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Åke Hodell
1965
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Åke Hodell (1919–2000) was a Swedish poet, visual artist, composer, and former fighter pilot. His aviation career came to an abrupt end in 1941 when he crashed during a training exercise at an airfield in ...
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Orderbuch
Åke Hodell
1965
Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren
Unpaginated [44 pages]
21 × 14.8 cm

Åke Hodell (1919–2000) was a Swedish poet, visual artist, composer, and former fighter pilot. His aviation career came to an abrupt end in 1941 when he crashed during a training exercise at an airfield in Skåne. Following a lengthy hospitalization, he turned his attention to the arts, developing a multidisciplinary practice that combined writing and collage with music, theatre, and performance.


 


Often read in relation to “CA 36715”, this text-based artist’s book serves as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It presents a fictional yet plausible list of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, reduced to numbers and categorized according to the uses made of their bodies after death: seife, lampenschirm, grundausfüllung, unbrauchbar (soap, lampshade, base fill, unusable). Excruciating in its stark minimalism, the enumeration transforms bureaucratic language into an indictment of the systematic dehumanization and annihilation carried out by the Nazi regime.


 


The book’s austere format also evokes the clandestine notebooks kept by prisoners in Nazi camps, where writing served to preserve traces of individual identity in the face of systematic erasure. Hodell’s artist’s book can thus be situated alongside the radical practices of Fabio Mauri and Christian Boltanski, whose works similarly confront the memory of the Holocaust.


 


A major retrospective devoted to Hodell’s exploration of resistance through art was presented at Malmö Konsthall in 2022.

Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren
Unpaginated [44 pages]
21 × 14.8 cm

Åke Hodell (1919–2000) was a Swedish poet, visual artist, composer, and former fighter pilot. His aviation career came to an abrupt end in 1941 when he crashed during a training exercise at an airfield in Skåne. Following a lengthy hospitalization, he turned his attention to the arts, developing a multidisciplinary practice that combined writing and collage with music, theatre, and performance.

 

Often read in relation to “CA 36715”, this text-based artist’s book serves as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It presents a fictional yet plausible list of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, reduced to numbers and categorized according to the uses made of their bodies after death: seife, lampenschirm, grundausfüllung, unbrauchbar (soap, lampshade, base fill, unusable). Excruciating in its stark minimalism, the enumeration transforms bureaucratic language into an indictment of the systematic dehumanization and annihilation carried out by the Nazi regime.

 

The book’s austere format also evokes the clandestine notebooks kept by prisoners in Nazi camps, where writing served to preserve traces of individual identity in the face of systematic erasure. Hodell’s artist’s book can thus be situated alongside the radical practices of Fabio Mauri and Christian Boltanski, whose works similarly confront the memory of the Holocaust.

 

A major retrospective devoted to Hodell’s exploration of resistance through art was presented at Malmö Konsthall in 2022.

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Åke Hodell (1919–2000) was a Swedish poet, visual artist, composer, and former fighter pilot. His aviation career came to an abrupt end in 1941 when he crashed during a training exercise at an airfield in Skåne. Following a lengthy hospitalization, he turned his attention to the arts, developing a multidisciplinary practice that combined writing and collage with music, theatre, and performance.

 

Often read in relation to “CA 36715”, this text-based artist’s book serves as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It presents a fictional yet plausible list of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, reduced to numbers and categorized according to the uses made of their bodies after death: seife, lampenschirm, grundausfüllung, unbrauchbar (soap, lampshade, base fill, unusable). Excruciating in its stark minimalism, the enumeration transforms bureaucratic language into an indictment of the systematic dehumanization and annihilation carried out by the Nazi regime.

 

The book’s austere format also evokes the clandestine notebooks kept by prisoners in Nazi camps, where writing served to preserve traces of individual identity in the face of systematic erasure. Hodell’s artist’s book can thus be situated alongside the radical practices of Fabio Mauri and Christian Boltanski, whose works similarly confront the memory of the Holocaust.

 

A major retrospective devoted to Hodell’s exploration of resistance through art was presented at Malmö Konsthall in 2022.

Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren
Unpaginated [44 pages]
21 × 14.8 cm

Åke Hodell (1919–2000) was a Swedish poet, visual artist, composer, and former fighter pilot. His aviation career came to an abrupt end in 1941 when he crashed during a training exercise at an airfield in Skåne. Following a lengthy hospitalization, he turned his attention to the arts, developing a multidisciplinary practice that combined writing and collage with music, theatre, and performance.

 

Often read in relation to “CA 36715”, this text-based artist’s book serves as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It presents a fictional yet plausible list of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, reduced to numbers and categorized according to the uses made of their bodies after death: seife, lampenschirm, grundausfüllung, unbrauchbar (soap, lampshade, base fill, unusable). Excruciating in its stark minimalism, the enumeration transforms bureaucratic language into an indictment of the systematic dehumanization and annihilation carried out by the Nazi regime.

 

The book’s austere format also evokes the clandestine notebooks kept by prisoners in Nazi camps, where writing served to preserve traces of individual identity in the face of systematic erasure. Hodell’s artist’s book can thus be situated alongside the radical practices of Fabio Mauri and Christian Boltanski, whose works similarly confront the memory of the Holocaust.

 

A major retrospective devoted to Hodell’s exploration of resistance through art was presented at Malmö Konsthall in 2022.

MORE BOOKS

Åke Hodell (1919–2000) was a Swedish poet, visual artist, composer, and former fighter pilot. His aviation career came to an abrupt end in 1941 when he crashed during a training exercise at an airfield in Skåne. Following a lengthy hospitalization, he turned his attention to the arts, developing a multidisciplinary practice that combined writing and collage with music, theatre, and performance.

 

Often read in relation to “CA 36715”, this text-based artist’s book serves as a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It presents a fictional yet plausible list of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, reduced to numbers and categorized according to the uses made of their bodies after death: seife, lampenschirm, grundausfüllung, unbrauchbar (soap, lampshade, base fill, unusable). Excruciating in its stark minimalism, the enumeration transforms bureaucratic language into an indictment of the systematic dehumanization and annihilation carried out by the Nazi regime.

 

The book’s austere format also evokes the clandestine notebooks kept by prisoners in Nazi camps, where writing served to preserve traces of individual identity in the face of systematic erasure. Hodell’s artist’s book can thus be situated alongside the radical practices of Fabio Mauri and Christian Boltanski, whose works similarly confront the memory of the Holocaust.

 

A major retrospective devoted to Hodell’s exploration of resistance through art was presented at Malmö Konsthall in 2022.

MORE BOOKS