Jules Spinatsch. 1964 – 2155

Over the past 35 years, Jules Spinatsch has created an extensive body of work that has been exhibited, collected and published at home and abroad. The exhibition at the Bündner Kunstmuseum shows the broad media spectrum of his works and approaches. The artist transfers his own and found visual material into publications, image series, photographic installations and video works. Starting from a documentary approach – "from what is, not what should be" – Spinatsch examines the possibilities of photography: from the direct observation of social events on site to the use of semi-automatic recording processes that combine seemingly contradictory principles such as chance and control to create new forms of imagery. Places such as the Vienna Opera Ball, the WEF in Davos, software companies, nuclear power plants, prisons, winter sports events or bubbling mud pools in Iceland become his research spaces. At the Bündner Kunstmuseum, the artist is realising a presentation that introduces a new spatial dramaturgy on the second basement floor. Spinatsch invites – and at the same time demands – to deal with questions of perception, power and control as well as their construction and representation through media images. In doing so, he examines questions of authorship and authorship and at the same time makes the potential, the limits and the instability of photographic images visible.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Roma Publications is publishing a two-volume publication that includes the large-format illustrated book pitalismus ist ill and the reader On Jules Spinatsch with art-historical and essayistic texts.