Publication Scaffold
22 & 23 November 2019
As part of Dublin Art Book Fair, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

Images: Jo Melvin’s reading of Barry Flanagan’s 1965 (O for orange U for you: poem for the lips); Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty perform In the Way.

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios presents Publication Scaffold, a series of events, performances, installations and discussions co-produced with Askeaton Contemporary Arts and held during the opening weekend of 2019’s Dublin Art Book Fair.

Listen to a new podcast with excerpts from the talks and performances, presented and produced by artist Michael Holly here.

Publication Scaffold finds practical and metaphorical ways of envisaging the process of publishing. It points to books not solely as objects, but as conversation and encounter, as discursive notions surrounding their own existence. Publication Scaffold plans to go up, down and around Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, to be encountered in surprising places and times throughout the fair’s schedule. It is fitted and bolted together both by hand and by thought, making operative spaces for wide-ranging and digressive territories. Pages turn, words are uttered, platforms for communal discovery emerge. Juxtaposition and serendipity are fundamental to these investigations, leading to new ways of thinking about the portable, malleable exhibition format as a publication itself.

Highlights included a launch of John Hutchinson’s new publication, and Ruth Clinton and Niamh Moriarty debuted a new artist talk. Emanuele De Donno revealed the inner workings of Viaindustriae, an expansive publishing and research initiative based in Foligno, Italy, while John Carson and Conor Kelly’s sprawling psychogeographic artwork, Evening Echoes, presented at TBG+S back in 1995, was reprised.

Gareth Bell-Jones spoke of artist John Latham’s challenges to ideas of perceived knowledge, and presented several of his artworks. Vukašin Nedeljkovic urgently interrogated the social conditions and experiences of asylum seeker accommodation in Ireland. Renata Pekowska showcased her continuing research on the role and history of artists’ books in Ireland, while Wayne Daly entangled himself with the legacies of visionary architect Cedric Price. Dan Starling skyped in from Vancouver his adaption of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and as Adam Chodzko’s world revolves at pace, surprising relationships and connections occur through his affirmative actions. Gene Beery’s self-published artist books are pithy critiques of arts institutions and social mores, while Ramon Kassam navigated the neoliberal cultural infrastructures that have appeared in Ireland and in particular, Limerick City. Cesare Pietrousti exposesd the inherent commodification in distribution networks and trans-active exchange. Barry Flanagan’s concrete poetry was performed at Publication Scaffold, as Elisabetta Benassi recontextualises the archives of 20th century news into sculptures, film, books and slides. Juan Sandoval explores the concept of land, extracting soil from industrial sites and places of political and social conflict to make ceramic objects.

Publication Scaffold at Dublin Art Book Fair has been made possible by an Arts Council Arts Grant, along with support from the Artist Residency Programme at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Askeaton Contemporary Arts, Limerick, and Mahler & Lewitt Studios, Spoleto.