Nicole Schweizer Knihy

Jean Otth (1940-2013) was a pioneer of video art in Switzerland. While studying art history and philosophy in the early 1960s, he began to experiment with the then very new medium, making full use of its visual potential. From the beginning, Otth's artistic trajectory, which was influenced by the practice of painting, became closely tied to the emergence of new technologies. His works were soon exhibited in Switzerland as well as at major international shows, such as the 1973 Biennale São Paulo, the 1976 Venice Biennale, and documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977.Throughout his career he mixed immaterial video projection with material reality and explored their interaction. While constantly questioning the media he used, Otth produced borderline works that test the observer and provoke desire through covering-up, reframing, and shifting. This new monograph, the first book ever in English on this remarkable artist, features photographic and filmed works as well as his drawings from all periods of his career.

This first monograph dedicated to the work of Yael Bartana (born 1970 in Kfar Yehezkel, Israel; lives and works in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Tel Aviv) gives a comprehensive overview of the artist's films, installations, performative projects, photographs, and sound works of the past 15 years. From Bartana's early video vignettes to her most recent project "What if Women Ruled the World?" (2017), by way of her monumental trilogy "And Europe Will Be Stunned" (2007-2011) with which she represented Poland at the 54th Venice Biennale, the book highlights the artist's fascination with the ways in which social rituals shape both individual identities and collective memory. Far from a mode of direct documentation, Bartana's works are themselves modeled on the aesthetics of the ritual, and are therefore, above all, performative works, which unapologetically seduce us. Her films draw attention to the fact that cinema is a ritual, and that the camera, perhaps better than any other device, mimics the ritualistic in its ability to fetishize, seduce, and draw us into the ceremony we are watching.