Statement #12 | Verlag für Handbücher — Sicheres Arbeiten

Statement #12

Verlag für Handbücher — Safe Operations

Performative setting
July 1, 2021, 4–8 pm

Be it operating instructions or user manuals, technical documentation or service instructions, package leaflets or total solutions … these and other pragmatic, efficiency-oriented printed matter comprise the collections of the Verlag für Handbücher [Publishing House for Handbooks]. Their stated aim is to “investigate mechanisms of change” through the medium of artist’s books and to set up a “laboratory of functionality”. Additionally, the collective publishes books, which explore the rhetorics of the handbook and its aesthetic qualities. Similar to Kunstraum Lakeside, the publishing house attends to a very specific segment of artistic production: While Kunstraum Lakeside focuses on research at the interface of economy, technology, and art, the Verlag für Handbücher investigates the instruction manual, which is typically associated with technological-economic contexts, as a special manifestation among literary genres.

Departing from its archive of printed instructions, which is also outfitted as a travelling reference library, the Verlag für Handbücher presents Safe Operations at Kunstraum Lakeside, an interpretation of its handbooks as a performative script and spatial installation.

Verlag für Handbücher
[Publishing House for Handbooks]
www.verlagfuerhandbuecher.de

Safe Operations features a handbook library that collects operating instructions, user manuals, and technical documentation and translates them into performances. At Kunstraum Lakeside you can dispose of your obsolete instruction manuals or package leaflets in a special handbook collection point.

Kurator/en:
Künstlerische Leitung: Franz Thalmair
Kurator*innen: Gudrun Ratzinger, Lea Lugaric