Bibliotherapy is an exhibition and publication project on the subject of books, reading and what people read. It moves between art and science, literature and therapy, original and copy, light and nourishment, bonsai and potato, between Bouvard and Pécuchet, and Markowitsch and Lin.

Rémy Markowitsch (b. 1957) grew up in Zurich, and worked first as a journalist and photographer in Lucerne. Active as an artist since 1991, his sophisticated and meticulous creative work has attracted attention and recognition in Switzerland and internationally. After living and working in Berlin for several years he is now staying in London as a scholar of the Zuger Kulturstiftung Landis & Gyr.

In Bibliotherapy Markowitsch has developed an art project that explores the activity of reading and, in its broadest sense, reading’s therapeutic effects. Not only reading itself becomes the object of research in this project but the image that the reader/interpreter projects and to what extent viewers/listeners are emotionally affected in excess of the uttered word. Markowitsch’s interest in reproduction – since 1991 his extensive photographic work «Nach der Natur» (After nature) has investigated photographic images in books – undergoes a shift in Bibliotherapy from the visual, the printed image in the book, to probe the mediation of the text itself. The imaging of the executants, the portrayal of the readers, serves this purpose.

Given its first multimedia presentation with synchronic readings of the entire text of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet at the Villa Merkel, Esslingen, winter 2001/2002, the exhibition has since undergone development, continuing at the Liverpool Biennial fall 2002 with a video-reading of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

For the exhibition in Lucerne, Markowitsch has produced Bibliotherapy’s third and most ambitious station. Devoted to Gottfried Keller’s Bildungsroman Der grüne Heinrich, it follows the formal and thematic four-volume plan of that work and is made up of four categories of reader: Markowitsch filmed a large number of young people reading, fellow artists in Berlin and Switzerland (mainly in their studios), as well as a sequence of woman readers. For the fourth volume, the artist himself assumed the role of reader.

The presentation in the main exhibition hall of the Museum of Art Lucerne is the culmination in this convergence of three major works of world literature, read in the original languages, in stages, by some 260 performers. Written language, spoken language and picture-language interweave in five video projections and on monitors. Markowitsch’s monumental, glowing sculpture BonsaiPotato that serenely dominates the area and Michael Ming Hong Lin’s virtually wall-to-wall floral pattern floor-painting lend the installation a distinctive atmosphere. The collaboration with Taiwan/Paris-based Lin (b. 1964), who caused a furore in the newly reopened Palais de Tokyo site for contemporary arts in Paris with a big installation last year, is of interest not least in the light of traditions of male and/or artist friendships, a subject that likewise links the three literary works.