Anja Manfredi & Nicole Haitzinger: Glimpses into the Stars Became Space, Fotohof edition, Salzburg 2019

A celestial globe in a museum depicted on the cover of this volume indicates the direction it will take: the manifestation of the firmament, the stars, and the unknown throughout time in the spiritual dimension. The artist book provides insight into Vienna’s religious sites and spiritual architectures; it maps a selection of sacral spaces through the grid of the city’s twenty-three districts, revealing a dispositive of various religions throughout Vienna. The understanding of the subject of the publication Glimpses into the Stars Became Space by Anja Manfredi and Nicole Haitzinger follows a rather intuitive logic by also including secular astronomical sites, such as the Kuffner or Vienna observatories. Rather than diving into cosmological symbolism or astrological thought, the viewer meanders through different religions in an urban reality engendering a conceptual space. The project is situated at the intersections of art and architecture, material and visual culture, anthropology and philosophy.

The small format of the 416-page book echoes the size of a bible or the Catholic hymn book, the Gotteslob, yet with a Swiss binding. The mainly black-and-white image sequence starts with photographs of celestial globes and astronomical instruments installed in the Globe Museum of the Austrian National Library. The succeeding sculpture of Atlas, who, as a titan, following Greek mythology, is condemned to hold up the celestial heavens for eternity, was photographed in the Archeological Museum in Naples and shoulders the world’s oldest celestial globe. Questioning the space between the terrestrial and the celestial, and with the view directed toward the sky, the dramaturgy of the publication follows the numerical order aligned with Vienna’s districts.

The photographs reveal how the Roman Catholic Church spatially manifested itself with impressive architecture over the centuries: the famous landmark St. Stephen’s Cathedral (a gothic dome in the first), the impressive baroque St. Charles Church in the fourth district, the Kirche am Steinhof, the Church of St. Leopold designed by Otto Wagner (one of the most important Art Nouveau churches), and Fritz Wotruba’s archaic brutalist church (built of concrete blocks and glass). Naturally, all of these costly and elaborate architectural endeavors contrast with the Shaolin Temple’s ordinary entrance door made of glass and aluminum or the Mandir Association’s Hindu Temple in the eighth district with its colorful paintings of divinities decorated with plastic flower garlands.

The publication also meanders through precious material and its pastiches: there is marble next to its painted version, pure gold extended with its paint, and the black-and-white photograph of a simple yet classy table arrangement blurs the distinctions between porcelain and plastic. The depicted and recurring visual motifs and patterns start from antiquity, running throughout time and across continents and resonating in thoughtfully arranged spreads: the same motifs from different angles propose the subject’s intensification; the focus on details opens up questions on materials or abstractions; some subjects address the whole gamut from emptiness to overabundance. The entire sequence suggests that the images are to be seen in their singularity with no narrative intention.

In her artistic practice, Anja Manfredi is interested in exploring photographic facets in relation to perception while particularly negotiating performance, the body, and movement. Collaborating with Nicole Haitzinger, a dramaturge and a professor of art, music, and dance studies, the project additionally invites a performative reading by reflecting the pace of the spiritual and sacral spaces. In a very prudent manner, the artist hints at various rules and rituals among believers in regard to their confessions in the respective place of worship. In the first district, the image sequence opens with the Stadttempel (City Prayer House), the city’s main synagogue. Following an impressive view onto the cupola with its vast number of little stars, the artist shares her female perspective from the balcony, looking down to the benches on the ground floor, reserved for men. Her photographs address the complex question of equality within a spiritual community, the rituals of belonging, and the restriction of access through the place reserved for male shoes in a mosque or the doorbell nameplate that hints at a religious site to which the artist was not granted entry.

At first glance, the publication may feel a bit untimely and anachronistic during a period of permanent crises in which society seems to be breaking apart, but the artist forces the viewer to consider a set of complex relationships, traditions, and regulations and poses questions toward an absolute but otherwise uncertain future.