Book presentations with artists Cécile Hummel and Doris Lasch

Astrid Seme & Doris Lasch feat. Barbara Kruger, The Imaginary Museum: Astrid Seme & Doris Lasch featuring «Untitled» 1994/2017 a work by Barbara Kruger, 2017. Photo: Mark Pezinger Verlag, 2017

Cécile Hummel, double-page spread of Recueil 17 Cairo – Downtown d`images du monde oriental-occidental, 2017. Foto: Cécile Hummel

Doris Lasch shares insights on her most recent artist’s book, The Imaginary Museum, developed together with Astrid Seme for the exhibition Exposed Exhibitions: Fotoarchiv der Kunsthalle Basel. In it the two artists engage with a political text by the American artist Barbara Kruger that was first presented at Kunsthalle Basel in 1994. Current political situations shed new light on this more than twenty-year-old work that happened to have been presented at Art Basel’s Unlimited earlier this year. Lasch and Seme’s book gives Kruger’s work a new and different legibility and sets it up as once again ripe for discussion. The Imaginary Museum, 2017, 128 pages, edition of 350, published by Mark Pezinger Verlag.

In her current work, Basel-based artist Cécile Hummel deals with the Mediterranean region, testimonies of its history, and the reciprocal cultural influence of the Orient and the Occident. During her residency in Cairo in 2012 and 2013, and in the following years over various trips and shorter stays in the Mediterranean region, Hummel made drawings and photographs documenting and reflecting on the above mentioned influences, especially in architecture, and also changes caused by tourism. Some of this work has been shown in various exhibitions over recent years; this is the first time it is available as a publication.