We were guests at Independent Publishing Festival – Indiecon 2023!

Hamburg is always worth a trip – but this visit to the Hanseatic city was something very special, as it was all about Indiecon 2023 in the Gleishalle at Oberhafen. There we were invited to present Marlen Wagner’s Artist Books. We made contacts with other exhibitors, publishers and galleries, talked to many visitors and presented our projects.

We met Jae Kyung Kim, Founding Director von einBuch.haus and realised that we are neighbours – on opposite sides of Florastraße in Berlin Pankow. Her exhibition concept of transferring the form of a book into three-dimensional space could be understood as the inversion of many of Marlen Wagner’s Artist Books, in which the Berlin artist presents her outdoor installations and performances as photographs in book form.

We also found similarities at TEXTEM, a Hamburg-based publishing house. The RISS, a journal for psychoanalysis andrelated areas, is published there. In the latest issue we met many old acquaintances and companions from earlier times as authors. Our interest inpsychoanalysis is essential forone of ourmain areas of work for more than 20years: the project of Dream Prey.

From Manchester/UK Jack Hale, one of the two founders of The Modernist, came to Hamburg especially for the Indiecon. Even a quick glance at the books and magazines on display showed us a kinship: 20th century architecture and design continue to show their impact in the 21st century. Urban everyday life paints a picture of Britain that has preserved some of its unconventional bizarreness – in clear forms and colours – beyond today’s political and social oddities.

Marlen Wagner’s Artist Books are partly unique ones, partly multiples. The handcrafted objects literally bind procedings together by making them present in such a way that they are not only erased by documentation as a past. Rather, her books are, in many senses of the word, art that sublate itself by inviting to be unfolded.