Arnolfini publications

Over the years Arnolfini has published over 100 publications, mainly exhibition catalogues to accompany the visual arts programme. Below is a list of some of Arnolfini's recent publications, which are all available from the bookshop. The bookshop also has in stock a selection of older titles.

If you have an enquiry or wish to purchase any publications, contact the bookshop on bookshop@arnolfini.org.uk or tel 0117 917 2304

Download a full catalogue backlist

Arnolfini Bookshop is happy to supply libraries and institutions on invoice with a 10% discount, post free within the UK. Arnolfini publications are available to the book trade through our distributor Cornerhouse tel 0161 200 1503 publications@cornerhouse.org

Past Exhibition Catalogues

Lois and Franziska Weinberger: Home Voodoo (2007)
Arnolfini, £10.95 ISBN: 9780907738831

This catalogue accompanies the first major solo exhibition in the UK for the internationally renowned Austrian artist-duo, Lois and Franziska Weinberger. The diverse media employed in their practice incorporates sculpture, found objects, text pieces, large-scale mural drawings and maps, slide works, photography, video installations and site-specific interventions. They often use the discarded materials of consumer society, or the ‘weeds' that grow up around the edges of the city, to create a subtle poetics of the margins.

Through a process of association, their work examines issues of urban existence, land use, attitudes towards and definitions of ‘nature' and cultural production, incorporating an exhaustive understanding of botany with a keen perception of social structures in the urban environment. The Weinbergers work revolves around the notion of the garden as a ‘perfectly provisional realm'. Within this temporary, shifting arena, they investigate the interaction between the unfettered forces of natural and cultural growth as they collide with social concepts of order and structure, imbued with the spirit of moral values.

Ursula Biemann: Mission Reports. Artistic Practice in the Field: Video Works 1998 - 2008 (2008), Arnolfini, £17.50 ISBN: 9780907738916

This monograph on and around Ursula Biemann's practice, provides an opportunity to engage with more than a decade of her video art production and writing. She has consistently developed a unique aesthetic language with which to explore her concerns with the concept of borders and the contemporary forms of migration that they produce.Biemann's video essays offer a critique of the visual technologies being advanced for the control of global mobility, confounding the prevailing representations to reveal a more complex human geography of collateral effects and unrecorded movements on the ground.

Through a range of essays by cultural theorists, as well as texts by the artist herself and generous visual documentation, this book surveys the numerous artistic and visual research projects Biemann has conducted throughout the contested trans-national territories of the world.

Encounters
Performance, Photography, Collaboration: Manuel Vason (2007)
Arnolfini, £19.95 ISBN: 9780907738848

Encounters is a new and extensive collection of Manuel Vason's photographic collaborations with artists working in performance. Vason's beautifully stylized and vividly constructed images question relations and boundaries between the body and space, architectures and the event, and between actions, time and memory. Published by Arnolfini to accompany the first major exhibition of Vason's work in the UK, and edited by Dominic Johnson, Encounters brings together exciting new critical essays on Vason's collaborative images, by Rebecca Schneider, Tracey Warr and Kate Random Love. Through the lens of Vason's practice, these essays explore performance and photography, documentation and portraiture, and the challenging historical relationships between each development.

The publication also contains a series of commissioned artist writings on the collaborative process, by Ernst Fischer, Helen Spackman, Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly, Anne Seagrave, and other performance practitioners.

Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933 - 1957 (2005)
Arnolfini, £14.95 ISBN: 9780907738787

This publication sets out to explore and question notions of experiment that permeated the extraordinary range of arts practice at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, USA and the developments in education and community that unfolded over its 24 year life, from its beginning in 1933. The focus is on key themes and episodes, notably the roots in Bauhaus educational methods under Josef and Anni Albers, the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, the contributions of Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and the development of Black Mountain poetry. It traces a progress from European foundations to the assertion of a consciously American ethos. Students included Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland and Robert Rauschenberg and the College attracted a diverse range of artists and writers including Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, the film director Arthur Penn and the critic Clement Greenberg.

