Bea Schlingelhoff - If you slap the water, you hurt the heads of the fish

Comes in different cover patterns. “If you slap the water, you hurt the heads of the fish” is the first comprehensive monograph devoted to artist Bea Schlingelhoff. Published on the occasion of her solo exhibition No River to Cross at Kunstverein München, it extends far beyond this to survey fifteen years of her artistic practice through imagery, ephemera, and various texts. Additionally, the publication brings together five newly commissioned pieces of writing, penned by Catherine Chevalier, Gloria Hasnay, Christina Irrgang, Helene Moll, and Sadie Plant, each focusing on a specific body of Schlingelhoff’s work. Each book is one of a kind and bound in different endpapers from the private collection of the artist’s father.

In her artistic practice, Schlingelhoff endeavors to remember women’s forgotten biographies, dissolve patriarchal frameworks, and trace the persistence of fascist structures. Her works are interrogations of the ideology and history of the respective sites of her exhibitions. The artist, whose work also encompasses drawing, sculpture, and typography, discloses underlying structures through site-specific interventions: additions, changes, and subtractions on architectural as well as structural levels. By shifting relationships in this way, she reveals inherited notions of how spatial and juridical arrangements are constituted. Co-published with Kunstverein München.