Thingness


Editors:

Nina Nowak and Gaby Peters

Publisher:

Künstlerhaus Dortmund (Dortmund, 2016)


Thingness accompanied an exhibition of the same name, curated by Nina Nowak and Gaby Peters for Künstlerhaus Dortmund. The spaces of the exhibition and the publication sat alongside each other, rather than either referring to, or requiring, the other. The two spaces worked towards an unpacking of what a ‘thing’ might be, and how humans form images of (or relationships with) them, however remarkable or mundane they might be. Nowak and Peters state in their introduction that it is the ‘ubiquity of things and our casual treatment of them that has drawn us to the subject – a relationship that makes things appear to be both everywhere and nowhere. We forget how much they are a part of us, how they form us and make us dependent on them, how they reflect back on us, how they suddenly surprise us or how they unexpectedly become strange and resist our attempts to decode them.’

The publication exists in the form of a box containing each contributor’s text or project in its own distinct pamphlet. I contributed a text, From Art Objects to Art Things, which attempted to generate a modified reading of the works of Mark Landis by placing them in relation to the work of Guglielmo Achille Cavellini, whose work I had come across when researching my project, One Drop of Water Contains As Much Electricity as Would Make a Thunderstorm. This text became the founding document for The Landis Museum, and also fed into the production of works for Untitled.


Exhibited in:

Thingness: Über die Dinge

Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Dortmund (8 Oct 2016 → 4 Nov 2016)