Working within the framework of the ICI’s 2012 research theme of “phantom worlds” and fueled by our long-held belief that all human activities leave behind a visual trace, Speculative Pentimenti presents a visual exploration of contemporary society through the works of artist and longtime associate Sande Sisneros.

The catalog features full color images alongside essays from Curator, Sue-Na Gay, and ICI Director Lise Patt.

Publisher: ICI Press
Retail Price: $45

The Speculative Pentimenti Catalog is available in the ICI Gift Shop.

Ueber das Sammeln von Honig

Christel Dillbohner’s site-specific installation at SPACE, Los Angeles, February/March 1993

“Insights/Einblicke”

catalog essay by Michael Lawrence, Los Angeles, 1994

“…..The Honey Gatherers utilized approximately 3,000 square feet to investigate the various aspects of the ancient art of honey gathering.
Using a wide range of materials, the installation was a metaphor for the human condition of searching happiness. The search specifically focused on gathering and filtering experiences in order to better understand those experiences.
The installation also exemplifies the artist creating art, of finding momentary meaning in the continual flow of events.”

February 25 – April 15, 2012

“I am familiar with the surface of things…Fraying, tattered, cracked, flattened, swollen, dried, scrawny, bristling, moldy, clenched, tangled, punctured, battered, bashed-in, scooped-out, withered, engorged, trampled, toppled, crushed, bald, listing, leaning, twisting hanging, buried, wedged, jammed, impaled, straggling, stretched, disjointed, disembowled, skinned, docked, gnawed, entrenched.” (Rosamond Purcell, Owl’s Head: On the Nature of Lost Things, Quantuck Lane Press, NY, NY, 2003, p. 29)

Inspired by Rosamond Purcell’s imagined museums, the ICI opened the drawers to its Ephemera Kabinett and invited the public to unleash its many secrets.

Museum of Obsolete Tools
Museum of Wires
Museum of the Croquet and Musket Ball
Museum of Natural Disasters
Museum of Ruined Landscapes
Museum of Failed Attempts
Museum of Filthy Mail
Museum of Bisected Objects
Museum of Corrosion

Visitors had the opportunity to suggest new categories for the ICI’s Ephemera Kabinett database (“fraying, moldy, trampled, skinned, withered”) as they re-arranged objects from the archive into ever-changing, new ‘museum collections.’

Although many recent scholarly texts address Sebald’s complex prose, Searching for Sebald is the first to explore Sebald’s fictive world through the idiosyncratic and anti-heroic photographs that propel and interrupt his labyrinthine narratives. Theoretical essays approach Sebald through the multiple filters of art history, film and photographic studies, cultural theory, and psychoanalysis. Contemporary visual art projects offer a more anamorphic reading of this bricoleur. The book also features an English translation of an interview Sebald gave in 1997 in which he talks exclusively about his use of photographs. Searching for Sebald is the 7th in a series of publications by ICI Press that explores the methodologies of culture.

featuring artwork by:

Shimon Attie, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Andre Breton, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Walther Brüx, Tacita Dean, Marcel Duchamp, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rodney Graham, Vic Muniz, Adam Pendleton, Gerhard Richter

artist projects:

• Dorothy Cross
  “Antartica“
• Christel Dillbohner
  “Wahlverwandschaften und Korrespondenzen”
• Anne Flannery
  “Sebald’s Invisible Cities”
• Axel Forrester
  “Max”
• Suvan Geer
  “Trying to Remember my Mother’s Face”
• Skuta
  “The Colorful Auras Found in Black & White Glass Plates of One Family”
• Pablo Helguera
  “How to Understand the Light on a Landscape”
• Antoinette LaFarge
  “All That is Beyond Hearing”
• Daniel Lash
  “Translation and Repetition: An Architectural Translation of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn“
• Matthew Marco
  “The Minimalls of Downey, CA (excerpt)”
• Jeremy Millar
  “A Firework for W.G. Sebald (2005-6)”
• Helen Mirra
  “Rings of Saturn Index”
• Chris Rochelle
  “Birdland”
• Christian Scholz
  “A Sebald Portfolio”
• Tris Vonna-Michell
  “Who is Reinhold Hahn”
• Tim Wright
  “In Search of Oldton”
• The Institute of Cultural Inquiry Research Team
  “A Truth That Lies Elsewhere”

essay contributions:

