Posts Tagged ‘exhibition’
Shortlist Photo-Text Award 2026
I was happy to learn that The End of the World is shortlisted for the Photo-Text Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles. This aims to reward the best book in which photographs and words contribute equally to the work. The preliminary jury of the 2026 Book Awards was composed of Basile Le Cleac’h (Director of the Atelier du Palais), Ana Gallart de Mora (Head of BAL Books), and Emilie Pautus (Founder of the independent bookstore Les Grandes Largeurs).
The shortlisted books will be on display throughout the festival at La Mécanique Générale. See the full shortlist for all three categories of the Awards here. The final jury will meet at the festival’s opening, and the winning publications in the three categories will be announced on the evening of Tuesday, July 7, 2026, at the Théâtre Antique in Arles.
The book was also recently a staff pick at Printed Matter, where they have it in stock. Ordering from me and shipping to the US is also possible again in a relatively normal way.
Photopoetry at V&A South Kensington
Photopoetry is on view at one of my favourite museums, the wonderful V&A in London. The display considers how photography and poetry can create new meanings when paired in the pages of books. Selected by collector and photopoetry advocate David Solo, the books are available for visitors to handle, read and enjoy. In this Dark Wood is among the selections.
More information about the selected works is available here.
On view from March 23 – September 20, 2026. Free entry.
Exhibition at Maison Julien Gracq
Maison Julien Gracq presents the exhibition Archipels, from the collection of Alain Le Provost.
Through conceptual and poetic approaches, sometimes aiming at the immaterial, the works in the exhibition revolve around notions of erasure, transformation, and experiences of limits, opening up new perspectives.
A statement in French by Sandra Doublet can be accessed here (pdf).
Works by Jérémie Bennequin, Olivier Debré, Fred Deux, Damien Dion, Marcel Duchamp, Sharka Hyland, Francis Picabia, Claude Rutault, Elisabeth Tonnard, Christophe Viart, Emmanuelle Villard.
Maison Julien Gracq, Saint-Florent-Le-Vieil, 49410 Mauges-Sur-Loire, France.
April 8 – August 30. Opening reception April 11 at 14.00.
a minima
The exhibition a minima, curated by Didier Decoux, will open in Brussels next week. It looks like it will be a very interesting exhibition about blank pages in books, empty books, books with little content, self-referential books. The curator’s statement is copied below, in Dutch (because it is worth copying).
Museum Wittockiana, March 20 – September 27. Opening reception March 19 at 18.00.
My work The Book of the World will be on view.
a minima brengt werken samen die het zwijgen raken en de leespraktijk verschuiven.
Ontstaan uit een privécollectie en aangevuld met enkele bruiklenen, doorkruist de tentoonstelling vrijelijk honderdvijftig jaar uitgeefgeschiedenis, van 1876 tot vandaag.
Stille voorlopers — Mallarmé, Duchamp — zijn aanwezig. Maar vooral het conceptuele gebaar ontvouwt zich hier, dat in de tweede helft van de 20e eeuw opduikt en wordt voortgezet binnen de concrete poëzie en het kunstenaarsboek.
Te zien zijn onder meer werken van Amélie de Beaufort, Barbara Schmidt-Heins, Bernard Villers, Bruno Munari, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Elisabeth Tonnard, Elsa Werth, Giovanni Anselmo, George Maciunas, herman de vries, Irma Blank, Jiří Valoch, Jonathan Monk, John Cage, José Luis Castillejo, Kimsooja, Marcel Broodthaers, Micah Lexier, Michel François, Monika Droste en Guy Rombouts, Nathalie Czech, Peter Downsbrough, Raphaël Van Lerberghe, Sara MacKillop, Simon Cutts…
Hier vertelt het boek niet:
het suggereert,
het houdt in,
het biedt weerstand.
Elke vorm, in haar soberheid, opent een ruimte. Lezen wordt zo een aandachtige, ontroerende en kritische – soms zelfs een subversieve – daad.
THIS TOO SHALL PASS launch in Gent
I have made a new work for ‘Neighbor’, a fourteen meter wide light sculpture consisting of eight ‘digits’ mounted on 019, a former welding factory turned artist space in Gent, Belgium.
You can read more about the light sculpture and previous artists who contributed to it here.
My work is based on a text I once saw painted in large letters on the side of a building in Asbury Park, New Jersey: THIS TOO SHALL PASS. Later, I read this has its origin in Persian poetry. It is a verse with the status of being true – always, and everywhere. At the same time, it seems like a radically disruptive statement in our everyday lives, where we unthinkingly go on as if we controlled our environment.
