Was trägt Sie? / What carries you? was published on the occasion of Lisa Holzer’s exhibition at the Secession in Vienna in 2019.

The book brings together photographic works, text-based images, and installation views that reflect Holzer’s sustained investigation into the relationship between language, gesture, and vulnerability.

Holzer’s practice often operates at the threshold between image and statement. Photographs are overlaid with short textual fragments—questions, assertions, interruptions—that destabilize the authority of both mediums. In this publication, these elements are sequenced in a manner that avoids narrative closure. Instead, the book proposes a field of associations in which bodies, emotions, and linguistic structures intersect.

The title itself—What carries you?—introduces a structural ambiguity. It suggests support and burden simultaneously, oscillating between emotional dependency, physical posture, and social expectation. This ambivalence is mirrored in the images: close-ups of flowers, faces, and fragments of bodies are rendered with heightened sensitivity, yet are interrupted by language that exposes fragility rather than resolves it.

The design of the book reinforces this dynamic. Typography and image placement function as compositional devices, producing pauses and shifts comparable to spatial transitions within the exhibition. Rather than documenting the show in a linear manner, the publication extends it, translating its atmosphere into a sustained engagement with perception, affect, and the instability of meaning.