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"Rodney Graham: Literature and What an Artist Does With It"

This book section was commissioned by MACBA/Hatje Cantz for Rodney Graham’s major retrospective, curated by Friedrich Meschede. It travelled to Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, and Hamburger Kunsthalle and was published in four languages.

For the first time, it investigated Graham’s “literary” outputs in depth. What had previously been considered to be apart from his oeuvre’s central concerns is now established as following a similar impetus as his film and photography:Graham critically and humorously (in what Lerm Hayes calls a “hedonistic conceptualism”) considers the entire “system” of literature.

The literary aspect was central to the exhibition’s concept and hence the essay was one of just two commissioned pieces in the catalogue, the other one being by Julian Heynen, high-profile German curator and cultural talk show personality.

Subsequent to this publication, opportunities arose to further this research on Graham and Tacita Dean: The Lieven Gevaert Research Centre, KU Leuven, invited Lerm Hayes to be one of two keynote speakers (with Simon O’Sullivan, Goldsmiths College London) of Minor Photography, Leuven, 2011, published in the Leuven UP series 2012.