Search Engine: Book Launch and Conversation

Join us at READ Books for the launch of Search Engine, a new monograph on the work of Antonia Hirsch, edited by Jayne Wilkinson, designed by Derek Barnett, and published by Information Office. Hirsch will present the book in conversation with Libby Leshgold Gallery Director/ Curator, Vanessa Kwan.

Search Engine is a book project that situates Berlin-based artist Antonia Hirsch’s conceptual practice on par with her image and object making. The publication’s title and its central feature, a classic book index, stake the gamut of the artist’s enterprise: mobilizing contemporary tools, narratives, and epistemic systems, she transforms raw information and raw material into investigations of how we situate ourselves emotionally, socially, politically, and economically.

The publication comprises an extensive image section, texts by Henriette Huldisch (chief curator at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis) and Katharina Rein (art historian and media scholar, University of Potsdam), a conversation between Elena Filipovic (director, Kunstmuseum Basel) and Antonia Hirsch, and an introduction and glossary by the artist.

By mingling pictures of work-in-progress, research images, as well as artwork documentation, Search Engine undermines the distinction of “high” and “low,” art and non-art. A similar gesture is performed by the book’s index where terms key to Hirsch’s practice are ordered alphabetically, rather than thematically or by importance.

Hirsch and Kwan will use the book as a jumping off point to discuss how the conditions for artistic and institutional practice have shaped Hirsch’s work over recent years. And speaking from the perspective of artist and producer respectively, Hirsch and Kwan will more broadly address institutional frameworks and their tools vis-à-vis contemporary art production: what these tools are or might be and how they can be mobilized in today’s critical practices.

Antonia Hirsch was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and received her BFA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (London, England). From 1994 to 2010, the German-Canadian artist lived and worked in Vancouver, Canada. She has been based in Berlin since 2010. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, USA); Salzburger Kunstverein (Austria); Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Taiwan); Tramway (Glasgow, Scotland); Kunstinstituut Melly, FKA Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam, Netherlands); ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Germany); and in Canada at Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver) and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto). She has been artist-in-residence at institutions such as the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Canada) and the Cité des Arts (Paris, France), and has received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, Hessische Kulturstiftung, and Stiftung Kunstfonds.

Hirsch’s projects and writing have appeared in publications such as C Magazine, Fillip, The Happy Hypocrite, and Triple Canopy. In addition to artist books, she has published two anthologies, Intangible Economies (Fillip, 2012) and Negative Space: Orbiting Inner & Outer Experience (SFU Galleries, 2015). She was an associate editor at Fillip from 2009 to 2015. Her work is held in public collections, including those of the Vancouver Art Gallery (Canada), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), and Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry (Miami Beach, USA).