The title and cover of the artist book Bodies of my Work by Miriam Bajtala are programmatically borrowed from a performance: a spatial installation of her work index. Performance visitors wore 99 title plates of her works. Today, the now 127 ‘bodies of her work’ have found their organized form in the pink-colored archive of this book: from conceptual, multi-layered, funny and ‘really good’ works to discarded, unrepresentative and previously invisible works. Text translations from time-based media into the book medium can also be read – those voices, off-texts, subtitles that appear in her sound, performance and video works.

Miriam Bajtala has been formulating her multifaceted, sometimes autobiographical work, which deals with themes of perception, memory, (self-)empowerment, testimony and representation, in the media of video, video installation, drawing, photography and performance for around 25 years. She often situates her works in spaces – concrete spaces such as apartments, but also social spaces. She asks questions about identity constructions and the mechanisms of social attribution: “What does it mean to be at a disadvantage and to come from an economically underprivileged and culturally uneducated family with a migration ‘foreground’?” As an artistic method, she repeatedly involves other people in her works and allows her and their experiences to interact with each other in mutual feedback and loops.

This artist’s book, Bodies of my Work, which manifests itself here as a processed archive, invites both chronological and non-linear reading. The extensive volume with over 400 illustrations contains texts by the artist as well as contributions by Claudia Slanar, Jens Kastner and Sabine Winkler.

Miriam Bajtala, *1970 in Bratislava, Slovakia; lives, sleeps and works in Vienna.