A staple-bound combination of found images and the artist’s own analog photography, this self-published book records a model’s series of gestures as she attempts to replicate the bodily positions recommended for breathing exercises found in an old German dictionary. Risograph-printed in an edition of 150 in the artist’s studio in Berlin, the documentation of the model’s search for prescribed physical comfort instead show her awkward, cramped contortions. By de-, or re-contextualizing these dated instructions, Romanian artist Ioana-Rada Nastai humorously highlights the nonsensicality of understandings of human body and behavior (a spoof accented by Nastai’s decision to color the model’s shorts blue in all the otherwise grayscale photos). The Berlin bookshop Raum B has also interpreted this paradoxical outcome as “a metaphor for the contemporary practices we immerse ourselves in to find ease and reach a state of well-being in a world we’ve built for ourselves, but feels foreign.”
In this work, Nastai builds on her interest in vernacular photography and its capacity for temporal address. This zine is also formally innovative, with small reprints of the dictionary’s instructional illustrations for poses attached inside each double-spread, as well as an additional detachable and un-foldable photograph tucked into the book’s center.