Description
Essais
Author/Editor: Hannes Schüpbach
CONTENTS
RELATED: Hannes Schüpbach appears in person November 5, 2023 to speak on this book and to present his films Essais (2020) and Instants (2012). Full details here.
Hannes Schüpbach: Essais
With an essay by Philippe-Alain Michaud, curator of film at the Centre Pompidou. Published by Verlag für moderne Kunst, Vienna, October 2023. Design by Raphael Drechsel, Vienna. English/German/French.
Hannes Schüpbach enters into dialogue with dancer/choreographer Kira Blazek Ziaii, poet/language activist Stephen Watts, art conservator Éléonore Bernard, fashion designer Heba-Raphaëlle Meffre, cellist Flurin Cuonz, author Marco Baschera and visual artist Jiajia Zhang, exploring the concept of movement that starts within us—in dance, poetry, fashion, music and language. How singular are our gestures? Where do transitions between individuals come into play? Where does a shared cultural space come into being? In this venture (the title references Montaigne’s Essais, in which he contemplates existence on the basis of his own observations and reflections) Hannes Schüpbach addresses a pivotal aspect of artistic work. The publication pairs these conversations with images from Schüpbach’s 16mm film Essais and contains an essay by Philippe-Alain Michaud, curator of film at Centre Pompidou, Paris.
96 pages
Published 2023 by Verlag für moderne Kunst
ISBN: 978-3-99153-043-5
Hannes Schüpbach (born 1965, Winterthur) is based in Switzerland. He is a visual artist, a maker of silent films and a writer. He has made eleven silent films since 1999. An overview exhibition of his works, Stills and Movies, at the Kunsthalle Basel was curated by Adam Szymczyk in 2009. It highlighted the intimate conceptual interconnections between his installations, performances and films; they all entice movement and unfold through memory. Many of his pieces explore the creation of art, such as his films Erzählung (2007), L’Atelier (2007), Spin/Verso/Contour (2011), Instants (2012) and Essais (2020), as well as his large-scale installation Explosion of Words (2021), which revolves around the oeuvre of London-based poet Stephen Watts. His films have been shown in the US at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, Harvard Film Archive, San Francisco Cinematheque, Pacific Film Archive, Bard College and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He has written about the films of visual artists such as Rudy Burckhardt and Klaus Lutz, both of whom lived and worked in New York. Publications on his work include Hannes Schüpbach. Cinema Elements: Films, Paintings, and Performances 1989–2008 (Kunsthalle Basel; Scheidegger & Spiess, 2009); Film as Corporeal Exposition: On Spin/Verso/Contour (with Maja Naef; Revolver Publishing, 2012); Instants (with Joël-Claude Meffre; Revolver Publishing, 2014) and Explosion of Words (with Stephen Watts; Vienna: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2021).
