When Oswald Wiener and his wife Ingrid moved to Canada in 1984, it was not only an act of seeking knowledge, but also a conscious step by the writer to leave art behind. Interest in the extremes of nature in the Arctic Circle, in extraordinary social circumstances made Dawson City in the Arctic tundra the ideal setting for a life experiment: living and working, the house in the woods, the Claims Café – a restaurant they ran with Wiener schnitzel and apple strudel and the only Italian espresso machine far and wide – became sites of introspection and a practice of thinking beyond art, science and philosophy.

The end of the long stay in the mid-1990s, gave rise to the need to record the house, the innermost place of activity and long reflections. In over 300 photographs taken by Wiener during his lifetime, the artist couple made the house, their living and working conditions, the subject of a photographic survey. As documents of a personal space of thought and perception, these pictures are a world of their own, but they are symptomatic of the larger context of Oswald Wiener’s artistic thinking. (From Peter Pakesch: “Oswald Wiener – 4/5 October 2003 at home”) This book is published in cooperation with Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (Bruno Brunnet & Nicole Hackert)

Oswald Wiener *1935 in Vienna +2021 in Styria, Austria, was an Austrian-Canadian writer, cyberneticist, linguistic theorist and restaurateur.