The Weight of the Concrete marks the first monographic exhibition of Ezio Gribaudo (Turin, 1929-2022) in Austria. It serves as a comprehensive homage to his multifaceted career, offering an extensive exploration of his roles as both artist and publisher. The exhibition borrows its name from Il Peso del Concreto (1968), a seminal book that featured Gribaudo’s early graphic work alongside an anthology of concrete poetry edited by the poet Adriano Spatola. In line with his interdisciplinary approach, this exhibition explores Gribaudo’s idiosyncratic oeuvre, his poetics of matter, and the complex relationship he developed between image and language. Gribaudo’s work is then carried into the present by a scenography designed by the Italian artist Davide Stucchi. The exhibition is curated by Tom Engels and Lilou Vidal.

At the center of The Weight of the Concrete are the Logogrifi, Gribaudo’s emblematic series that he developed from the 1960s onward. Throughout his life, the Logogrifi have articulated a deep entanglement with his activities as a bookmaker, as well as his fascination for new industrial printing processes, typefaces, language games, and relief matrices. Grounded in linguistic or visual riddles, the Logogrifi are akin to logogriphs or puzzles that involve the formation of new words by permuting their initial letter. In Gribaudo’s interpretation, a Logogrifo oscillates between legibility and abstraction, at times verging toward readable forms and at others scaling the enigmatic world where image and language coalesce.

The Weight of the Concrete explores Gribaudo’s distinct poetic repertoire of forms—encompassing textual, figurative, and topographic elements, yet invariably disconnected from their provenance—which heralds the emergence of a new grammar and, consequently, novel forms of reading. Starting with achromatic embossments on blotting paper, transforming into wooden and polystyrene reliefs, and ultimately culminating in vividly chromatic pieces using typographic ink, the works persistently interrogate the ways in which form, language, and matter continue to shape and redefine one another. This transformation not only challenges traditional modalities of readership and perception, but also progressively slows down and intensifies the viewer’s experience, moving it from an exercise in deciphering the achromatic nature of the page to a vibrant and colorful encounter. This relentless experiment with printing technologies was sparked by his dedication to publishing artist monographs, featuring contemporaries such as Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, Lucio Fontana, Asger Jorn, and Wifredo Lam, as well as his interest in popular print formats like newspapers, dictionaries, atlases, and children’s books. To emphasize this non-hierarchical relationship between his artistic work and publishing activities, the exhibition’s final chapter presents a unique selection of Gribaudo’s rare publications and archival materials.

The Weight of the Concrete gathers these graphic and poetic operations with the support of Davide Stucchi’s spontaneous gestures and conceptual responses. Drawing from Stucchi’s longstanding practice of using ready-made objects and industrially produced materials, his scenography reflects a mutual fascination for the industrial reproduction and repurposing of standardized materials. Operating at the intersection of visual arts, design, fashion, and scenography, Stucchi’s interventions echo and amplify Gribaudo’s interdisciplinary body of work. 

The Weight of the Concrete will be complemented by two namesake publications. The first, which will be released alongside the opening at Grazer Kunstverein, will showcase photographic excerpts from Gribaudo’s achromatic embossed Logogrifi books (1965-1972), uniquely complemented with an intervention by Stucchi. The second publication reflects the editorial premise of Gribaudo’s and Spatola’s Il Peso del Concreto (1968). It revisits and reimagines this publication and the archive of its making, pairing Gribaudo’s graphic work with a new selection of historical and contemporary concrete and experimental poetry. It will also include essays elucidating the interplay between language, matter, and their poetic interconnections. Published by Axis Axis and Grazer Kunstverein, it is scheduled for release in the summer of 2024.

The Weight of the Concrete will also feature a sound program, The Weight of the Tongue, which serves as a speculative prelude to the upcoming publication. Focusing on the vocalization of experimental poetry, the program will gather the voices of Tomaso Binga, CAConrad, Susan Howe and David Grubbs, Hanne Lippard, and Patrizia Vicinelli. Additionally, Katalin Ladik, Bryana Fritz, and Nat Marcus will contribute to the program and perform their work at the opening of the exhibition.

