Barbara Kruger: Believe & Doubt

Barbara Kruger (born 1945) fuses picture- and word-based art to engage issues of power, pleasure, money, love and death. Her photographs, large-scale installations and immersive, multichannel video rooms address the viewer through an intensely spatialized visual display. Though Kruger’s art often imitates advertising, it is the overwhelming disparity between her work and the commercial forms she imitates that compels us to consider her work: instead of the advertisement we are conditioned to expect, we are instead confronted with problematic social attitudes, issues and stereotypes. In this volume, her oeuvre is examined from various perspectives in an in-depth conversation between Kruger, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. Designed in close cooperation with the artist, this catalogue documents the Belief & Doubt installation at Kunsthaus Bregenz, demonstrating the enormous social currency of Kruger’s artistic statements and her powerful forms of address.