LOSK - An Assembly of Shifting Spaces
Artist book, in cooperation with Alina SchmuchLOSK is an artist book which evolved from a collaboration with Alina Schmuch. It combines installations with photografphic works.The project developed from a cooperation between the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, Moscow in the year 2011. The architect Rem Koolhaas and the chief editor of the architectural magazine Domus, Joseph Grima, initiated a research concerning the urban changes against the background of the Olympic winter games in 2014 in Sochi. We were invited to produce photographical material about the research of the architects to depict the social changes in the urban context. After our trip to Sochi we developed an autonomous artist book out of the pictures we took there. In the book LOSK Alina Schmuch’s and my different points of perspective are combined consciously. In that way, Schmuch’s photographies, which deal with materiality, surface and room setups of half-public and public spaces, are shown besides a translation of my sculptural object work into the two-dimensional space of the book. Our positions merge at the question with what kind of forms and materials the human today surround himself in the broadest sense.In this collaboration Alina Schmuch and me establish a dialogue about the medium photography and prove it as to its different legibility. The pages of the book become exhibiting spaces in which the reader finds his own way- analogue to tread a path through a room.LOSK is published by Spector Books
2012
Sochi is the site of several large-scale sports events: the city hosted the 2014 Olympic Winter Games and will host some matches of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Furthermore, Sochi is destined to be the site of the “Russian Grand Prix” Formula 1 races, starting in 2014. The artists Alina Schmuch and Franca Scholz have visited the city on the Black Sea coast by invitation of the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow. Losk is the result of their journey. The book presents everyday life and strange objects in the urban space. “Losk”—meaning glow or sheen in Russian—focuses on the surfaces of Russian society: floors, interiors, pavings, facades. The surfaces are inscribed with the fantasy of wealth and importance, but also with the persistent signs of poverty and the resonance of the Socialist past. — Jan Wenzel
