Christian Jankowski

Dramensatz
Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel;
Christoph Merian Verlag, Basel, 2003
134 x 182 mm, 236 pages

Video is the artist Christian Jankowski’s preferred medium, and cultural and artistic activities are his chosen “playing field.” Dramensatz is a collection of ten videos portraying transcribed dialogues presented in a typographic dramatic format (Dramensatz). The videos’ linear sequence forms a parallel to the book’s own linearity which is represented in the book by consecutive minutes and seconds that correspond to the time frame in the videos.

A volume encompassing all of the titles accompanies the work and guides the reader in the form of a video track. Our concept—the font is a visual reference to the Reclam series of books—was developed in collaboration with the artist and the curator Phillip Kaiser. The book was chosen by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture as one of “The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2003.”