Following the 2015 exhibition “Florian Hecker/John McCracken” at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien Graz, this publication probes the experimental capacity of the white-cube space of the gallery. For the exhibition, two complementary yet autonomous artists were brought into dialogue with each other: German artist and computer composer Florian Hecker, and the late American sculptor John McCracken.

The way we see the world has changed drastically since NASA released the “blue marble” image of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. No longer a placid slow-moving orb, the world is now perceived as a hothouse of activity and hyper-connectivity that cannot keep up with its inhabitants.

In April 2010, during his residency at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Akram Zaatari attempted to write, improvise, and deliver a conversation with an imagined Israeli filmmaker, giving him the name Avi Mograbi. In this conversation, Zaatari revisits photographs he made in his teenage years during the Israeli occupation of his hometown, Saida, in 1982, and imagines what an Israeli filmmaker could have experienced in the same period.

Charlemagne Palestine works from a highly personal universe of ritual, intoxication, and shamanism. Over the last four decades the artist has created an extensive body of experimental musical compositions, bodily performances, and, in later years, visual artworks inhabited by stuffed animals. To Palestine, teddy bears figure as powerful shamanic totems, which he fondly calls “divinities.”

Yorgos Sapountzis’s work appropriates public space and the statues, monuments, and memorials that inhabit it. The Athens-born artist concentrates less on their historical-political meanings and much more on their function as a medium of recollection. Sapountzis consciously tries to ignore historical information about the sculptures and instead allows them to “speak” through their gestures, poses, and ornaments.