Robert Vanis – back of a book

The Academy Library holds a print collection of approximately 300,000 works, including around 10,000 titles of historical holdings. A significant portion of this collection has been placed in the reading room since the general renovation of the Academy building – a space that enables focused study and provides structured access to knowledge.

However, the perception of the publications displayed in the reading room usually ends at the limits of their visibility—the book spines. Even titles and authors appear here more as ornamental elements within a museal scene, as the historical collection is rarely used by readers.
Between the mere visibility of the books and their content-related shadow existence—between representation and functionality—the historical holdings in the reading room have condensed into an ensemble that serves less the transmission of knowledge itself than its aestheticised presence, thus potentially becoming part of a historicist staging.

Robert Vanis takes up this idea in his work back of a book, using it as a point of departure for a site-specific artistic intervention.
Across several metres of shelving, he replaces and supplements the spines of selected volumes with mirrors, photographs, facsimiles, photographic paper, and glass. This subtle disruption of the familiar appearance of the reading room opens a space for reflection, in which questions concerning the materiality of knowledge and the transience of matter can be raised.
Vanis delicately connects photography with its spatial context, thereby pointing to an aesthetic and conceptual gap.

Large-format cyanotypes of screenshots reference techniques of documentation and archiving that could hardly be further apart in terms of their temporal and medial origins. The cool aesthetic of the cyanotype process stands at the opposite end of the colour spectrum from the reading room’s reddish-hued interior.

In this sense, books and shelves become carriers of new meaning through the alteration of their surfaces. The materials used reflect—both literally and metaphorically—the relationship between knowledge and memory, between original and reproduction, authorship and quotation, ephemerality and the urge to resist it through collection and archiving.

Through this interplay of photographic image and spatial intervention, the reading room is transformed into a potential site for questioning cultural systems of storage. At the same time, photography itself becomes a subject of inquiry: as a medium for documenting the seen as the experienced, and as a means of expressing thought and imagination.

Robert Vanis, born in 1982 in Annaberg-Buchholz, lives and works as an artist and commissioned photographer in Vienna and Dresden.
From 2016 to 2025, he served as Artistic Associate in charge of the Photography Lab at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden. Since 2015, he has been Image Editor for PhotoResearcher, the journal of the European Society for the History of Photography, based in Vienna.
In 2022, he founded materialmatters, a company specialising in the photographic documentation of artworks.
As of October 2025, he will hold a teaching position in the Photo Laboratory at the Institute of Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Curator: Patrizia Wiesner-Ledermann