For more than 30 years, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia has supported the publication of contemporary artists’ initial monographs with the Collection Cahiers d’Artistes. From 11 November to 10 December, the Cahiers archive will be presented during the «Extended Cahiers» exhibition, initiated by Pro Helvetia Moscow and realised in collaboration with the GROUND Art Centre.

No fewer than 142 Cahiers d’Artistes have been published since the launch of the project in 1984. This wide selection includes names such as Peter Fischli & David Weiss (1985), Pipilotti Rist (1994) or even Lang & Baumann (1997). With its Collection Cahiers d’Artistes, Pro Helvetia enables aspiring Swiss artists the publication of an initial monograph to their name. Once every two years, based on the recommendation of a specialist jury, the Swiss Arts Council selects eight artists out of those who have followed a call for applications. The monographs are designed in close cooperation with the artists themselves. For the artists, this represents a unique opportunity to make their work – underscored with a professionally written text – better known to the international art scene. The series was launched by the Arts Council in 1984 and has been published by Edizioni Periferia since 2006. An online platform for the Collection Cahiers d’Artistes was created in 2015 at www.cahiers.ch. The website contains additional information about the artists of the past and current series and makes all the monographs published over more than 30 years available in digitised form.

Impressions of the opening on 11 november (Photos: Grigory Matveev)

The «Extended Cahiers» exhibition at the GROUND Art Centre in Moscow provides the occasion to showcase this very large body of material and digital archive of Swiss contemporary art trends. The exhibition is realised by independent curator Madeleine Amsler and by Patrick Gosatti, in charge of the Cahiers project at Pro Helvetia. The presentation of all of the publications featured in the past 30 years is designed as a living round tour, a dynamic and branched extension of the works in space and on the walls. Imagined as an extended book, such a presentation intends to highlight the topicality of the archive as well as its reactivation potential. Besides the presentation of the original publications, the exhibition presents an abundant selection of images, photographs, impressions taken from numerous pages of the Cahiers d’Artistes as well as artistic actions especially realised for this exhibition, such as a performance the artists Gilles Furtwängler (2017) and Delphine Chapuis Schmitz (2015) realised in collaboration for the occasion. A video project based on the archive completes the presentation of the Collection Cahiers d’Artistes. Besides the presentation of the archive, this event is likewise an important occasion for the presentation of the latest 2017 edition with the publications from Gina Folly, Gilles Furtwängler, Mathis Gasser, Charlotte Herzig, Karin Hueber, Florence Jung, Yves Scherer and Hagar Schmidhalter.

A discussions day will take place on 11 November, the date of the vernissage. The artists Gilles Furtwängler and Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, as well as the curators Denis Pernet, Madeleine Amsler and Patrick Gosatti, will exchange ideas and debate approaches related to the contemporary archive with cultural practitioners from Moscow. The Collection Cahiers d’Artistes archive will be the point of departure of discussions that will be developed concerning artistic production, edition and its relationship with the performance or even the role, function and contemporary development of the critical discourse.