This publication accompanies the first exhibition in the UK about Black Mountain and features contributions by Mary Emma Harris, Eva Diaz, Christopher Benfey, Jed Perl and Edmund de Waal.

Richard Dedomenici is still an Artist (2006)
Arnolfini, £5.00 ISBN: 9780907738794

A one man subversive think-tank, Richard Dedomenici's anarcho-surrealist interventions have included building a nuclear fallout shelter in the Great Eastern Hotel. This is Richard's first book with world-wide distribution, bringing him a step closer towards his hypothetical model of economic stability, whereby income generated from the sale of his books and related objects will subsidise his ephemeral performance work, which, in turn, will inform the content of the aforementioned merchandise.

Published to coincide with Richard's Visiting Writer residency at Arnolfini during the 2006 Inbetween Time Festival, the book forms a kind of sequel to Richard's very first book - Richard Dedomenici is an Artist, bringing the reader up to date with Richard's artistic endeavours. With thirty-two pages, more than six and a half thousand words and many colourful illustrations, the book represents remarkably good value for its handy pocket book size. Produced in a limited edition of 500, each one hand numbered by the artist using his left hand.

Shimmering Substance / View Finder (2002)
Arnolfini, £7.50 ISBN: 9780907738718

Text by Catsou Roberts, Alex Coles, dialogue between Barry Schwabsky & Catsou Roberts and between Catsou Roberts and Stephen Hepworth. Published to coincide with two consecutive Arnolfini exhibitions that take painting as their point of departure. Shimmering Substance, 27 Apr - 23 June 2002, touring to Cornerhouse, 13 July - 1 Sept 2002 View Finder, 6 July - 8 Sept 2002.

Shimmering Substance, curated by Barry Schwabsky and Catsou Roberts, explores the elusive nature of materiality. It is concerned with the substance used to construct works of art. Includes the work of Enid Baxter Blader, Mel Bochner, Kate Bright, Tom Chamberlain, Sarah Dobai, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Alexis Harding, Roger Hiorns, Rachel Howard, Marilyn Minter, David Musgrave, Ernesto Neto, Lawson Oyekan, Rudolf Stingel, Lawrence Weiner and Pae White. View Finder looks at the pictorial dimension of painting and more specifically, the representation of landscape in contemporary art.

Includes work by Michael Ashkin, Melanie Carvalho, Claude Closky, Rob de Mar, Dan Hays, James Ireland, Patrick Jacobs, Paula Kane, Clare Langan, Matts Leiderstram, Virgil Marti, Gianni Motti, Seamus Nicholson, Ester Partegàs, Torbjørn Rødland, Børre Sæthe and Dirk Skreber.

Para-Cities: Models for Public Spaces/Trouble Shooting
Vito Acconci / Acconci Studio (2001)
Arnolfini, £5.00 ISBN: 9780907738664

One of the most influential American artists to have emerged in the 1960s, Vito Acconci continues to make vital contributions to contemporary art with a body of work that consistently responds to critical issues of the time. His provocative and pioneering work has explored the body as a physical, psychological and social phenomenon across a variety of media including writing, performance, video, film, installations and sculpture, as well as site-specific constructions. Conceived to coincide with Vito Acconci's Para-Cities, Trouble Shooting draws together work by Marion Coutts, Nils Norman, Mick O'Shea, Eva Rothschild and Uri Tzaig. The exhibition addresses the public sphere through re-imagining spaces of leisure and the activities destined for those spaces.

Pale Carnage (2007)
Arnolfini, £6.95 ISBN: 9780907738855

Published to coincide with Pale Carnage, a group exhibition addressing ideas of cruelty, desire, beauty, decadence, voyeurism and violence in relation to the culture and history of the late 19th and early 20th century, as re-explored by a number of international contemporary artists. Pale Carnage examines, in particular, the relationship between Classicism and Modernism and its association with Fascism. The title comes from a poem by Ezra Pound.

