Privat/Privacy

The catalog for "Privat/Privacy," a 2012 group exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt that surveyed how contemporary art has tracked the collapse of the boundary between private life and public display.

Curated by Martina Weinhart and shown at the Schirn from November 2012 to February 2013, the exhibition gathered roughly thirty artists working across photography, film, and installation to examine domestic scenes, personal secrets, and surveillance-adjacent looking. The book reproduces work by Merry Alpern, Richard Billingham, Sophie Calle, Tracey Emin, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Nan Goldin, Birgit Jürgenssen, Leigh Ledare, Christian Marclay, Ryan McGinley, Laurel Nakadate, Peter Piller, Martha Rosler, Dash Snow, Fiona Tan, Kohei Yoshiyuki, and Akram Zaatari, among others, alongside essays by Boris Groys, Christian Heller, and Jan Verwoert and interviews Weinhart conducted with Ledare, Nakadate, and Piller.

The 240-page, German/English bilingual volume was published by Distanz Verlag, Berlin, with a foreword by then-Schirn director Max Hollein. It is included in Surveillance Index Edition One as an example of art-world engagement with covert and voyeuristic looking, from Yoshiyuki's photographs of couples observed on Tokyo beaches at night to Alpern's images shot through a rear window onto strangers' private encounters.