Etwas fehlt

Alex Hanimann began producing series of drawings and fairly extensive groups of paintings in the early 1980s. Since 1992, his work with language, a mixed bag of existential and anonymous signs and codes, of imagination and reality, has developed into a separate strand of his creative process. In his text-based murals and superimposed texts using slide projections, Hanimann undermines syntactic logic and linguistic conventions, creating a new order by stripping the words of their conventional context and superimposing them, just as he dissolves the original context of his found images. Etwas fehlt catalogues Hanimann’s photographic explorations over the past twelve years, presenting roughly three thousand selected images from his archives. Shown in a chronological but disjointed order, the images are removed from their meaningful contexts and re-contextualized on the page. The mosaic layout specially developed for this publication does not yield a rigid sequence or listing of the images, but a flexible structure that enlivens each page, interspersed with blank spaces at seemingly random intervals. The photographs are accompanied by an interview of Alex Hanimann by Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as brief essays by Lorenzo Benedetti and Ludwig Seyfarth about the photographs’ subject matter, contextual meaning and points of view.