Posts Tagged ‘postcards’
Earth Station launches with AMBruno in London
I am happy to announce my new book Earth Station, made as part of AMBruno’s project ‘Intervals’ which will launch at Tate Britain in London this week (see below).
The book uses intervals between images found on postcards from the 1950s and 1960s, when mass tourism began to grow, as a playful method of critique – creating brief visual stories about how humans changed nature. See more images here (though because of the intervals, this book needs to be held in hand: without intervals there is no story).
Edition limited to 50 copies (not numbered), inkjet printed and wire bound. 40 pages, 14 full color illustrations, size 21,5 cm wide x 17,2 cm high.
Priced at € 45 plus shipping. Order through my webshop or by sending an email. If ordering, note that the book will be shipped as of next week. The book will also be available at the multiple book fairs AMBruno participates in during 2024/5.
This Friday October 18, AMBruno will present an afternoon of talks at Tate Britain around ‘Intervals’. A panel conversation with AMBruno artists and past project selectors, including Gustavo Grandal Montero, Elizabeth James, Sophie Loss, Richard Price, Chris Taylor and Cally Trench, will discuss ‘Intervals’ in the context of the group’s history. Follow this link for the details. It is free to visit this.
Next week, AMBruno will also show the project at the Small Publisher’s Fair in Conway Hall (October 25 and 26). Yay!
About AMBruno
The artists’ association AMBruno focuses on developing and promoting the book as a key medium in art. Founded in 2008, the group’s members change with each new project, where artists create books based on a specific theme each year.
In 2024, an open call invited artists to create books exploring the theme ‘Intervals.’ This could refer to an intervening time, a pause or break, a gap between two things, or the difference in pitch between two sounds. Fourteen artists were selected for this project by Sarah Bodman, an artist and scholar from the Centre for Print Research at UWE Bristol. The artists are Karen Blake, Helen Douglas, David Howes, Julie Johnstone, Philip Lee, Sophie Loss, John McDowall, Alastair Noble, Redell Olsen, Ximena Pérez Grobet, Peter Rapp, Rachel Smith, Elisabeth Tonnard and Maria White.
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.
Exhibition Unboxing Photographs
I’m developing a new installation titled More Than A Few Glimpses Of Its Charms. The work will be exhibited at the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, from February 16 to May 27 as part of the show ‘Unboxing Photographs: Work in the Photo Archive’.
More about this show below or follow this link. For those of you in Berlin: the opening will take place at the Kunstbibliothek on February 15.
More Than A Few Glimpses Of Its Charms consists of 18 different series of found used postcards in which each series is based on the same photograph. There are 18 different photographs but together nearly 100 different postcards in the installation. The cards in each series show slight visual differences; the color is changed by age or by variations/manipulations in the print runs, sometimes there are signs visible of how the card went through the mail system or was tacked to a wall. The photos are the same, the actual objects and the meaning they had for the senders and receivers are not. The installation is completed by texts in four languages drawn from the backs of the postcards.
About the exhibition ‘Unboxing Photographs’
The exhibition opens the boxes of four photo archives to showcase the material diversity of photographs as three-dimensional objects: from glass plate negatives, to 35 mm film, to prints on albumin or silver gelatin paper. These photo-objects are taken in the hand, tilted and turned over, labeled, cut down, framed, glued into albums, printed, and dispatched or posted online. Contact and inventory sheets, cardboard mounts, card catalogs, and today even display screens are integral parts of the photo-object, or even constitute it.
Window with cutout image
© Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Since the 19th century, archaeologists, ethnologists, and art historians have worked with photographs and assembled them in archives. There, they are processed and ordered – and only through such treatment do they become usable as documents for scholarly research. These procedures alter the physical properties of photographs and leave behind material traces. Photographs, hence, are neither objective nor timeless. By taking them seriously as objects, and not just as pictures, it becomes possible to tell their multifarious stories.
The exhibition interrogates the commonly practiced and disciplinary conventions that govern the perception and presentation of photographs – for example museum display using passepartouts – and tries out new design possibilities. Work with photo-objects is also central to the artistic interventions of JUTOJO, Ola Kolehmainen, Joachim Schmid, Elisabeth Tonnard, and Akram Zaatari, all of which have been integrated into the exhibition.
Vase with Corsini-Medici coat of arms
© Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Elisabeth Tonnard 