Architecture, power, space, gender, surveillance and authority are the issues that have animated Monica Bonvicini's work for the past two decades. Her installations, sculptures, drawings, and films often rise questions about how the built environment shapes, conditions, and controls viewers as subjects and, in the process, dictates our phenomenological, sexual, and psycho-social relationship to space. The book provides an overview of Bonvicini's artistic production reconsidering her past work, tracing its current trajectories, and creating a geography that charts the terrain of the artist's attempts to embody and negotiate the very same architecture of history it challenges.

Italian-born, Berlin-based Bonvicini won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (2001), the Kunst Preis in Berlin (2005) and the Roland Preis in Bremen (2012). Her work has been featured in the most prominent biennials, including Venice (2001, 2005 and 2011), Istanbul (2004), Gwangju (2006), New Orleans (2008) and Berlin (2003). Institutions where she had solo exhibitions include the the Art Institute of Chicago (2009), the Kunstmuseum Basel (2009), the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel (2011), CAC Malaga (2011), and the Hamburger Deichtorhallen (2012).