Ad Kaligofsky

This artist’s book was published for Kaligofsky’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Grita Insam in Vienna. In this exhibition, the artist used objects and processes for recording and reproducing images and sound as processors of previously initiated stagings.

Among the exhibits were photographs of a record with spiral holes at the pause points, which had been rotated and photographed in different sequences in a way that combined still and moving images. The eight photographs were joined by a record player of French origin, from which the tone arm had been removed and thus deprived of its original function. With the inscriptions “arrêt” and “marche”, it seemed as if the device was instructing the exhibition visitors. Delicate drawings of a “pneumatic shoe” continued the circular and undulating movements on paper. On the wall opposite these elements, a wide strip of unexposed photographic paper mounted in front of the window was displayed, which changed color during its exposure over the exhibition period.

In the exhibition and on the pages of this artist’s book, all these elements move like actors in an experimental set-up for an enigmatic study. In the mirrored structure of the artist’s book, whose cover is printed in the tone of a gray card, there is also a photograph of the photographic experimental set-up in the artist’s studio, with which Kaligofsky once again demonstrates the role of the medium of photography between process and document.

Sabine Breitwieser