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Visiting Artist Katja Jug Exhibition: "Artist's Book—Frozen Unfrozen"

During her stay at the MPIWG this summer, visiting artist Katja Jug presented her current work, the artist's book "Frozen Unfrozen." The book tells of the encounter of "Frozen," a woman, and "Unfrozen," a man, in a unheated apartment in the subtropical winter of the Chinese metropolis Chongqing.

"Both wear warm clothes and use radiant heaters and heating pads. Their behavior resembles a self-staging; their bodies move through the apartment and stairwell," Katja Jug explains. "They never go outside, but their sights go outside. Like on a catwalk they take frozen poses, which reminds us of a voguing dancer. The interplay of their bodies and gazes transform their states of aggregation and being. An interplay of freezing and thawing, solidification and re-release occurs."

Snapshots of the exhibition

The publication is designed as a poster novel that allows the interlocking of three visual techniques—photography, drawing, typography—on 33 folded and assembled posters. As a result of the book's form as loosely interlocked sheets, the publication requires the intervention of the readers. The result is a narrative style reminiscent of the montage technique of silent movies.

The book project will be realized in cooperation with the Swiss art book publisher edition fink and is to be published at the end of 2020.