An additional public program, taking place in early 2024, will delve into the intrinsic relationship between concrete poetry, publishing, graphic design, typeface, feminism, and performative practices. Contributors to this program include Mónica de la Torre, Alex Balgiu, Andrea di Serego Alighieri, and others.

The public program and the publications are curated and edited by Tom Engels and Lilou Vidal.

EZIO GRIBAUDO (1929-2022, Italy) was an artist and art publisher based in Turin. Gribaudo’s work, notable for its fusion of figurative, textual, and topographical elements, was shaped by his expertise in typography, industrial printing, and publishing. He managed the Edizione d’Arte Fratelli Pozzo publishing house and was instrumental in the Le Grandi Monografie series by Fabbri Editori, producing monographs on artists such as Karel Appel, Francis Bacon, Alberto Burri, Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Antoni Tàpies, among others. In collaboration with Michel Tapié, he contributed to the ICAR (International Center of Aesthetic Research) in 1960. Gribaudo was also committed to curatorial projects, such as the exhibition of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection at Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin, in 1976, and Jean Dubuffet’s exhibition-performance CouCou Bazar at Promotrice delle Belle Arti with FIAT in 1978.

Ezio Gribaudo’s artistic trajectory is characterized by a prolific exhibition history. His work has been featured in exhibitions both in Italy and internationally since the late 1950s and continues to be exhibited to this day. A small selection of solo exhibitions includes: Galleria d’Arte La Bussola, Turin (1959); Galleria Schwarz, Milan (1967/1972); Galleria la Bertesca, Genoa (1967); Galleria Viotti, Turin (1968); Galerie de France, Paris (1968); Kunstverein Göttingen (1971); Petit Palais, Musée d’Art Moderne, Geneva (1971); Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (1973); Marlborough Graphics Gallery, London (1974); Galleria Michaud, Florence (1975); Etablissement d’en face, Brussels (2019); and Galerie Sans Titre, Paris (2022).

In addition, Gribaudo participated in significant exhibitions such as the 9th Rome Quadriennale (1965); the 33rd Venice Biennale (1966); Salon de Mai, Paris (1967); Salon de Mayo, Havana (1967); the 9th São Paulo Art Biennial (1967); Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1967); GAM (Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna), Turin (1967); Salon de Mai, Paris (1968); Museum of Modern Art, Caracas (1968); The National Gallery, Prague (1969); the 8th International Exhibition of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana (1969); the 10th Rome Quadriennale (1973); Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (1979); International Exhibition of Graphic Arts, Bilbao (1982); Grand Palais, Paris (1982); Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli (1986); the Italian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin (2015); Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2016); Museo del Novecento, Milan (2017); GAM (Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna), Turin (2017); Pio Pico Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); and MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2021).

DAVIDE STUCCHI (b. 1988, Italy) lives and works in Milan. He works at the intersection of visual art, fashion, advertising, scenography, and domesticity, exploring pre-existing materials through minimal gestures and interventions. With a conceptual and poetic approach, Stucchi creates installations and sculptures that reveal absent bodies and intimate stories through the tangibility and vulnerability of the objects. His recent solo exhibitions include Clin d’oeil, with Luisa Gardini, Ermes Ermes, Rome (2022); Falli (Phalluses), Martina Simeti, Milan (2021); DS, Deborah Schamoni, Munich (2020); 2546/9728, Sundogs, Paris (2019); Davide Stucchi con Corrado Levi, zazà, Naples (2019); and Light switch (Entrance), Gregor Staiger, Zurich (2019), among others. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM, Paris (2023); Between Bridges, Berlin (2023); Palazzo Ducale, Genoa (2023); Marsèll, Milan (2022); Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris (2021); MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2020); the 17th Rome Quadriennale, Palazzo Delle Esposizioni, Rome (2020); Stadtgalerie Bern (2020); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2018); Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2017); the 16th Rome Quadriennale, Palazzo Delle Esposizioni, Rome (2016), among others. Since 2017, Stucchi has been active as a set designer for various fashion labels, culminating in his latest collaboration with Magliano since 2021.