The catalogue includes an essay by writer, novelist and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell and a picture essay edited by Martin Clark. Artists: Noboyushi Araki, Athanasios Argianas, Ulla von Brandenburg, Tom Burr, Gillian Carnegie, Steven Claydon, Cerith Wyn Evans, Lothar Hempel, Mark Leckey, Aïda Ruilova, Dirk Stewen, JD Williams

Gina Pane (2001)
John Hansard/Arnolfini, £10.00 ISBN: 9780854327638

The first English language publications about the work of the influential French artist Gina Pane, it includes specially commissioned essays by Anne Tronche, Jennifer Blessing and Bernard Blistène. Gina Pane established an international reputation as one of the most radical artists in Europe for her performances or Actions in the 1970s. Using her body as material and expressive language she pushed herself to her physical and psychological limits. The exhibition examines the relationship between Gina Pane's Actions and her practice as a whole, which included painting, sculpture, drawing and the uses of Photography.

Liu Ding: Products (2008)
Arnolfini, £9.75 ISBN: 9780907738893

Liu Ding's works focus on the embedded reality of consumerism within society. Working in a variety of forms, though predominantly with installation, he shows us the changing face of lifestyle culture, and how it guides us with our everyday choices. Based in Beijing, China, Liu Ding is also a co-founder of Pink Studio, an organisation that curates exhibitions of work by emerging artists in China.

Mircea Cantor: The Need for Uncertainty (2008)
Modern Art Oxford, £14.95 ISBN: 9782907331227

The Romanian artist Mircea Cantor often mines the territory of conceptual and performance art associated with Alan Kaprow, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. Cantor who is also a co-founder of Version, a journal devoted to the interface of culture, sociology, music, philosophy, and natural sciences, resists restricting his work to a singular style or medium. To date, his works have explored a wide range of topics and include photography, installation, sculpture, and short films. This fully illustrated book features views of newly commissioned work together with source images and an essay by Curator Suzanne Cotter.

Published to accompany a major commission and exhibition with Mircea Cantor in 2008 / 09 organised by Modern Art Oxford, in collaboration with Arnolfini, Bristol and Camden Arts Centre, London.

Johanna Billing: I'm Lost Without Your Rhythm (2009)
Camden Arts Centre, £14.95 ISBN: 9781900470940

Johanna Billing's videos reflect on routine, rehearsal and ritual with an emphasis on the fragility of individual performance and power of collective experience. Her new work is based around the recording of a live performance of dance ‘learned' or performed by amateur Romanian dancers in Iasi (pronounced ‘yash'), during Periferic 8 Biennial of Contemporary Art ‘Art as Gift' in Oct 2008. The film links several days' activity into a continuous process, in which dancers were watched by an audience who were free to come and go as they pleased. Johanna Billing's skill lies in combining the choreography of individuals with facilitating their freedom to perform naturally, bringing the whole together through editing hours of footage. There is no final performance, the whole is a collaboration between choreographer, dancers and local musicians. The unfolding dramas hold the viewer enthralled and moved.

Published to accompany a major commission and exhibition with Mircea Cantor in 2008 / 09 organised by Modern Art Oxford, in collaboration with Arnolfini, Bristol and Camden Arts Centre, London.

Hans-Peter Feldmann: Book #9 (2007)
Walther Konig, £22.50 ISBN: 9783865602329

This artists' book by Hans-Peter Feldmann features work from the past decade including his recent series of Flower photographs. Feldmann is a collector of photographs; he takes photographs when he cannot find suitable images for his work. The pictures Feldmann selects and brings together in exhibitions and, in particular, books are an unpretentious trace of his own observations which he prefers the viewer to interpret. Hence, Feldmann can narrate many things in his pictures without giving anything away.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Hans Peter Feldmann at Sprengel Museum, Hannover, April - July 2007 and Arnolfini, Bristol, Nov 2007 - Jan 2008.