Martha Rosler

Mitchell-Innes & Nash announces Martha Rosler’s participation in Documenta 12 and Skulptur Projekte
Münster in June 2007.

The international exhibition Documenta 12 will be on view from June 16 – September 23. Martha Rosler’s contribution to Documenta will include photographs and a slide show of images taken in the city of Kassel, addressing the layers of history and culture that inform the city’s landscape and architecture. She will also exhibit one of her best-known works from the 1970’s, “The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems,” which pairs photographs of New York’s infamous skid row with lists of words and phrases that describe inebriation.

Skulptur Projekte Münster, a city-wide exhibition of sculpture that takes place every ten years, will be on view from June 16 – September 30. Rosler’s project will be “Transposing Fragments (a historical digression).” The project transposes iconic details of important structures onto other important sites in Münster. The aim is to raise their visibility and reactivate their symbolic relation to Münster’s history and institutions.

At Art 38 Basel, on view from June 13 – 17, concurrently with Münster and Documenta, Mitchell-Innes & Nash will exhibit an installation from Rosler’s series, “In the Place of the Public,” a series of photographs taken in airports, which are displayed with corresponding wall-text.

Martha Rosler is internationally known for her works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance. Her work has been included in several Whitney biennials; the Institute of Contemporary Art in London; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Dia Center for the Arts in New York; and many other international venues. A retrospective of her work was on view in five European cities and in New York at the New Museum and the International Center of Photography in 2000. A book of Rosler’s selected writings was published in 2004 by the MIT press. She is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York and Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin and Cologne.

The Martha Rosler Library is a project in which a major portion of the artist's private collection of books is made available for public use. The project was initiated by Martha Rosler and e-flux, in whose space on the Lower East Side in New York it was first opened to the public for a period of six months. At the Frankfurter Kunstverein the presentation of this itinerant project will take a new shape in collaboration with Revolver Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. A book, co-published by Revolver and e-flux, including the full bibliography of Martha Rosler's book collection, will be published to mark the exhibition.

Martha Rosler is one of the most important North American artists today and is a respected figure thanks to her critical writings. Over the years she has built up a large book collection of close to 10.000 volumes, which has functioned as a basis for her reserach in relation to her artistic work, teaching and writing. Over the years the major part of the library has co-existed with Rosler in her Brooklyn home and long ago began encroaching on the available living space. This created the space problem that helped engender the idea of temporarily moving the library – thus giving the public the opportunity to browse the collection. Theory, history, architecture, political journals, poetry, plays, novels and art books inform her collection, but also comics and science fiction, as well as books that arrive, not out of personal choice, but as gifts or found objects, or even books chosen for their strangeness.

A personal library represents the private sphere of an individual, her way of acquiring and combining knowledge. Accumulation is the result of an intellectual inquiry that takes place in parallel with a more random search, which can lead us to unexpected textual, and therefore mental, spaces. The Martha Rosler Library, which consists of about 7000 of the artist’s books, offers the visitor an opportunity to approach this open source of information with her or his own interests and to create new affinities and connections between the elements of the library that add to more than the sum of knowledge contained in it.

The intention is, through the summer period, to activate the library, inviting visitors to engage in readings and attend talks as well as to know more about the work and methodology of Martha Rosler, one of the most acute critical observers of our present time. In this connection Jessica Silverman, student at the California College of Arts, will be a guest in the Residency Program of the Frankfurter Kunstverein in order to organise events, talks and workshops in and relating to the library.

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Martha Rosler lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey and travels widely to give talks. She has had numerous solo exhibitions worldwide and has been represented internationally in renowned exhibitions, such as Documenta and Manifesta. Moreover, she has published numerous books.

The Martha Rosler Library is a project by e-flux. In collaboration with Revolver Verlag it is presented in Germany for the first time at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. The project has been realised with kind support from Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Hessen-Thüringen and the 1822-Stiftung.


Speaking of Others is a two-year project platform inviting international initiatives to the Frankfurter Kunstverein.
with kind support from:
Kulturstiftung des Bundes

Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation