Helmut Schweizer - endeavours in a circus to take the...

Helmut Schweizer is a German artist of the postwar period and contemporary, born in 1946. The photograph measuring 30.5 x 24 cm, printed directly by the artist, is pasted onto a white cardboard sheet 50 x 50 cm and was included in a portfolio produced in 1976 to fund the Laboratorio di Via Maroncelli in Milan. An self-managed space by a group of international artists including John Armleder, Olivier Mosset, Halmut Schwaizter, Nicol Gravier, Ugo Carrega and others. Between 1970 and 1976, Helmut Schweizer developed his photographic series Aktions (Actions). Across more than one hundred three-part tableaux, the artist stages everyday situations—often surprising, at times subtly absurd. Aktions stands as one of the key contributions to conceptual photography of the 1970s. Fifty years after its creation, the series is published here in its entirety for the first time. The book draws on a comprehensive study of the artist’s archive, revealing a body of work that is both conceptually rigorous and visually distinctive. An extensive essay by curator Steffen Siegel offers an in-depth reading of the series and foregrounds Schweizer’s political concern: how can the relationship between humans and nature be rethought beyond the hierarchies of subject and object, domination and submission? Helmut Schweizer lives and works as a visual artist in Düsseldorf. Steffen Siegel is Professor of the Theory and History of Photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen.

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