Auto/Pathographies

This publication documents the collective exhibition Auto/Pathographies and provides a critical framework for addressing identity questionings specific to the experience of illness. Presented at the Kunstpavillon in Innsbruck (Austria) and OBORO (Montreal), Auto/Pathographies brings together photographs, videos, performances and installations produced from 1990 to the present. The works of the participating artists, working in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Austria, offer both sensitive and critical perspectives on the impact of illness in redefining being and social relationships. Rare images from the Jo Spence Memorial Archive, presented for the first time in Canada and Austria, are among the works through which the disease is transformed into a site of aesthetic, political and even metaphysical questioning, and whose interest extends beyond individual biographies. The book includes an essay by curator Tamar Tembeck, an art historian specializing in the field of visual and performative pathography in contemporary art, as well as texts by artists who participated in the exhibition : Angela Ellsworth and Tina Takemoto, Christina Lammer and Terry Dennett, curator of the Jo Spence Memorial Archive. The preface is written by Andrei Siclodi, Director of the International Fellowship Programme in Art and Theory at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, where the Auto/Pathographies project was developed.