Events > Book Launch

08 Sep. 2024

Book Launch: Search Engine by Antonia Hirsch

Speakers
Antonia Hirsch and Jayne Wilkinson
Time
2:00-4:00 pm

Search Engine is a new monograph on the work of Antonia Hirsch, edited by Jayne Wilkinson, designed by Derek Barnett, and published by Information Office. Please join us for the launch of Search Engine on Sunday September 8th, where Hirsch and Wilkinson will present the book in conversation, focusing in particular on the book’s central feature: an index acting as a poetic meta text to Hirsch’s practice.

Antonia Hirsch’s Search Engine is a book project that situates the Berlin-based artist’s conceptual practice on par with her production of images and objects. The book’s title and its central feature, a classic index, reveal the full spectrum of Hirsch’s oeuvre. Mobilising contemporary tools, narratives, and epistemic systems, she transforms raw information and raw material into investigations of how we situate ourselves socially, politically, and economically. The publication comprises an extensive image section, texts by Henriette Huldisch (chief curator at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis) and Katharina Rein (art historian and media scholar, University of Potsdam), a conversation between Elena Filipovic (director, Kunstmuseum Basel) and Antonia Hirsch, and an introduction and glossary by the artist.

The publication was made possible through the generous support of the Berlin Senate through its Department for Culture and Social Cohesion and Hessische Kulturstiftung.

Buy the Artists' Book Search Engine

Antonia Hirsch was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and received her BFA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (London, England). From 1994 to 2010, the German-Canadian artist lived and worked in Vancouver, Canada. She has been based in Berlin since 2010. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, USA); Salzburger Kunstverein (Austria); Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Taiwan); Tramway (Glasgow, Scotland); Kunstinstituut Melly, FKA Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam, Netherlands); ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Germany); and in Canada at Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver) and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto). She has been artist-in-residence at institutions such as the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Canada) and the Cité des Arts (Paris, France), and has received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, Hessische Kulturstiftung, and Stiftung Kunstfonds. Hirsch’s projects and writing have appeared in publications such as C Magazine, Fillip, The Happy Hypocrite, and Triple Canopy. In addition to artist books, she has published two anthologies, Intangible Economies (Fillip, 2012) and Negative Space: Orbiting Inner & Outer Experience (SFU Galleries, 2015). She was an associate editor at Fillip from 2009 to 2015. Her work is held in public collections, including those of the Vancouver Art Gallery (Canada), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), and Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry (Miami Beach, USA).

Jayne Wilkinson is a writer and editor from Toronto. She was formerly editor-in-chief at Canadian Art and regularly contributes to art publications including C Magazine, e-flux Criticism, esse arts + opinions, Momus, and others. She holds an MA in Art History and Critical Theory from the University of British Columbia and is an occasional lecturer at the University of Toronto.

  1. Search Engine