The Weight of the Concrete is realized in collaboration with Museion—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, where it will be on view from March 23 to September 1, 2024, and with the Archivio Gribaudo in Turin, Italy.

The project is supported by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (12th edition, 2023), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide.

This publication coincides with the exhibition Until Due Time, Everything Is Else by Pan Daijing. It is the sixth entry in a series of compact volumes featuring visual contributions, correspondence, responses, and conversations accompanying the Grazer Kunstverein exhibition program.

The images within this book are excerpts from a video created by Pan Daijing. This publication is intended to act as a sixth screen, aligning with a five-channel video installation on display in Until Due Time, Everything Is Else at Grazer Kunstverein. 

Editor: Tom Engels
Image: Pan Daijing
Graphic Design: Julie Peeters
Printing and Binding: Benedict Press, Münsterschwarzach
Edition: 350
Typeface: Kleisch GK by Chiachi Chao
128 pages, color
ISBN: 978-3-9505230-5-8
Price: 13,- euro, 7,- euro for members

This publication appeared in conjunction with the exhibition Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously by Miloš Trakilović. It is the fifth in a series of small volumes of correspondence, responses, and conversations, which accompanies the exhibition program of Grazer Kunstverein.

The publication features a newly commissioned essay by Edwin Nasr, as well as an interview between Elena Petrović and Miloš Trakilović conducted on the occasion of the exhibition.

Editor: Tom Engels
Graphic Design: Julie Peeters
Printing and Binding: Benedict Press, Münsterschwarzach
Edition: 350
Typeface: Kleisch GK by Chiachi Chao
64 pages, color, English
ISBN: 978-3-9505230-4-1
Price: 9,- euro, 5,- euro for members

This publication appears in conjunction with the exhibition sekretas by Marija Olšauskaitė. It is the fourth in a series of small volumes of correspondence, responses, and conversations, which accompanies the exhibition program of Grazer Kunstverein.

secrets gathers words, plants, and glass contributed by Elena Narbutaitė, Marija Olšauskaitė, Maria Tsoy, Aleksandra Krivulina, and Tom Engels.

Editor: Tom Engels
Guest Editor: Elena Narbutaitė
Poems: Maria Tsoy
Photography: Marija Olšauskaitė
Graphic Design: Julie Peeters
Printing and Binding: Benedict Press, Münsterschwarzach
Edition: 350
Typeface: Kleisch GK by Chiachi Chao
64 pages, white on white with inlaid images
ISBN: 978-3-9505230-3-4
Price: 9,- euros, 5 for members

In Until Due Time, Everything Is Else, Pan Daijing crafts an evocative exploration of temporality, memory, and presence. Through an interplay of video, traces of performance, site-specific interventions, and sound, the exhibition delves into the impermanent and fleeting dimensions that shape her understanding of performance — a perception that might parallel existence itself.

Pan Daijing’s work typically thrives in the realm of the live, manifesting itself through durational performative situations, inhabited installations, concerts, and other intimate encounters with audiences. Until Due Time, Everything Is Else introduces a counterpoint: all elements of liveness are stripped away. Instead of witnessing the dynamism of bodies in space or the throbbing pulse of live sound, visitors encounter only the echoes of such occurrences. Suggestions of presence are enveloped, hinted at, or harnessed by the exhibited works, and imbued with the vitality of what once was or what is to come.

Until Due Time, Everything Is Else gathers works of an ambiguous nature, as they mark the presence of something else, something that is not-here and not-now. They stand as materials crafted in moments of anticipation, as remnants from those very animate experiences, or as bearers of the procedural and intuitive displacements that happen when moving from one medium to another.

