A historical work that was first exhibited at the University of California at San Diego in 1973, Aerospace Folktales is made up of 51 gelatin silver prints, a soundtrack consisting of recorded conversations and a written commentary displayed among large potted plants and director chairs dispersed throughout the gallery.

In mines and ports across the world, human labor sustains our industrial and globalized economies. Allan Sekula imagined and set out to realize an artwork, The Dockers' Museum, which makes the struggles of miners, dockworkers, and seafarers visible through networks of metonymic objects that embody these workers' imaginaries.

Allan Sekulas Arbeiten zählen zu den meistdiskutierten Werken der zeitgenössischen Kunst. In der Kombination von Fotografie und Text behandelt er einerseits die gerade auch aktuell diskutierte Frage nach den Formen des Dokumentarischen. Inhaltlich leisten sie andererseits kontroverse Beiträge zu den Debatten um die wirtschaftliche, soziale und kulturelle Globalisierung.

OKEANOS includes a series of essays from scholars, historians, and thinkers, interspersed with a selection from Allan Sekula’s immense oeuvre of seminal texts, as well as parts of his private notebooks, which include critical and humorous personal notes, as well as sketches made and written across the decades and mostly focusing on the maritime space and the material, economic, and ecologic implications of globalization.

The catalogue is published on occasion of the exhibition ‘The Purloined Masterpiece. Images as Time Machines’ at the Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.