A.S. Bruckstein Çoruh

House of TASWIR. Doing and Undoing Things. Notes on Epistemic Architecture(s), Munich: W. Fink, 2014.

With her House of TASWIR, Bruckstein designs a highly idiosyncratic epistemic architecture whose cosmopolitan Jewish protagonists—splinterers of the logos, vagrants, and believers in the iconic quality of letters—have largely withdrawn past the surpassing disaster of the European twentieth century.

By connecting pre-modern paths of knowledge with Surrealist, Dadaist, and contemporary techniques of assemblage, sampling and remixing, TASWIR creates a radical simultaneity and overlapping of multi-local and diachronic references that together makes up the House of TASWIR.

The book can be ordered at the Wilhelm Fink Verlag or via amazon

Chris Newman on House of Taswir, October 22, 2017

The form of the book, the mode of presentation, the form of the book is the mode of presentation, what you could call the orchestration, is amazingly consistent, which means whatever the nature of the stuff, how ever bitty, it remains consistenly & constant. In fact a counterpoint ensues, which is between the consistency of the presentation & the bittiness of the material, & this counterpoint becomes something in its own right, becomes per se, & becomes the book which is both it with itself & it itself. Apart from that you never have to pull up the screen to block off the neighbouring bed, you don’t have to grow the hedge between neighbours, in fact you need the neighbours (& how) to manifest yourself, they’re your only chance, & that’s how the book is.

This book is high risk in its making, because it could have landed as an ego-banana, & self-obsession of chosen topics, whathaveyou. But what happens is that these manifest themselves as potential topic, i.e. they are non-topic topics, they are not concerned with themselves, they are specifically general, & thus transcend the personal, use the personal to become the ultimate general. This book is a textbook of texture, whereby the texture becomes the text, including the pictures, the density & spread across the pages is the text. So one medium – the idea of text as a medium – transforms itself into another in the most active of ways – it’s working actively before you. In this respect this book is more like a performing arts piece than the usually passive book-medium, which has to be activated by the reader. This is like taking the material of the book, words, pictures & turning it into an abstract substance & spreading it across the pages as if they were a canvas, but of course a book has many pages, not just the one all-confrontationalness of a canvas, & so you are dramatically involved in the spread by turning the pages, to set the substance of the meaning free. This redefines the medium of “book,” what a book could be. This piece is homogenous & all-embracing at the same time. it is the embodiment of the conjunction and.

Chris Newman, artist, composer, poet, writer
on House of Taswir

October 22, 2017

More Reviews

“Es war zuerst eine Ausstellung im Berliner Gropiusbau, dann ein interkulturelles Projekt, nun ist es ein Buch: House of Taswir von Almut Bruckstein Çoruh. Es ist ein Haus, in dem man sich verlieren kann – es ist ein Buch, in dem man sich verirren kann: ein Denk-Labyrinth aus Notizen, Zitaten und Reflexionen einerseits und aus Bildern, Abbildungen und Kalligraphien andererseits – ein anarchisches, höchst idiosynkratisches Gebäude, in dem jüdische und islamische Philosophie, mittelalterliche und postmoderne Deutungstradition aufeinander treffen. Faust-Kultur druckt eine Seite aus Brucksteins Gedanken- und Bildcollage ab.”

Faust-Kultur 

“With her House of TASWIR, A.S. Bruck­stein Çoruh designs a highly idio­syn­cratic epi­stemic archi­tec­ture whose cos­mo­pol­itan Jew­ish protagonists—splinterers of the logos, vag­rants, and believ­ers in the iconic qual­ity of letters—have largely with­drawn past the sur­pass­ing dis­aster of the European twen­ti­eth century.

By con­nect­ing pre-modern paths of know­ledge with Sur­real­ist, Dadaist, and con­tem­por­ary tech­niques of assemblage, sampling and remix­ing, TASWIR cre­ates a rad­ical sim­ul­tan­eity and over­lap­ping of multi-local and dia­chronic ref­er­ences that together makes up the House of TASWIR.”

Verena Gerlach

“The House of Taswir practices free association of objects, positions, places. It uses semiotic techniques inherited from ancient Talmudic texts, and cultivates methods of citation, inversion, displacement, veiling, cup-up, remix, repetition. The House of Taswir is an imaginary institute for artistic and diasporic thinking that creates concepts from constellations yet unknown, drawing on the interpretation of dreams, of poetry, icon letters, and TASWIR.”

Forum Transregional Studies