Reaching beyond the registers of performance documentation, these works are containers imprinted by transformative moments, and so embody or forecast change. As such, the exhibition directly confronts the paradox of the trace, which suggests that in attempting to capture or preserve an instance, one inadvertently alters or distorts its origins. Daijing’s pieces are a meditation on this paradox, emphasizing that traces, whether in memory or art or life, are both revealing and concealing, capturing both past and future whilst simultaneously eluding complete comprehension. 

Until Due Time, Everything Is Else is complemented by a publication of the same name, which extends Pan Daijing’s exhibited multi-channel video installation to paper. It is edited by Tom Engels and designed by Julie Peeters.

Until Due Time, Everything Is Else is Pan Daijing’s first institutional exhibition in Austria and is curated by Tom Engels. 

Pan Daijing (b. 1991, Guiyang, lives in Berlin) has shown her work internationally at the 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023); the Louvre, Paris (2023); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021); the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021); Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020); Tate Modern, London (2019); and the Biennale of Moving Image, Geneva (2018), among others. In 2024, Pan Daijing will present a solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich and, as the recipient of the Preis der Nationalgalerie, will exhibit at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. She has performed at numerous venues and festivals including the Barbican Centre, London; Kraftwerk, Berlin; Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg; Berghain, Berlin; Sonar Festival, Barcelona; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and the National Pantheon, Lisbon. She has released three full-length albums: Tissues (2022), Jade (2021), and Lack (2017).

The exhibition is supported by ifa—Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and is a cooperation in the context of steirischer herbst ’23.

“A Prayer Before Birth (20 min., 1991) is startling in its dislocating but enthralling moving image sequences, chronicling Duckworth’s lived experience with multiple sclerosis (MS) to tackle entangled questions of subjectivity, disability and desire, all in the space of nineteen minutes. In A Prayer Before Birth not only does Duckworth foreground lesbian subjectivity, but she also articulates a visual language to represent the non-healthy body. Taking on strategies of Surrealism and American Avant-garde film, Duckworth uses non-normative narrative in the film to escape the limitations of “positive images” of disability and lesbian identity. This modified surrealist aesthetic reflects ‘an increasing sense of unreality’ and produces new realities to grapple with the psychological and physical traumas that MS induces.”
—Lucy Howie

A Prayer Before Birth is shown in the context of The Work We Share, a film program of ten newly digitized films from the Cinenova collection. Produced between 1972 and 1994, the films address oppositional histories and questions of difference through the lenses of gender, race, sexuality, health, and community.

The Work We Share gathers a number of films that previously existed in precarious conditions, in some cases, with negatives being lost or distribution film prints being the only copy. This program intends to acknowledge Cinenova’s interdependency: from organization to filmmakers, cultural workers, communities, and individuals. How can we acknowledge our interdependent relationships? How can we recognize our place in a network of communications, relationships, and resources, particularly as an un-funded volunteer organization? What different strains of labor does our work rely on? How do we sustain this work mutually?

Cinenova is a volunteer-run charity preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. It was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women, each formed in 1979. Cinenova currently distributes over 300 titles that include artists’ moving image, experimental film, narrative feature films, documentary, and educational videos made from the 1910s to the early 2000s.

Jacqui Duckworth was an independent filmmaker, born in Warrington in 1948. All of Jacqui’s film and photography work arose from an instinctive and original cleverness rather than a traditional academic approach and she made several searching films before the MS diagnosis in her early 30s prevented her carrying on with her plans for further film projects. These included: An Invitation to Marilyn C, Home Made Melodrama and A Prayer before Birth, the latter shown on Channel 4 as part of a series exploring the relationship between mind and body.

