So far, the work of Austrian artist Peter Friedl (*1960) has managed to elude stylistic classification. Investigating the social, political, and cultural realities at work in institutionalized practice, his projects have been called "conceptual, aesthetic acts"--usually they are subtle forays into institutional criticism with political insight. Four or Five Roses continues Friedl's exploration of the stereotypical language of the monologue genre. The book contains some 45 children's "monologues," edited by the artist from numerous interviews and conversations recorded on playgrounds in South Africa. Faithfully transcribed and translated into English from different South African languages (Afrikaans, Northern and Southern Suthu, Zulu, Xhosa...), the "edited monologue" then becomes a hybrid genre, both fictionalised speech and serious counter-voice. What is ultimately at stake is how discursive strategies operate as a political tool, endlessly reshaped and manipulated for the sake of persuasion. The texts are accompanied by color illustrations of the actual South African playgrounds.

Since 1995 Peter Friedl has been photographing public playgrounds from around the world and compiling them alphabetically by reference to the names of the places.

A retrospective of Peter Friedls work which cannot be classified according to material or stylistic criteria. Nevertheless, his projects follow strict, methodologically ordered processes. An observer of his political and cultural environment, his projects react to concrete situations or events originating in the folds of history considered in the present and the collapses of collective imagination. In various formats his work is deployed in long-term projects. This publication features a personal and lesser-known aspect of his art: his drawings.

This publication offers a retrospective of the work of photographer and filmmaker Friedl Kubelka (born 1946)--known as a filmmaker under the name of Friedl vom Gröller. It gathers her portraits of filmmaker friends and family, film stills and a selection of her fashion photographs. In 1972 she began her epic project Year's Portraits, for which she photographed herself daily over a period of one year--a process that has been repeated every five years since. Among the artist's portrait subjects are Franz West, Walter Pichler and Peter Kubelka (her husband), as well as central protagonists of the American Independent Cinema such as Jack Smith, Bruce Conner, Hollis Frampton, Kenneth Anger, Jonas Mekas, George and Mike Kuchar, and many more. Most of the images gathered together here are published for the first time in book form. The book also includes a DVD with a selection of vom Gröller's 16 mm films.

Interviews with workers involved in the building and upkeep of Edificio Copán in São Paulo, Brazil.

Heterogeneous objects provides various essays that explore the encounter of photography with other media since the 1960s. The essays offer new ways of thinking about photography beyond modernist notions of medium specificity and autonomy based upon the idea that a photograph does not rely on a coherent system of codes but is almost always encountered as a fragmented, partial object. Addressing recent debates in art history and photography theory, film studies, and media theory, the contributions cover a broad array of approaches, relating photography to issues of the panorama, surveillance, sculpture, transformation and processuality, and the development of new media categories. Rather than conceiving of photography as a medium, the aim is to reconsider the photograph as a historically, theoretically, and culturally embedded heterogeneous object that is always related to, in contact with, or shaped by other media.