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Antonia Hirsch: Search Engine is the artist’s exploration of the nature of art, knowledge, and how we engage with the overwhelming flow of information in our digital age. Constructed as an experimental "index" that is both thought-provoking and non-linear, it guides readers through the Hirsch’s meditations on attention as a radical act in a society that often demands it for profit. The book invites readers to jump through ideas, associations, and fragments that lie beyond the binary of truth or meaninglessness, echoing the nature of an index as a structured, yet open, form. With reflections on stage magic, digital screens, and the hierarchy of language, Search Engine is both a tool and a journey, a book that rewards a curious, roving eye with new perspectives and a deeper understanding of how we navigate—and interpret—the contemporary world. Featuring texts by Henriette Huldisch and Katharina Rein, with an artist interview by Elena Filipovic.

What if it is not the object that possesses the aura but instead there is something that possesses us in the face of an object?

Antonia Hirsch, Search Engine

Contributors

1. Antonia Hirsch

   was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and received her BFA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (London, England). From 1994 to 2010, she lived and worked in Vancouver, Canada, and has been based in Berlin since 2010. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, USA); Salzburger Kunstverein (Austria); Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Taiwan); Tramway (Glasgow, Scotland); Kunstinstituut Melly, FKA Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam, Netherlands); ZKM Museum für zeitgenössische Kunst (Karlsruhe, Germany); and in Canada at Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver) and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto). She has been artist-in-residence at institutions such as the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Canada) and the Cité des Arts (Paris, France), and has received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and Hessische Kulturstiftung. Hirsch’s projects and writing have appeared in publications such as C Magazine, Fillip, The Happy Hypocrite, and Triple Canopy. In addition to artist books, she has published two anthologies, Intangible Economies (2012) and Negative Space: Orbiting Inner & Outer Experience (2015). She was an associate editor at Fillip from 2009 to 2015. Her work is held in public collections, including those of the Vancouver Art Gallery (Canada), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), and Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry (Miami Beach, USA).

2. Elena Filipovic

   is the director of Kunstmuseum Basel. From 2014 to 2024, she was director and curator of Kunsthalle Basel (Switzerland) and previously served as senior curator of WIELS (Brussels, Belgium). She curated the Croatian Pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale and was co-curator, with Adam Szymczyk, of When things cast no shadow, the 5th Berlin Biennale (2008). Her writing has appeared in numerous journals and artists’ catalogues; she has edited several compendiums on exhibition histories, including The Artist as Curator: An Anthology, published by Mousse (2017), and The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, with Marieke van Hal and Solveig Øvstebø, published by Hatje Cantz (2010). She is the author of David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale (2017), published by Afterall Books, for which she was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant, and The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (2016), published by MIT Press and winner of Honorable Mention, 2017 PROSE Award in Art History and Criticism.

3. Henriette Huldisch

   is chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, USA). Previously, she was curator and director of exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, USA), where she organized exhibitions such as Ericka Beckman: Double Reverse (2019); Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974–1995 (2018); An Inventory of Shimmers: Objects of Intimacy in Contemporary Art (2017); and Edgar Arceneaux: Written in Smoke and Fire (2016). From 2010 to 2014, she worked at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart (Berlin, Germany) and curated exhibitions with Harun Farocki, Anthony McCall, and others. During that time, Huldisch also served as visiting curator at Cornerhouse (Manchester, England) where she presented solo projects with Stanya Kahn and Rosa Barba. From 2004 to 2008, she was assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, USA), and there co-curated the 2008 Whitney Biennial, among others. Her publications include Before Projection (2018), An Inventory of Shimmers(2017), Ellen Harvey: The Museum of Failure (2015), and numerous contributions to exhibition catalogues and periodicals such as Artforum.

4. Katharina Rein

   is a cultural historian and media scholar specializing in illusionist entertainment culture, audio-visual media, and digital media. Her award-winning doctoral dissertation, completed at Humboldt University (Berlin, Germany), analyzes stage magic in the late nineteenth century. It was published in 2020, titled Techniken der Täuschung, and in English translation in 2023 as Techniques of Illusion. She is the author of Gothic Cinema (2021, English translation 2023) and Gestörter Film (2012) and the editor of Illusions in Cultural Practice (2021) and Magic: A Companion (2022). She has authored more than twenty-five academic essays that have appeared in four languages. Rein currently works as a lecturer in European media studies at the University of Potsdam (Germany). In 2022, she was guest professor for the Theory and Aesthetics of Digital Media at the University of Vienna (Austria). Prior to this, she worked as a researcher and lecturer at the International Research Institute for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy of Bauhaus University (Weimar, Germany). She was a member of two international interdisciplinary research networks: “Les Arts Trompeurs. Machines, Magie, Médias,” from 2015 to 2018, and “Daring Media: Practices and Conditions of Risk and Courage in Contemporary Cultures,” from 2021 to 2023.

5. Jayne Wilkinson

   was editor-in-chief at Canadian Art, before which she served as editor/publisher at Prefix Photo, director/curator at Prefix ICA, Toronto and held positions at the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver. She contributes art writing and criticism to a variety of print, online, and peer-reviewed publications, and has lectured on topics related to contemporary art and culture, nationally and internationally. She holds a BA in Art History from the University of Guelph and an MA in Art History and Critical Theory from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

6. Claudia Kotte

   is a lecturer at the Goethe-Institut Berlin. Her research courses include "Memory and Migration in Contemporary American and Canadian Fiction", "Diasporic Communities in Canadian Literature and Film", "The Transatlantic Relationship in Practice", "Canadian Film: History, Filmmakers, Perspectives" (University of Innsbruck, 2012), "Le cinéma québécois", and "German Film from the Beginning to the Present".

This project made possible with support from: Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Community; Hessische Kulturstiftung; the Embassy of Canada in Germany.

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