A Song of Ceylon (51 min., 1985) is a study of colonialism, gender, and the body. It stages and interprets a Sri Lankan ritual of spirit possession and cure, and takes the form of a stylised non-narrative film that presents an audio-visual montage of “possessed bodies.” Its title refers to Basil Wright’s 1934 documentary The Song of Ceylon about the then British colony of Ceylon, renamed Sri Lanka in 1972. Invoking the idea of absence and of history withdrawn, Jayamanne’s film pursues a rite of the body.

A Song of Ceylon is shown in the context of The Work We Share, a film program of ten newly digitized films from the Cinenova collection. Produced between 1972 and 1994, the films address oppositional histories and questions of difference through the lenses of gender, race, sexuality, health, and community.

The Work We Share gathers a number of films that previously existed in precarious conditions, in some cases, with negatives being lost or distribution film prints being the only copy. This program intends to acknowledge Cinenova’s interdependency: from organization to filmmakers, cultural workers, communities, and individuals. How can we acknowledge our interdependent relationships? How can we recognize our place in a network of communications, relationships, and resources, particularly as an un-funded volunteer organization? What different strains of labor does our work rely on? How do we sustain this work mutually?

Cinenova is a volunteer-run charity preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. It was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women, each formed in 1979. Cinenova currently distributes over 300 titles that include artists’ moving image, experimental film, narrative feature films, documentary, and educational videos made from the 1910s to the early 2000s.

Laleen Jayamanne taught Cinema Studies at the University of Sydney. Her undergraduate education was in Sri Lanka and she has a Masters in Drama from New York University and a Ph.D. in film from the University of New South Wales, on “The Positions of Women in the Sri Lankan Cinema; 1947-1979.” She is the author of The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani (Indiana University Press, 2015) and The Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Paradjanov, Kubrick and Ruiz (Amsterdam University Press, 2021).

Sweet Sugar Rage (56min., 1985) exposes the exploitation of women’s labor in Jamaica’s sugar cane fields and shares the themes and methods of Sistren’s workshops and theatre in the context of their wider efforts in education, employment rights, and community activism. The film combines the testimony of women that work in the cane fields with evidence of their working conditions and their employers’ attitudes as the basis of drama workshops that bring rural and urban women into dialogue to analyze the exploitation of working-class women’s labor and to challenge the patriarchal attitudes of employers and unions alike. Following the methods of Paulo Freire’s “conscientization” and Bertolt Brecht’s “alienation method,” we see the women collectively take charge of staging and re-staging ways to challenge the systems that oppress them, which offers methodologies of learning together to acquire the feminist and decolonial tools to effect social change.

Sweet Sugar Rage is shown in the context of The Work We Share, a film program of ten newly digitized films from the Cinenova collection. Produced between 1972 and 1994, the films address oppositional histories and questions of difference through the lenses of gender, race, sexuality, health, and community.

The Work We Share gathers a number of films that previously existed in precarious conditions, in some cases, with negatives being lost or distribution film prints being the only copy. This program intends to acknowledge Cinenova’s interdependency: from organization to filmmakers, cultural workers, communities, and individuals. How can we acknowledge our interdependent relationships? How can we recognize our place in a network of communications, relationships, and resources, particularly as an un-funded volunteer organization? What different strains of labor does our work rely on? How do we sustain this work mutually?

Cinenova is a volunteer-run charity preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. It was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women, each formed in 1979. Cinenova currently distributes over 300 titles that include artists’ moving image, experimental film, narrative feature films, documentary, and educational videos made from the 1910s to the early 2000s.

