The recipe sounds incredibly simple: 176 ink drawings by Moussa Kone meet 176 short texts by Bastian Schneider; together they (re-) construct 176 stages of a nocturnal final round leading a museum guard through the rooms of a Viennese palace - the Albertina museum - and letting him look at and behind the scenes of the exhibition spaces.

At the same time, this sequence of perspectives forms the starting point for an emblematic dramaturgy designed by Walter Pamminger: each double page offers space for four aspects, so that in each case four drawings enter into dialogue with their textual counterparts.

It quickly becomes clear that texts and images do not simply comment upon or illustrate each other, but rather fully correspond to each other: they open up a space which, above all, gains its meaning from the distance that remains between the two registers of the description.

To increase this tension further through the narrative sequence of a graphic novel is the experimental framework spanned by the present book, showing step-by-step what is not seen: the perspective of artistic representation as such, which nonetheless becomes here exhibited and decipherable.

The book offers for the reader’s reflection a route through a course of text-images and image-texts, which targets the twilight of the art world by means of subtle observations, but without falling into the mistake of being thereby too didactic. (Text quoted from the press release by Sonderzahl publisher, Vienna)

The book presentation was held at the Albertina museum. Art critic Nina Schedlmayer had a talk with Moussa Kone, Bastian Schneider and Walter Pamminger.

Text

Bastian Schneider has published several volumes of flash fiction and prose poetry, including Der Winterschlaf der Zugvögel (2016), Die Schrift, die Mitte, der Trost (2018), and Paris im Titel (2020). He is the recipient of the Dietrich Wellershoff and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann fellowships, among others, and was nominated for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016. He is a guest lecturer in creative writing at the University of Cologne and lives in Cologne and Vienna.

Concept

Walter Pamminger lives in Vienna and is a chemist, book designer, author, and curator. He has received national and international awards for his design concepts, including the State Prize for the most beautiful book in Austria and the silver medal at the competition for the world's most beautiful books of the Stiftung Buchkunst (Book Art Foundation) in Germany. In his book projects he works closely with visual artists, filmmakers, architects, and writers.

Drawings

Moussa Kone, born 1978 in Scheibbs, Austria. Lives and draws in Vienna. Exhibition activities in Austria and abroad; has published several artist books and initiated art projects dealing with the relationship between text and art. He has received numerous prizes and fellowships, and his works can be found in collections such as the Albertina in Vienna, where he once worked as a guard from 2004 to 2007.