The catalog accompanies Selma Selman's solo exhibition Flowers of Life, which includes recent works - sculptures, a video work and drawings from 2021 to 2024. These take up central aspects of Selman's oeuvre and reflect her own experiences as well as those of her Rom*nja family. The first part of the book directly depicts the exhibition using installation views. In addition to a comprehensive introduction to the exhibition and Selman's work by curator Matthias Ulrich, an essay by Catherine Nichols delves deeper into the aspect of Selman's collaboration with her family and also traces art historical references and connections.

In the other part of the book, the catalog focuses on Selman's work to date, focusing in particular on her special paintings on scrap metal and her various performances. The artist herself has her say in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, providing direct insights into her work and giving a very personal account of her upbringing, her training and her path into artistic work, which began at an early age.

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This first publication on Selma Selman presents the young artist and her remarkable, multifaceted oeuvre to date

Security and threat, power and powerlessness, the clash of society and state power, interaction and isolation. The video works Double Bind and Threshold Barriers by Aernout Mik create haunting situations that open up questions. Valid frames of reference seem to be suspended, social parameters no longer apply. New dynamics and structures of authority and security are hinted at, but there is still a lack of clarity. And where does the individual stand and position himself or herself in these spaces and situations of transition?

Katharina Dohm, curator of the exhibition, and Daniel Loick, philosopher and sociologist, explore these questions in their text contributions to the catalog. Based on Mik's spatial and video installations, the behavior and interaction of groups in different, even unstable social contexts is illuminated.

Tip: The catalog, designed in direct reference to the aesthetics of Aernout Mik's works, opens up very direct, immediate insights into Mik's video works and shows images of his latest work Threshold Barriers for the first time.

Between 1933 and 1945, the National Socialist regime controlled artistic creation in Germany. In particular, artists who were persecuted because of their religion, their origins or their political views fled from the state threats into emigration. But what happened to those who remained in the country?

The catalog shows the different strategies and scope of action used by artists who did not seek or find any proximity to the Nazi regime. On the basis of 14 selected biographies, the volume illustrates in scholarly text contributions that apathy, stagnation and hopelessness were not the only factors that determined artistic work during this period.

Tip: Around 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs vividly reflect the contradictions of the artistic biographies of this period.

For the first time, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting the work of the Swedish artist couple Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg in an extensive survey exhibition in Germany. On display are around 40 video and sound works from the last two decades as well as their first virtual reality work from last year. The encounter with the films of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg has something of a seduction - they impressively and directly attract the viewer into colorful, suggestive worlds accompanied by hypnotic music. Their films resemble absurd dreams and repressed memories, they atmospherically fathom the limits of what is humanly bearable. Curator Lena Essling, philosopher Patricia MacCormack, musician David Toop and curator Massimiliano Gioni decipher the work of Djurberg's mountain in terms of locations, sound and central themes.

TIP With an abundance of large-format color illustrations and picture series, the catalog provides a multifaceted insight into the complex work of Djurberg Berg.

A glass display case. Behind it a stage showing scenes relating to folklore or natural history, inhabited by all kinds of materials, stuffed animals or even human figures. This is what we typically associate with dioramas. And what does this have to do with art? For the first time, the exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle takes a critical look at this question. The show starts even before the development of Louis Daguerre’s theaters at the Paris Opera, with the early religious tableaux dating from the 18th century which reflect the scientific use of dioramas in natural history museums and continues right up to the 21st century, to the deconstruction of the diorama in contemporary photographs, films and installations. The numerous texts in the accompanying catalogue range from meticulous technical instructions to art texts and even the kind of theoretical analyses typical of the history of art and culture. They reflect the interdiscipinarity of this special medium, providing multilayered insights into the cultural history of exhibiting and the development of the diorama as a precursor to the virtual world

TIP In addition to the wide range of dioramas portrayed, the catalogue texts are unbelievably diverse. They range from the detailed analyses by Carl Akeley, the inventor of the dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, to a letter by Anselm Kiefer to the curator and Donna Haraway’s famous text on the “teddy bear patriarchy”

The photographic series “Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert)” is based on a collaboration between Horn and the French film and stage actress Isabelle Huppert. Together they selected earlier roles Huppert had played that the actress then performed again for the camera. For these photographs, Huppert visualized her repertoire solely on the basis of her memory, without the aid of the scripts or the films themselves. 
Setting out from the Schirn, Horn places a selection of these motifs in public space in a way that does not reveal that they are part of her work or an artistic project: no mention is made either of the artist or the exhibiting institution, and there is no title that would indicate that it is a work of art. Sixteen motifs appear in places in Frankfurt’s urban space in which advertising is usually displayed—advertising that in our society for the most part relies on the impact of faces. However, in Horn’s work the portraits are not furnished with commentary and therefore raise questions, for example how and whether we can read the face we are looking at even without a prescribed context.

Outstanding works and groups of works dating from the late nineteenth century to the present strikingly demonstrate the final intensification or surprising turn within an artist’s oeuvre. The catalogue centers on works by fourteen artists such as Claude Monet and Henri Matisse, who produced a late work that has received acclaim in the meantime, or Martin Kippenberger and Bas Jan Ader, who, when they died young, left us an almost unknown “late work.” 
Artists: Bas Jan Ader, Stan Brakhage, Giorgio de Chirico, Walker Evans, Alexej von Jawlensky, Georgia O’Keeffe, Martin Kippenberger, Willem de Kooning, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Francis Picabia, Ad Reinhardt und Andy Warhol 

With examples of installations from the late 1960s to the latest artistic positions, the publication demonstrates the specifically Brazilian aspect of this “art of experience.” The book combines positions now considered classical, like those of Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida, Lygia Clark, Tunga, and Cildo Meireles, with works by younger artists such as Ernesto Neto, Maria Nepomuceno, Henrique Oliviera, and Dias & Riedweg and thus continues the history of the installation in Brazil through to the present.