Austrian artist and curator Anna-Sophie Berger here assembles a group of works, from Arakawa and Gins to Lyle Ashton Harris, that register the body as a habitat that can be imaginatively stretched, altered, modified, adorned, replicated or destroyed.
The gallery becomes a mouth. It has four pointy teeth and is an aged, even sickly, shade of off-white. The teeth are walls, and on them hang artworks selected by Anna-Sophie Berger for the exhibition life and limbs, Swiss Institute's fourth installment of its Architecture and Design Series. Berger's premise for the show considers the body an experimental testing ground for design, a living site that is both vulnerable and resilient. As the title implies, life and limbs exists in a world where the human body, unadorned, is at risk and often confronts threat with dark and knowing humor but also with grace. Across these works, which draw from speculative architectures, Surrealism, late twentieth-century fashion design, and Viennese Actionism, among many other subsects of modern visual culture, Berger's singular understanding of corporeal awareness unfolds. In the clutches of this jaw, bodies find ways to disappear, though some stretch, reach, and metamorphosize in attempts to escape themselves. This book is a means to further explore Berger's thesis. Three remarkable essays, by Annie Godfrey Larmon, Philipp Ekardt and Berger herself, ponder the works that populate this wunderkammer and question design's transformative potential.
Works by Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Lutz Bacher, Günter Brus, Sarah Charlesworth, CoBrA, Moyra Davey, Manfred Deix, Gina Folly, Nathaniel Goldberg/Inge Grognard, Lyle Ashton Harris, Benjamin Hirte, Birgit Jürgenssen, Marc Kokopeli, Nicolas de Larmessin, Tobias Madison, Till Megerle, Johnny Moke for Adeline André, Moschino, Ebecho Muslimova, Kayode Ojo, Meret Oppenheim, Walter Pichler, Lucia Elena Průša, Diamond Stingily, Marija Tavčar, Rosemarie Trockel, Heimo Zobernig.
Published following the eponymous exhibition at Swiss Institute, New York, in 2019.
