Architecture Books, Los Angeles, United States
October 10–November 7, 2026
Organized by Public Fiction at Architecture, Christopher Williams: KÜCHENBEDARF + ARBEITSSCHUHE is an exhibition of books, research materials, and artworks that act as extended footnotes to Christopher Williams’s long-term project RADIO PLAY.
RADIO PLAY was inspired by Bavarian playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1971 play Inklusive, which was first broadcast in West Germany in 1972 and later in East Germany in 1974. The play—itself inspired by a travel brochure—is pictorial, full of descriptions of seaside leisure. It follows a German working-class husband and wife on a prepaid, all-inclusive vacation in Italy. In this supposedly idyllic setting, their quotidian, melancholy dialogue–a kind of social realism–winds around what is actually included in their vacation package and what is not, how much things cost, and who can afford them. For seven years, Williams has researched, translated, published, directed, and recorded the play in various forms, producing to date three paperback editions, one LP, a double LP, a single, liner notes, a series of advertising poems, a folder, two posters, and a playbill. At the center of this project are two recordings of slightly different versions of the play, one made on West German equipment and the other on East German equipment, both historically accurate to their respective broadcasts. According to Williams, the work began with a question: “We expect a recording to bear an ideological relationship to its materials, but does it also bear the ideological thumbprint of the technology that produced it?”
Questions of attention also run through Supplement ’03 (2003), a five-and-a-half-hour cooking show that keeps its camera trained on food as it cooks, without the shortcuts of television editing. Alongside a graphic photograph of men’s dress shoes titled Untitled (standard men’s insole)…, these works raise questions of focus: what we choose to focus on, and what we don't. As Williams puts it: “To focus is to assert a preference for one surface over another. What value or significance is assigned to this focus and why is it privileged? [...] To speak of one thing, it is necessary to remain silent in regard to another. A model is a representation of a system.”
Born in 1956 in Los Angeles, Christopher Williams is a conceptual artist whose output covers photography, radio, video, installation, billboards, advertising, poems, and books. Across these media, images are both his subject and his material. Often described as a mobilization of advertising, his practice borrows the visual language of studio photography to produce images that, through repetition, are forced into familiarity yet resist easy consumption. Repeated across exhibitions and contexts, these images accumulate meaning through their circulation as much as through what they depict.
Christopher Williams: HAUSHALTSWAREN + SCHUHWAREN is at once pedagogical and experiential, building what Williams defines as “a textual historical context” for the placement of his pictures.
Christopher Williams: RADIO PLAY
Common Wave Hi-Fi, Downtown Los Angeles
October 5, 2026
Williams invited a select, mostly English-speaking audience to listen to the remastered double LP of RADIO PLAY on reference-grade audio equipment. The 95-minute program consisted of an uninterrupted presentation of the play in German, without translation, introduced by a new monologue written by Williams for the role of an audio specialist and performed in German by Norbert Stöß, the actor who plays the narrator on the East German section of Williams’s RADIO PLAY and a former member of Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble.
Text by Lauren Mackler.
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