Simon Castets - Böcker

Inspired by Le Corbusier's 1925 Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, the second exhibition in Swiss Institute's annual Architecture and Design series presents a prototype for the 21st-century home, simulating a living environment where the house moves beyond its physical confines and into the digital realm.

Complete documentation of the longest-running work from Hans Haacke's famous Poll seriesGerman artist and institutional critique pioneer Hans Haacke (born 1936) is famed worldwide for examining museums by directly asking their audiences questions. Hans Haacke: Swiss Institute Visitors Poll documents the results of his longest ever poll work, which was conducted at Swiss Institute from June 21, 2018 to October 24, 2019.Newly commissioned for this publication, Haacke's featured essay outlines the history of his poll works, discussing the context and development of this body of work over four decades—all leading up to the Swiss Institute Visitors Poll. The book documents the results of the poll, including 652 pages of facsimile index cards that were written by poll respondents in response to Question #20: “What multiple-choice question would you also have liked to see in this poll?”

The first ever overview of Pfeiffer's lively artistic output across mediums from the 1960s to the present, from A to ZPublished with Pacific.Inspired by the illustrated alphabets found in abecedariums, this new book on Walter Pfeiffer (born 1946) presents playful and illuminating insights into the Swiss artist’s practice from A to Z, annotated by Pfeiffer himself. The book also features new texts reflecting on five decades of Pfeiffer’s artistic output from an international group of curators, critics and writers. At once a meticulously crafted artist’s book and a comprehensive monograph, Walter Pfeiffer demonstrates the artist’s sustained commitment to exquisite, innovative publications.This book is part of Swiss Institute’s newly redesigned SI Series. Each book in the SI Series adds context through seminal essays, archival materials, event transcripts, artist portfolios and exhibition documentation, as well as reprints and new translations of important texts.

In the “St. Petersburg gamble,” the house offers to flip a coin until it comes up heads. The payoff doubles each time tails appears. By conventional definitions, the St Petersburg gamble has an infinite potential return; nonetheless, most players feel that they should not risk more than a few dollars each time. Explaining why people offer such small sums for something with infinite potential remains contentious in both economics and philosophy. The St. Petersburg Paradox embodies Swiss Institute’s longstanding dedication to producing inventive group exhibitions, putting artists across a century (Marcel Duchamp, Ericka Beckman, Hans Arp, Amalia Ulman, Tabor Robak) in dialogue with each other to explore the precarious nature of gaming and the impulses that underlie the way risk is calculated.Embracing the conceptual framework of an exhibition at Swiss Institute and its related public programs, each book in the SI Series adds retrospective context through seminal essays, archival materials, event transcripts, artist portfolios and exhibition documentation, as well as reprints and new translations of important texts. Each book in the series assumes a unique format to delve into the work of an artist, an artistic movement or a philosophical conundrum.

Work Hard, the curatorial debut of celebrated Swiss artist Valentin Carron (born 1977), presents a creative discourse between a surprising group of artists: Edmond Bille, Vittorio Brodmann, Marguerite Burnat-Provins, Luciano Castelli, Claudia Comte, Sylvain Croci-Torti, Latifa Echakhch, Frédéric Gabioud, Mathis Gasser, Fabrice Gygi, Andreas Hochuli, Trix and Robert Haussmann, David Hominal, Bernhard Luginbühl, Urs Lüthi, Fabian Marti, Méret Oppenheim, Simon Paccaud, Mai-Thu Perret, Ugo Rondinone, Denis Savary, Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely.In this book Carron suggests an imaginary time and place in art history while conjuring mythologies of labor and exploring the very personal approach that he took to understanding the narrative of national identity. Essays by Mai-Thu Perret and Balthazar Lovay plus an annotated walkthrough by Carron evoke the vernacular poetry of quirky Swissness.