Book Launch: Natascha Sadr Haghighian. relearning bearing witness

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Presentation of the book 'Natascha Sadr Haghighian. relearning bearing witness', n.b.k. Discourse Vol. 17, published by Marius Babias and Anna Lena Seiser, with an introduction by Brian Kuan Wood, texts by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, an afterword by Marius Babias and Anna Lena Seiser, and a greeting by Klaus Lederer.

376 pages, with color illustrations, soft cover, English, 19.80 Euro, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne

The selection of writings, interviews, materials, and pictures of works by Natascha Sadr Haghighian shines light on the artist’s sustained curiosity and the multifaceted research it spurs into techniques of seeing and technologies of visibility. “Looking awry,” a practice that pays attention to what is seen from the corner of one’s eye, that seeks out the margins of the images and pursues the visual byways, is its chosen method. Typically using her own phenomenological observations as points of departure, Sadr Haghighian has in the present book compiled examples of this technique of seeing and thinking that illustrate its varied application. Edited together with Brian Kuan Wood and designers Zoff Kollektiv the 376-page book holds a number of essays and conversations written in the past ten years threaded with constellations of images from various works and related research. 

The book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Natascha Sadr Haghighian. passing one loop into another, June 12 – July 31, 2020. Natascha Sadr Haghighian develops installations, video and audio works, as well as performative interventions which reveal the infrastructures and conditions of our social order. Taking current and historical events as a point of departure, the artist addresses how our scope of action, structure of the gaze, and ultimately our thinking are formed. She shows the complex interdependencies and the mutual interpenetration of technology, politics, systems of value creation, and the biological, and calls into question our anthropocentric self-understanding. In 2020 Natascha Sadr Haghighian was honored by the State of Berlin with the Hannah Höch Advancement Award for outstanding artistic achievements by mid-career artists.