• Richard Crownshaw (Manchester Metropolitan University)
  “German Suffering or ‘Narrative Fetishism?’: W.G. Sebald’s “Air War and Literature: Zürich Lectures”
• Adrian Daub (University of Pennsylvania)
  “Donner à voir – The Logics of the Caption in W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn and Alexander Kluge’s The Devil’s Blind Spot“
• Lisa Diedrich (Stony Brook University)
  “Gathering Evidence of Ghosts: W.G. Sebald’s Practices of Witnessing”
• Florence Feiereisen and Daniel Pope (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
  “True Fictions and Fictional Truths: The Enigmatic in Sebald’s Use of Images in The Emigrants“
• Mattias Frey (Harvard)
  “Theorizing Cinema in Sebald and Sebald with Cinema”
• Christopher C. Gregory-Guider (University of Sussex)
  “Memorial Sights/Sites: Sebald, Photography, and the Art of Autobiogeography in The Emigrants“
• Avi Kempinski (University of Michigan)
  “Quel roman! Sebald, Barthes, and the Pursuit of the Mother-Image”
• Christina Kraenzle (York University, Toronto)
  “Picturing Place: Travel, Photography and Imaginative Geography in W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn“
• Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (University of Ulster)
  “Post-War Germany and ‘Objective Chance’: W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean”
• Anneleen Masschelein (K.U. Leuven, Belgium)
  “Negative Indexicality in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and André Breton’s Nadja“
• Bettina Mosbach (Bonn University)
  “Superimposition as a Narrative Strategy in Austerlitz“
• Christian Scholz, translated by Markus Zisselsberger
  “But the written word is not a true document,” a conversation with W.G. Sebald (1997)
• John Sears (Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire)
  “Photographs, Images and the Space of Literature in Sebald’s Prose”
• Carsten Strathausen (University of Missouri)
  “Going Nowhere: Sebald’s Rhizomatic Travels”
• Markus Zisselsberger (State University of NY, Binghamton)
  “Melancholy Longings: Sebald, Benjamin, and the Image of Kafka”

with an introductory essay by:

• Lise Patt (Institute of Cultural Inquiry)
  “Searching for Sebald: What I Know for Sure”

The Limited Artist edition is an edition of 75 with 25 artist proofs. Suitcases are available as a premium to members and supporters who contribute to the Institute in the amount of $1,000 USD.

Each suitcase is a unique object with a name drawn from one of the many fictional or fictionalized historical figures in Sebald’s prose fictions. The valise houses a hardcover edition of Searching for Sebald along with 20 originals works of art by 20 artists or visual researchers. To purchase a suitcase or to see what suitcase ‘names’ are still available, please visit the ICI Gift Shop.

Curators: Lise Patt, Christel Dillbohner and Anna Ayeroff
Assistant curator: Lily Siegel
Project desgin:Lise Patt and Anna Ayeroff
Publisher: Institute of Cultural Inquiry
ISBN: 978-1-889917-13-9

Artist Contributors

• Thomas Becker (Switzerland)
• Suvan Geer (U.S.)
• Antoinette LaFarge (U.S.)
• Christel Dillbohner (U.S./Germany)
• Deborah Paulsen (U.S.)
• Terri Valli Trotter (U.S.)
• Tris Vonna-Michell (Germany/U.K.)
• Jo Todd (U.S.)
• Melinda Smith Altshuler (U.S.)
• Jeremy Millar (U.K.)
• Tim Wright (U.K.)
• Daniel Lash (U.S.)
• Anne Flannery (U.S.)
• ICI Research Team (U.S./U.K./Germany)
• Pablo Helguera (U.S./Mexico)
• Yolande Macias McKay (U.S.)
• Chris Rochelle (U.S.)
• Skuta (U.S./Iceland)
• Axel Forrester (U.S./U.K.)
• Sande Sisneros (U.S.)
• Danny Redfern (U.S.)

The Collector’s Edition includes a hardcover edition of Searching for Sebald inside a black silk clamshell box with an image of a labyrinth and ICI embossed on the spine.

Also inside, a drawer holds study documents and a researcher’s tools including: a magnifying glass, a stereoviwer, sample pages from one of Sebald’s texts, stereocards designed from the images in Sebald’s A Natural History of Destruction, a volvelle-style index, a study page drawn from Arturo Ott’s photo albums, and Christel Dillbohner’s Itinerary for a walking tour through East Anglia.

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Publisher: ICI Press
ISBN: 978-1-889917-14-6
Retail Price: $200

Purchase the Collector’s Edition from the ICI Gift Shop.

This edition has 9 four-color stamps of images from the book glued in place in the book to serve as miniature color illustrations. In addition, an extra full sheet of the 12 stamps is included with the book. Note: The special edition is currently out of print.
ISBN: 1-889917-05-2 (special edition)

A numbered edition of 50, including a complete set of Oeillet prints and the special edition of Bataille’s Eye, encloosed within a double-sided, felt-lined case with a distinctive glass eye on the spine.
ISBN: 1-889917-01-X (eye edition of 75 with original Oeillet prints).

Retail Price:$300                                                                                                                                      Purchase the Eye Edition from the ICI Gift Shop.

Retail Price:$500                                                                                                                                      Purchase the Collector’s Edition from the ICI Gift Shop.