Bildungsroman (to-be-finished artist book, paperback, 320 pages, offset printing, 2018)
Eduard Glaser lived all his life as a stranger. Born in to-day Czech Republic from a Jewish family, he spent his life wandering. Glaser was an astronomer, an epigraphist, an archaeologist and an expert of Judeo-Arabic culture in southern Arabia. Assuming the building method of the spolia, Bildungsroman proposes a biography made of found documents, supposed dreams, liminal texts and pop music videos that unfold along a rather tortuous line. Sometimes it becomes a hagiography of a sun worshipper. Bildungsroman traces the first part of Glaser’s life throughout his studies in Prague and Vienna, his journey by foot to Paris, his troubled time in Tunis and Alexandria before he reached his craved destination, Yemen. The so-called Arabia Felix (lat. “Happy Arabia”) has been the place where Eduard Glaser finally stopped his quest. Just to start digging.
A series of pieces sparked out of the research around Eduard Glaser’s life are scattered around. Photographs taken in Yemen probably by Glaser himself and other iconic elements essential in his path are put under glass to ape the museological behaviour in a clumsy fashion.
Arabia Felix (glass, laser print, mirror, 2018)
Congrès International des Orientalistes (isolating foam, laser prints, glass, BSD panel, 2018)
Et in arcadia ego (Third version) (glass, photographic print, BSD panel, clamps, isolating foam, 2018)
Is there a difference? (screenshot) (booklet, BSD panel, glass, blanket, laser print, 2018)
Sheeba meets Salomon (booklet, laser prints, isolating foam, wood, plywood, 2018)
Images included in Is there a difference? (screenshot) were excerpted from the feature film Khartoum (United Kingdom, 1966).
Photographs displayed in Arabia Felix and Et in arcadia ego (Third version) are courtesy of the Austrian Academy of Science, Sammlung Glaser.
Preliminary research for the book, the creation of its dummy and the artworks were carried on in 2018 in the course of the Artists in Residence programme of the Federal Chancellery and KulturKontakt Austria.