Produced on the occasion of Tony Coke’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, a collaboration between Kunstverein München and Haus der Kunst. The thematic starting point for Cokes’s new productions is the ideological and propagandistic entanglements of both exhibition venues during the Nazi era as well as their cultural-political role in the context of the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972.

The publication accompanies the eponymous exhibition and translates stills from the newly produced video essays into a book format while examining the significance of Cokes’s work in terms of a contemporary approach to institutional critique. The essays are written by Tina M. Campt and Tom Holert, with an introduction by Emma Enderby and Elena Setzer (Haus der Kunst) as well as Maurin Dietrich, Gloria Hasnay, and Gina Merz (Kunstverein München).

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Not Working, Artistic production and matters of class at Kunstverein München, 12 September–22 November, 2020.

Not Working brings together the contributions by artists, theorists and writers who in their work examine the interdependence of artistic production and social class. The complex structures and substantial rise in social inequalities, particularly visible in light of the current pandemic, have given the concept of class a wide range of connotations. Despite the ongoing attempts to view contemporary art in the sense of “class homogeneity”; it remains complicit in the reproduction and masking of existing conditions which it often claims to overcome. The texts in this book form a ground were class can be mediated with respect to artistic practices and other structures in the art world.

With contributions by Annette Wehrmann, Dung Tien Thi Phuong, Josef Kramhöller, Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky, Leander Scholz, Lise Soskolne, Mahan Moalemi, Marina Vishmidt and Melanie Gilligan, and Steven Warwick.

More information on the exhibition can be found here.