THIS TOO SHALL PASS will launch on October 2nd around 8 PM. It will be on view until November 16th, every evening from sundown until 10 PM, on 019’s eastern facade. The address is Dok-Noord 5L in Gent. It can best be seen from across the dock (Schipperskaai). The work is 10.30 minutes long and runs in a continuous loop. With thanks to the curators, Arnout De Cleene and Michiel De Cleene. The photo above is by Michiel De Cleene.
Edit: you can now see a recording here.
Exhibition in Arles
Métamorphose(s) opens tomorrow. This is an exhibition in which Antony Cairns, Stephen Gill, Galerie Christian Berst, NSDOS, Bill Viola and myself show work in collaboration with Publicis Luxe. See the invite below.
The show is curated by Julien Frydman at Les Collatéraux in Arles and runs during the opening weeks of the Rencontres d’Arles from July 3 – 12.
I have collaborated with Guillaume Gaud of Publicis Luxe to create an interactive spatial installation based on my book of found conversational phrases A Dialogue in Useful Phrases. Two chairs will invite the audience to be actors in the work. By sitting down, a viewer will automatically cause a series of conversational phrases to start appearing (basically a monologue, as if reading only the left pages or only the right pages in the original book). When a second person sits down in the other chair, a second series of conversational phrases starts to appear in answer and a dialogue in useful phrases will ensue. This serendipitous dialogue of miscommunications will be different each time because it will be influenced by when exactly each person sits down.
Exhibition in The Crocodile
A tiny solo exhibition of mine, curated by Jason Fulford, is on view in The Crocodile. This is an exhibition that you can see and hear and imagine exclusively if you meet up with Jason personally, since he carries it on his person. It can be encountered this way from May 23 until roughly August 1. After appearances in Spain and New York, the gallery is now on its way to San Francisco.
Jason prints letterpress cards for each show (see below), this is the fourth show so far.
Book exhibitions Munich and Bristol
Work of mine is included in Library of Artistic Print on Demand, curated by Annette Gilbert. It is on view at Villa Stuck in Munich until September 15th. For more information, visit the museum’s website. A book about the Library of Artistic Print on Demand is forthcoming from Spector Books. More info about the whole project: https://www.apod.li/
Then this Friday the 28th is the opening of B for Book, curated by Sarah Bodman at Frankenstein Press in Bristol. It looks like a joyful eclectic mix of artist’s books. It also launches the weekend of BABE – Bristol Artist’s Book Event and runs through July 19. More information about the show here or in the press release.
The Invisible Book at the National Library plus postcard set news
The Invisible Book has been gathering attention lately, and my postcard set Highlights in the history of The Invisible Book was sold out. I can now announce a new print run has become available, on a new cardstock. The set of six cards in a bellyband is priced at €10 plus shipping and available in my webshop. Or order by email.
The National Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) of The Netherlands is currently presenting The Invisible Book as one of the five most remarkable books in their collection. You can find more information (in Dutch) here. On September 26 there will be an evening at the library where all five books are discussed by the curators, find info here.
As a source of discovering many conceptual artists’ books that I hadn’t yet heard of, plus rediscovering works I did know, Moritz Küng’s Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements (1960-2022) (published by Walther Koenig on the occasion of the show I wrote about in my previous post) has been enjoyable. The Invisible Book is also presented in this, and gives one of the chapters its name. For those who read Dutch, there is a good review by Christophe Van Gerrewey in De Witte Raaf.
Blank. Raw. Illegible…
From May 14 to September 3, the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren shows Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements (1960-2022). Expect a whopping total of 259 books in the show, most of which will be visible to the eye.
Curated by Moritz Küng, the exhibition explores how contemporary artists and artist collectives exploit and activate the conceptual potential of a blank sheet of paper or a book with empty pages for their artistic practice. Starting with an authoritative exploration by artist Herman de Vries of the designation of the color white, the exhibition opens up the diversity of artistic concepts in reflecting on emptiness, purity, and raw material in relation to the formal and functional criteria of books in 15 chapters, the headings of each of which are taken from one of their book titles.
The Invisible Book will be on view in the show, and gives one of the chapters its name. For more information, visit the museum’s website. A catalogue will be published by Walther König (ISBN: 978-3-7533-0463-2).
For those wishing to read up on The Invisible Book, there were recently some new discussions of it: by Gill Partington in the London Review of Books (Vol. 45 No. 4, February 2023), by Annette Gilbert in the quite essential Literature’s Elsewheres (MIT Press, 2022), and by Felipe Cussen in La oficina de la nada (Ediciones Siruela, 2022).
Also
The postcardset of The Invisible Book will be part of Inexistent Books VI, curated by Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson and Jan Steinbach at Salong in Oslo, May 19 – June 4.
Visible, but also involving blank spaces, the book version of The Man of the Crowd is on view in a small exhibit on Edgar Allan Poe at Centre Céramique in Maastricht right now.
Elisabeth Tonnard 