Exhibitions

17^th International Contemporary Artists’ Book Fair  Curated by John McDowall and Chris Taylor

Artists’ Book Fair and Exhibitions Preview: Friday 7^th March, 6-9pm

Saturday 8th March, 11am-6pm  / Sunday 9^th March, 11am-5pm 

Talks

Nicky Bird  Question for Seller – the re-emergence of the photographic archive in artists’ books

2-3pm, Saturday 8^th March

Edinburgh-based artist Nicky Bird will be discussing her artistic interventions with museum archives and the artistic impulse to rescue other people’s unwanted photographs. Why create artworks as ‘alternative archives’ and what role in particular does the bookwork play in this? Since 1998 Nicky has collaborated with Chris Taylor and The Wild Pansy Press on numerous multiple and unique photo-based publications including Red Herrings, 1998, Tracing Echoes, 2001, Question for Seller, 2006, and Gay Interest Beefcake, 2008.  Her use of photography is in the widest sense, shifting from finding family photographs on eBay to working with press photographs. Alongside key examples of her work with The Wild Pansy Press, she will also include bookworks by other artists, which demonstrate the rescue impulse in different ways.

Nicky Bird is an artist whose work investigates the contemporary relevance of found photographs, their archives and specific sites. She has explored this through photography, bookworks, and the Internet, creating artworks that make visible the process of collaboration with people who have significant connections to a hidden history. Alongside commissions, residencies, exhibitions, and writings, Nicky is also a PhD Co-Coordinator at The Graduate School in the Glasgow School of Art.

Lynda Morris  Unconcealment: Prospect 68 – A book from 46 years ago and the knowledge it represents

Lynda Morris will be speaking between courses at the Artists’ Book Fair Dinner

7-10pm, Saturday 8^th March (£25, 3 course meal, bookings required)

Unconcealment comes from Martin Heidegger’s term Entborgenheit meaning that to think is a constant, and continuing process of digging down to come closer to truths. We need the books and documents to constantly prompt and help us to understand the recent past. Our primary material is both the work and the word of the artist.

This talk will look at a copy of the catalogue Prospect 68, held at the Kunsthalle and Kunstverein Düsseldorf, 20 to 29 September 1968. It was the first exhibition to bring together a truly International exhibition of Conceptual Art, showing the work of US, British, French, Italian, German and Dutch artists.

Why is so much more attention paid to an exhibition that took place six months later and relied heavily on the innovations made by Prospect 68? I am talking about When Attitudes Become Form, at the Kunsthalle Berne, 22 March to 27 April 1969.

We will consider whether the 1970s saw a struggle for power between the innovative dealers of the late 1960s and the directors and curators of European Museums, state employees who elevated the reputation of the critics and theorists they empowered?  

Book Fair Interventions

Chris Graham  Cunning Linguist  

Friday 7^th March, 8pm

Theodore Adorno said that “the culture industry, is both pornographic and prudish at the same time”. Now offering up ever increasing, ‘harder’ pornography for consumers to accept naively as harmless fulfillment of their own desires, Graham will read 69 DVD titles from a collection of ‘porn shop’ invoices and asking, “are we pornographic or prudish?”  EXPLICIT CONTENT WARNING

Karen Babayan and Persia Babayan-Taylor  Blood Oranges Dipped in Salt

Saturday 8^th March, 12noon

A playlet, based on one of twelve short stories taken from the artists’ book, Blood Oranges Dipped in Salt.

Shakeh Major Tchilingirian  Packing

Saturday 8^th March, 11am, 1pm and 3pm

A live interpretation of Karen Babayan’s video work, Packing, by Armenian dancer Shakeh Major Tchilingirian

Sharon Kivland  Reports (interim) on Knowledge

Saturday 8th March, 3.30pm

For Library Interventions in the Library of Leeds College of Art, I appointed a number of agents to represent me in the library, imagining what I would read and to what ends (subjects are various). It is, I suppose, a master/slave relation, after Hegel, for there is lordship on my part, and a form of bondage on theirs (at least initially, for if one considers Hegel¹s dialectic, after thesis and antithesis, there is self-realisation, and thus freedom). This is an interim report (perhaps now at the point of antithesis), from me as master and from those who have served me.

Silvia Champion  book on the fly

Saturday 8^th March, 5pm and Sunday 9^th March, 4pm

For the duration of the PAGES book fair Champion will be sitting at a table, dressed in white and with a typewriter typing all the phrases and words she hears around her. A sheet of blueprint paper between two white sheets will enable the artist to offer every fully typed page for sale, keeping the copy to form part of a new book. The accumulation of language might create a random, funny and perhaps, poetic text.

Katya Robin  Bucket Lists

Sunday 9^th March, 12noon

Performance and reading

A compact talk about the recent publication ‘Bucket Lists 1-4’, which is to be launched at PAGES. The illustrated talk will include works from Bucket Collection and a potted history of metaphorical uses of buckets. 

AMBruno  Book Act Live

Sunday 9^th March, 1-3pm

Live performances by some of the contributors to the AMBruno Book Act project and exhibition.

A New Reality Artists + guests

A curated temporary display and special events will showcase the self-publishing and printed matter projects of artists participating in The Tetley’s nine-month inaugural programme A New Reality alongside a selected group of book distributers and independent publishers based in Leeds. Publications and editioned prints by A New Reality artists Joe Gilmore (qubik), Nous Vous, Aidan Moesby will be shown in a collaborative display with SPUR, Village Bookstore and Catalogue Library.

Satellite Events

Amelia Crouch  A Parlay  

Wednesday 5th March, 6.30-7.45pm

Book launch and in conversation with Sarah Brown, Curator, Leeds Art Gallery.

A Parlay is the outcome of a project exploring art, value and utility. Beginning with a single artwork – the sculpture ‘Atom Body Was Light’ (1964) by Liliane Lijn – artist Amelia Crouch held a series of conversations with individuals at Leeds Art Gallery. Content from the conversations has been selected, edited and manipulated to produce a new artists’ book.

Karen Babayan  PERSE (ANCIENNE) Dressé

Portfolio of 9 digital prints

Recent acquisition by Leeds Museums & Art Galleries

The Print Room, Leeds Art Gallery until Sunday 9^th March

Sharon Kivland  Library Interventions

Leeds College of Art Library, Blenheim Walk

3^rd February – 28^th March

Closing Reception: Friday 28^th March, 5-7pm

John McDowall and Tim Renshaw  Hidden

The Wild Pansy Press Project Space, School of Fine Art, Old Mining Building, University of Leeds

Preview: Tuesday 4th March, 6-8pm

5^th–28^th March, Mon-Thurs 10am-5pm, Friday 10am-4p