HOW TO COOK A WOLF
KUNSTHALLE ZÜRICH PARALLEL
2007 / 2008

In collaboration with American artist John Kelsey, Kunsthalle Zürich is realising a year-round project in 2007 which deals with the collective and collaborative work of artists. The title being „How to cook a Wolf“, borrowed from a book by the American writer M.F.K. Fisher, different projects will be presented, texts will be published and special performances and screenings will take place over the period of a year and in a loose temporal order.

Artists’ collectives, artists’ groups, artists’ collaborations have constantly been present throughout art history. We ascertain however that just today, while contemporary art thrives in an exceptionally successful market and media context, a surprisingly large number of artists are in search again of fictitious and real collaborations, thus creating autonomous fields of activities and structures of distributions which at the same deal with the fictualisation of the identities of the individual artist.

In the context of „How to cook a Wolf“ at Kunsthalle Zurich, diverse groups and models of collective work will be presented. With this we try to examine what significance this ever changing, fictitious and transitory grouping of artists holds; which strategies they aspire to reach within the market environment; which forms of social involvement they generate and how art formulates itself when the definable author, the identifiable author, revokes him or herself from any reception as an obvious projection screen away from the market and the art system.

In the course of the year it is our goal to gather a collection of essays, texts and materials which try to summarise the phenomenon of the collectives, alliances, collaborations in a comprehensive reader.

Kunsthalle Zurich thanks:
Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich, Luma Stiftung