When Oswald Wiener and his wife Ingrid moved to Canada in 1984, it was not only an act of intellectual inquiry but also a deliberate decision by the writer to leave art behind.

His interest in the extremes of nature near the Arctic Circle and in exceptional social conditions made Dawson City, in the Arctic tundra, the ideal setting for a life experiment. Living and working there—the house in the forest, the Claims Café (a restaurant they ran serving Wiener schnitzel and apple strudel, and featuring the only Italian espresso machine for miles)—became sites of self-observation and a practice of thinking beyond art, science, and philosophy.

When their long stay came to an end in the mid-1990s, a need emerged to preserve the house—the innermost place of activity and prolonged reflection. In more than 300 photographs taken by Wiener during his lifetime, the artist couple turned their home and their living and working conditions into the subject of a photographic survey. These images constitute a world of their own as documents of a personal space of thought and perception, yet they also stand symptomatically for the broader context of Oswald Wiener’s artistic thinking.
(From Peter Pakesch: “Oswald Wiener – 4/5 October 2003 at Home”)

This book is published in collaboration with Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (Bruno Brunnet & Nicole Hackert).

Oswald Wiener (*1935 in Vienna; †2021 in Styria, Austria) was an Austrian-Canadian writer, cyberneticist, language theorist, and restaurateur.