BOOK:Dan Young & Christian Giroux-Berlin 2013/1983,ARCH+ Books

The artist book BERLIN 2013/1983, published by ARCH+, is an ambitious new work by Daniel Young and Christian Giroux that continues their collaborative program of conceptual motion picture installations and represents the artists’ preoccupation with the built environment. Berlin is an intriguing case study, not least because of the changing geo-politics altering the urban fabric of both East and West Berlin. With encyclopedic pretension, the artists attempted to document every building completed in Berlin in 2013 alongside buildings erected one generation (approximately thirty years) earlier. Devised as an imaging machine to destroy other images, the book counteracts the usual Berlin narratives in its analytical approach and presentation of its 784 building pairs. The artists describe their work as “Rigorous dérives”. BERLIN 2013/1983 was commissioned by TIFF, the Goethe-Institut Toronto, and Ed Video Media Arts Centre (Guelph) with support from the Canada Council for the Arts. –Efi Michalarou