Since 1989, Nana Petzet has recorded her artistic ideas in books with paintings, drawings, collages and hand-written texts. In this way, she has cultivated stylistic inconsistency, a form of mimetic adoption of preexisting picture material, the transcription and illustration of dreams and capturing of spontaneous thoughts on the most varied topics. These books were first publicly presented in Zurich in the group show A Night at the Show in 1995, where she worked on her books on stage. In 2012 individual visitors could choose from one of the eight books completed by Friends and Lovers in Underground at the Kunsthaus Jesteburg. For her lecture on the value of things Í gildi hlutanna in the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík, Nana Petzet relied entirely on drawings from her books as source material. Also the performance Three Contents, given in the frame of the series Blind Date in the Kunstverein Hannover in 2005, was based on scanned double pages which she selected with reference to the topics “me”, “art” and “nature”.

The selection of entries shown here focuses thematically on ecological issues and, despite the playfully ironic form, reflects the artist’s deeply felt concern for the state of the world.