Ken Okiishi and Nick Mauss work individually as well as on collaborative projects. Nick Mauss uses elements which consciously stage the viewing of his fragmentary and airy drawings. Ken Okiishi’s video works refer to popular movies.

One of the artists’ shared interests is the displaced aspects of modern visual culture. They pick up aesthetic forms of expression for lost utopias and relocate them in contemporary frames of reference. The excerpts they use do not only refer to their origins: the artists are more interested in the ongoing transformation of cultural meaning. The heterogeneous references are exposed as performative moments which oscillate between their established meaning and its subjective appropriation and revaluation.

The book contains drawings and collages by Nick Mauss and stills from videos by Ken Okiishi. The images form a kind of associative narrative through the book, containing subjects as lost places, singled-out figures, book covers, and typographic elements.

Published with the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and Galerie Neu, Berlin.