Krištof Kintera – I AM NOT YOU: Individually Hand-Worked Artist’s Book in a Shoebox

Kintera, Krištof. I AM NOT YOU. Basel: Museum Tinguely, 2014. Approx. 400 loose sheets of photographic reproductions, documents, drawings, studio materials, and texts, housed in the original shoebox, individually hand-painted, taped, inscribed, and otherwise altered by Kintera. Box approx. 33 × 23 × 12 cm. One of 1,000 copies, each individually made and unique. Very good condition.
A remarkable artist’s book, exhibition catalogue, and unique art object, produced for Krištof Kintera’s major solo exhibition I AM NOT YOU at Museum Tinguely, Basel, 11 June–28 September 2014. Rather than producing a conventional bound catalogue, Kintera and thedesigners Petr Babák and Lukáš Kijonka of Laboratoř conceived the publication as an accumulation of hundreds of loose reproductions of photographs, drawings, technical material, notes, and documents from the artist’s studio, effectively transferring the disorder and immediacy of his working table into a shoebox. The project was nominated in the 2014 Czech Grand Design awards. The container is integral to the work. Museum Tinguely described every copy as being hand-packed in an individual box, while Kintera’s own contemporary documentation describes the publication as a special edition of 1,000, comprising 400 pages, handwritten, hand-bound and taped. Kintera elsewhere calls it a “unique publication with handwritten remarks, taped pages etc.”