Less Influencers, More Poets
Presenting As I Wander Through the Park at the group exhibition Less Influencers, More Poets at Sixty Eight Art Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark. Including collective reading performance.
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Opening: 6:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. Wednesday 5 December
Gothersgade 167, Kbh
To close out the year (and in time for the Holidays), SixtyEight has invited Space Poetry to a reading-room environment that turns our exhibition floor into a 'pop-up' bookstore for the publisher. Here a wide range of titles, including artist books, special editions and magazines published by Space Poetry, will be available for sale. Including the latest number of Pist Protta, which will be launched on this evening. This bookstore intervention seeks to frame an intersection between art publishing and exhibition-making practices in the local economies of art available in the city. To this end, the intervention – rather than the gentrifying process implied in the name ‘pop-up’ – looks to the complex positions and roles that local artistic production has in contemporary art from a regional to an international level.
This exhibition project is part of SixtyEight's current two-year program, called Modes and Notes on the Local, where we are looking to support and explore the dynamic and complexity of the Copenhagen-based art scene. Especially via its interconnections, heavy traffic and/or exchange with the international art world. Space Poetry, with its innovative and irreverent twists on traditional formats, challenges the pervasive insistence that print matter is out the door – with each new publication, and like an Umberto Eco novel, saving the artist book (in this increasingly technocratic moment) from a burning tower of books. In this sense, Space Poetry (and its presence in the city) as a research-based institution and cultural treasure, gives producers new surfaces to act on and new avenues for readers/viewers to understand the book as a work of art and beyond.
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Bios
Space Poetry began as a group of aspiring young artists, with their first publication appearing in 1980. A few years later they initiated the magazine Pist Protta, which has since developed into a seminal fixture on the Danish art scene. Space Poetry, now run by Jesper Fabricius, has gone on to publish many titles across the array of art book production, including poetry collaborations, book objects, and artistic research. Space Poetry and Pist Protta have been featured in numerous exhibitions in Denmark and internationally, and have received several awards, such as the C.F. Hendriksen Medal from the Danish Association of Book Craft.
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SixtyEight Art Institute is an artistic/curatorial research organization looking to uncover, develop, and further exchanges between artists and curators and their creative labor. The exhibition Space Poetry 'Pop-up' Bookstore is the fourth installment of our two-year program of exhibitions, Modes and Notes on the Local, which is kindly supported by Københavns Kommunes Billedkunstudvalg and The Danish Arts Foundation.