Curated by Karola Kraus

This summer, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden will present “Program. For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle (Revision 11),” a large-scale survey of recent work by the Conceptual artist Christopher Williams. Sound familiar? This is because Williams has been re-presenting variations on the same core set of photographs in successive shows and catalogues since 2005, always recycling the same exhibition title. But each instance of his “Program” is a fresh revision of the material, usually supplemented with one or two new images, often drastically reorganized to address the historical and institutional specificities of the site it engages. So, one more time, with feeling: The plastic corncobs, the shower girls, the jellyfish, the Kiev 88 camera—all appropriate the codes of advertising, ethnographic, and architectural photography, inflecting these with an intriguing tension between technical precision and staged disturbance.

— John Kelsey