Before the Beginning and After the End. Goshka Macuga

The volume "Before the Beginning and After the End. Goshka Macuga", published by Fondazione Prada on the occasion of the exhibition "To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll", is organized as an atlas and retraces for the first time Goshka Macuga's career from 1993 to the present day in more than 300 pages. The volume includes original essays by Rosi Braidotti (philosopher, Center for Humanities, Utrecht), Elena Filipovic (art historian and curator, Kunsthalle Basel), Ariane Koek (art consultant, CERN, Geneva), Lawrence Krauss (physicist and astronomer, Arizona State University), Dieter Roelstraete (curator, dOCUMENTA, Kassel) and Michael Taussig (anthropologist, Columbia University, New York), along with an anthology of texts published for former projects by the artist.
The project was conceived and designed by Goshka Macuga whose artistic practice is often referred to as taking on the roles of an artist, curator, collector, researcher and exhibition designer. Macuga describes these categories that are often attached to her practice, as "predicating her position within, and making her part of, an art historical taxonomy". The artist works across a variety of media including sculpture, installation, photography, architecture and design and explores how and why we remember both cultural and personal events, with a particular focus on how we create our own classificatory systems for producing and remembering knowledge in times of rapidly advancing technology and information saturation.