The Storyteller

The art of storytelling

Responding to the rapid, often violent transformations of the 21st century, artists have displayed a growing desire to activate art’s documentary capacity: its ability to bear witness to things in the world. “The Storyteller” isolates an overlooked yet vital strand within this broader tendency: the use of the story form in contemporary art as a means of comprehending and conveying recent social and political events. For the artists in this book, the story functions neither as a purely imagined narrative nor as a piece of verifiable information. It is at once temporal and personal, public and communal, persisting through the listener’s interpretive process and through each subsequent retelling.

“The Storyteller” features artists from all over the world working in a variety of media. In some cases, the artist’s story takes the form of an invented drama based on real events; in others, it adopts universalizing literary genres such as the fairytale or the quest; in still others, there is a dialogue or exchange between active participants in a contemporary political situation. In all cases, the works enable people—whether the artists themselves, their subjects, or their audience—to construct a story of individual participation in historical processes, thereby presenting these events in a new and unexpected light.

Edited by Claire Gilman and Margaret Sundell, “The Storyteller” includes works by Cao Fei, Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis, Omer Fast, Mounir Fatmi, Ryan Gander, Lamia Joreige, Joachim Koester, Emanuel Licha, Missing Books, Steve Mumford, Adrian Paci, Michael Rakowitz, Liisa Roberts, and Hito Steyerl.

Published with ICI, New York.