Edited by Marie Angeletti with Gianmaria Andreetta and Camilla Wills.

Paradis is a continuation of the eponymous exhibition conceived by artist Marie Angeletti in Marseilles in 2021. The exhibition brought together 56 artists of different origins and generations. More than just a transcription of this event, this catalogue brings together some one hundred contributions, combining critical texts, poetry, artists’ writings and new translations, alongside an equally large number of visual contributions and ad hoc works, most of them previously unpublished.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Julie Ault, Martin Beck: Installation at Secession, Vienna, 22 September–12 November, 2006.

The exhibition consisted of an arrangement of individually and collaboratively authored installation fixtures, arenas, and works that functioned as the display architecture produced specifically for the Secession’s space.

The vocabulary inscribed by Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ series of photographs Untitled (Natural History)—Patriot, Historian, Ranchman, Scientist, Soldier, Humanitarian, Author, Conservationist, Naturalist, Scholar, Explorer, and Statesman parenthesized the exhibition. The photographs were hung on the gallery’s permanent walls.

Martin Beck is an artist whose exhibitions and projects engage questions of historicity and authorship and they draw from the fields of architecture, design, and popular culture. A ‘leitmotif’ in Beck’s practice is the notion of display: his works often engage histories of exhibiting and communication formats and, on a material level, negotiate display’s function as a condition of image-making.

His main bodies of works from the 2000s investigated how the modern conception of display developed in the mid-20th century. For his solo exhibition an Exhibit viewed played populated at Grazer Kunstverein, Beck presented works that emerged out of his research on Richard Hamilton’s 1957 an Exhibit in which colored acrylic panels, suspended from the gallery ceiling, created an environment that turned the gallery space itself into an artwork.