Through a close examination of the political and aesthetic strategies that artist Ines Doujak employs in her work, this book explores the realities of the current economic, microbiological, and ecological crises.
In the context of Ines Doujak's exhibition Geistervölker, Kunsthalle Wien and Sternberg Press publish a book that looks deeply into the artist's practice. In the exhibition, curated by What, How & for Whom / WHW, the artist traced, in fragments, the origins of pandemics throughout history and linked them to a global economy that is based on logics of extraction facilitated by colonial legal mechanisms and late capitalism.
These subjects have always been present in Doujak's works. Therefore, it felt crucial to have a book that allows several writers, theoreticians, and poets from different geographies to reflect on the political and aesthetic strategies that Doujak has been using during these past thirty years. The book is not a monograph nor a catalogue but rather a mosaic of texts in dialogue with Ines Doujak's oeuvre, which engage with burning and urgent topics such as how we relate to the world around us and to each other.
Since the 1990s, Ines Doujak (born 1959 in Klagenfurt, Austria) has been developing a multidisciplinary practice that encompasses photography, performance, film, and installation and uses political theory as well as natural and human-made objects—sculpture in the broadest sense—to deconstruct the political implications of sexist and racist stereotypes. Her meticulous research and her strong storytelling ability allow her the prowess to use both science and the grotesque to denounce exploitative structures and inequalities in society.
Edited by Ines Doujak.
Texts by John Barker, Maria Berrios, Alice Creischer, T. J. Demos, Danny Hayward, Patricia Highsmith, Matthew Hyland, Ernst Jandl, Pablo Lafuente, Pedro G. Romero, Grace Samboh, Klaus Speidel, Markus Wörgötter; foreword by What, How & for Whom / WHW.
