“die belege/les quittances/the receipts” by RELAX (chiarenza & hauser & co) is not only an exhibition at the CentrePasquArt in Biel but also an artist's book. Both deal with the fact that in the contemporary exhibition field, business management issues are increasingly taking precedence over the content of art.
In order to trace the reasons for this, both the publication and the exhibition reveal the bookkeeping of the artists' group RELAX over twenty years. Not only does it become clear that the cup of coffee has become noticeably more expensive. In the course of RELAX’ twenty years of artistic work, the number of exhibition projects on offer has increased every year, but the exhibition budgets have become smaller and smaller.
What the exhibition now attempts to show with installation, photography, and slide projection to visualize complex contexts seems at first glance to be extremely simple in the publication.
For the publication, several tens of thousands of receipts from the RELAX accounting system were copied and glued together into one hundred page A4 blocks. Each buyer of the publication thus receives a unique copy and a different insight into the artists' editions.
In addition, a text booklet contains – as a first publication – the CentrePasquArt annual accounts of the last few years. A detailed text by Philip Ursprung on the strategies of the artists’ group and materials on the exhibition completes the publication.