Sistren Theatre Collective, which means ‘sisterhood,’ was founded in 1977 in Kingston, Jamaica, by working-class women in the social, cultural, and political context of Jamaica’s socialist experiment of the 1970s following the first decade of independence. Since 1977, Sistren has used art as a tool for social change for the discussion and analysis of gender-based violence and to provide solutions through organizational networks. The founding members included Vivette Lewis, Cerene Stephenson, Lana Finikin, Afolashade (then Pauline Crawford), Beverley Hanson, Jasmine Smith, Lorna Burrell Haslam, Beverley Elliot, Jerline Todd, Lillian Foster, May Thompson, Rebecca Knowles, and Barbara Gayle. Assisted by the actor and director Honor Ford-Smith, the Collective was forged through a government initiative to improve employment in Jamaica’s poorest communities. Plays like Downpression Get A Blow (1977), Bellywoman Bangarang (1978), Nana Yah (1980), QPH (1981), and Domestik (1982), along with community drama workshops, presaged the documentary Sweet Sugar Rage in 1985.

Three women from the Welsh Rhondda Valley mining community talk of their lives during the grueling miners’ strikes of the 1920s and 1930s. Women of the Rhondda (22 min., 1972) draws on oral history methods to present a radically new representation of labor from the perspective of working-class women. 

Women of the Rhondda is shown in the context of The Work We Share, a film program of ten newly digitized films from the Cinenova collection. Produced between 1972 and 1994, the films address oppositional histories and questions of difference through the lenses of gender, race, sexuality, health, and community.

The Work We Share gathers a number of films that previously existed in precarious conditions, in some cases, with negatives being lost or distribution film prints being the only copy. This program intends to acknowledge Cinenova’s interdependency: from organization to filmmakers, cultural workers, communities, and individuals. How can we acknowledge our interdependent relationships? How can we recognize our place in a network of communications, relationships, and resources, particularly as an un-funded volunteer organization? What different strains of labor does our work rely on? How do we sustain this work mutually?

Cinenova is a volunteer-run charity preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. It was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women, each formed in 1979. Cinenova currently distributes over 300 titles that include artists’ moving image, experimental film, narrative feature films, documentary, and educational videos made from the 1910s to the early 2000s.

Esther Ronay, Mary Kelly, Mary Capps, Humphrey Trevelyan, Margaret Dickinson, Brigid Segrave and Susan Shapiro came together to make Women of the Rhondda in 1972. What started as research for an oral history book about the General Strike of 1926 turned into a film that captures the experience of four women from the Rhondda Valley mining community in South Wales.

Described by S. Pearl Sharp as “a visual poem on identity,” Back Inside Herself (4 min., 1984) shows a Black woman finding her own sense of self and rejecting hegemonic societal expectations of who she should be and how she should behave.

Back Inside Herself is shown in the context of The Work We Share, a film program of ten newly digitized films from the Cinenova collection. Produced between 1972 and 1994, the films address oppositional histories and questions of difference through the lenses of gender, race, sexuality, health, and community.

The Work We Share gathers a number of films that previously existed in precarious conditions, in some cases, with negatives being lost or distribution film prints being the only copy. This program intends to acknowledge Cinenova’s interdependency: from organization to filmmakers, cultural workers, communities, and individuals. How can we acknowledge our interdependent relationships? How can we recognize our place in a network of communications, relationships, and resources, particularly as an un-funded volunteer organization? What different strains of labor does our work rely on? How do we sustain this work mutually?

Cinenova is a volunteer-run charity preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. It was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributors, Circles and Cinema of Women, each formed in 1979. Cinenova currently distributes over 300 titles that include artists’ moving image, experimental film, narrative feature films, documentary, and educational videos made from the 1910s to the early 2000s.

S. Pearl Sharp’s (b. 1942, United States) work focuses on cultural arts, health, and Black Diaspora history, including the poetry short Back Inside Herself (1984 and 2009 Re-mix), the semi-animated Picking Tribes (1988), the celebrated The Healing Passage/Voices From The Water (2004) and directing numerous documentaries for the City of Los Angeles’ CH 35. Her films have screened in Norway, China, Britain, the Caribbean and at FESPACO. Instigating through art and activism, she authored the non-fiction books Black Women For Beginners and The Evening News, four volumes of poetry, and in 2021 she released the short poetry video Blood Bank.