and works in Helsinki. * * First monograph, published with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

Anticipating architectural sculpture by artists like Rachel Whiteread among others, Swiss artist Heidi Bucher's 'soft' sculptures and Latex molds of architectural fragments and whole spaces first won her fame in the 1970s and 80s. Bucher, the mother of artist Mayo Bucher, died in 1993. This is the first retrospective monograph on her work, and long overdue.

English-Polish edition (fully bilingual) // This anthology aims to exploit the psychological associations of space and the psychological reactions to it, such as agoraphobia, vertigo, and claustrophobia. The publication analyzes spatial emotion in contemporary art and architecture and maps its extremes and multiple overtones. It contains essays by Anthony Vidler on the relation between psychoanalysis and the perception of space, Mark Wigley on insecurity and design, Philippe Rahm on the emotional conditioning of space construction, and Stephen Willats on living conditions in social housing. Featuring works by such artists as Monica Bonvicini, Christoph Buchel, Jan Dibbets, Urs Fischer, H R Giger, Katarzyna Jozefowicz, Anish Kapoor, Daniel Liebeskind, Jane and Louise Wilson, Paul Noble, Gordon Matta-Clark, Paul Thek, Monika Sosnowska, and Decosterd & Rahm, the anthology also provides a visual survey of these topics in contemporary art. Designed by Norm, the book was distinguished in "The Most Beautiful Swiss Books" competition in 2003. It was published on the occasion of the exhibition by the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, and Laznia Center for Contemporary Art, Gdansk.