2014

In 2014, Fogo Island Arts published Silke Otto-Knapp: Questions of Travel in the monograph series.

This book was published on occasion of the parallel exhibitions Silke Otto-Knapp presented in two markedly different locations: on Fogo Island, Newfoundland from April 16–August 31 and at the Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, Vienna, March 12–May 25, 2014. The contrasting influences of place—between rural and urban, new and old world—is evident in the selection of works presented and compiled in this catalogue. The partnering of these exhibitions clearly brought into focus questions about art and its contexts. The tensions between nature and culture provided an appropriate figure for the artwork: a context imagined and devised for the circumstances of its own activation

Silke Otto-Knapp: Questions of Travel includes essays by Susan Morgan and Vanessa Joan Müller and a conversation between Otto-Knapp and Nicolaus Schafhausen. Müller reflects on how the tensions of Otto-Knapp’s artwork engenders the substance of its experience, while Morgan approaches the work via three significant influences: the cultural geographer J. B. Jackson; avant-garde dancer Anna Halprin and her husband, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin; and the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. In the conversation with Schafhausen, Otto-Knapp likens the art exhibition to “a theater situation that was both distinctly separate from reality and engaged with it at the same time.” As the activating element of an exhibition, the viewer could also be said to embody the reality of a work’s engagement. Otto-Knapp took the title for this project, Questions of Travel, from Bishop’s poem of the same name, which has been reprinted for this catalogue.

Edited by Rosemary Heather and Nicolaus Schafhausen
Contributions by Susan Morgan, Vanessa Joan Müller, Silke Otto-Knapp, Nicolaus Schafhausen
Co-published by Fogo Islands Arts, Kunsthalle Wien and Sternberg Press
Design by Surface

2014, English
15 x 21 cm, 100 pages, 20 colour ills., softcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-052-2