This publication assembles materials relating to Dora Budor’s exhibition Continent at Kunsthaus Bregenz (19.03.–26.06.2022), with the intention of providing different perspectives on the project while realizing an autonomous object within Budor’s broader body of work.
Central to the book are four texts that elaborate on the exhibition in different ways: an essay “Nonproductive Energies” by curator and writer Richard Birkett, which systematically steps through Budor’s exhibition on each level of the building, connecting it with a range of formal precedents and cultural references; this is complemented with a piece by author Amelia Groom, who writes from a perspective that considers the work Termites as a latent critique of authority, silence, and the inference of gendered codes. In addition to the commissioned texts, architect and historian Robin Evans’s “The Rights of Retreat and the Rites of Exclusion: Notes Towards the Definition of Wall” is reproduced in the book—an essay that elicits the story of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s fictional character, Jean Des Esseintes; a hermetic man who isolates himself from all that he despises by building walls that further alienate him from the outside. And finally, Budor explicates the singular works in her exhibition in an interview with the director of Kunsthaus Bregenz, Thomas D. Trummer.
These texts are brought together with the intention of allowing signification to further accrue in relation to the photographic documentation of the exhibition and the design of the book itself, which was produced as the result of a close collaboration between Berlin-based design studio HIT, the artist, and the editors.
Edited by Thomas D. Trummer, Kunsthaus Bregenz
Associate editor: Nicholas Tammens
Essays by Richard Birkett, Amelia Groom, and Robin Evans, as well as conversation between Dora Budor and Thomas D. Trummer
Graphic Design: HIT, Berlin
English / German, 21,0 x 28,2 cm, 192 pages
Date of Publication: December 2022
Distribution: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne
