mixed up with others before we even begin | Publication

mixed up with others before we even begin focuses on hybrid forms, the ambiguous, and the contaminated. In a figurative sense, dirt is not only a valuable tool for examining the institution of the museum as a site where the idea of purity expedited in Western modernism manifests; dirt is also an important cultural and social anthropological category for understanding society as a system innately structured along inclusion and exclusion.

The artists Leilah Babirye, Mariana Castillo Deball, Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová, Nilbar Güreş, Nicolás Lamas, as well as the collective Slavs and Tatars, have explored the mumok collection along these themes. In this way, the collection, founded in 1962 with a modernist point of view, is confronted with postcolonial, queer-feminist, and hybrid perspectives. Nicolás Lamas extends this confrontation with objects from the collections of The Natural History Museum Vienna.

The multi-part publication accompanying the exhibition reflects this artistic confrontation by giving each of the participating artists their own editorial space in six booklets. In addition, a text volume includes comprehensive essays by Evelyn Annuß, Ann Cotton, Jule Govrin, Julia Grillmayr, Karin Harrasser, and Franz Thalmair, which deal with the theme of "contamination" and "mixing" from different perspectives, not least from that of the body. The writer Ann Cotten “deforms” typography and grammar in a text intervention. She writes: „ I think of my typographical interventions … as similar to the funghi and galls that befall the stems and leaves of shrubs, deforming them“. And, as an invitation, she continues: „Whenever something goes awry and triggers a symptom or a disruption, we must grab the opportunity to notice the patterns also of the stochastic mechanisms of the deformed surroundings, in order to continually refine our technical intuitions as language users.“

mixed up with others before we even begin

Franz Thalmair (Ed.), Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

With a foreword by Karola Kraus and essays by Evelyn Annuß, Ann Cotton, Jule Govrin, Julia Grillmayr, Karin Harrasser, and Franz Thalmair
Artist’s booklets by Leilah Babirye, Mariana Castillo Deball, Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová, Nilbar Güreş, Nicolás Lamas, and Slavs and Tatars
Graphic design: Studio Kehrer

Text volume (112 pages) and 6 booklets (16 pages each) combined in one book cover
Format: 170 x 238 mm
Numerous illustrations mostly in color
German/English
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln 2022
ISBN (mumok): 978-3-903446-03-8
ISBN (König): 978-3-7533-0355-0

Sales price: 29,80 Euro