A world premiere! 12 years – 5 unique handmade books by Johan Sandborg (NO) and Duncan Higgins (UK)
“In a place like this” is a multi-component ongoing artistic inquiry produced collaboratively by Sandborg+Higgins, consisting of large-format handmade artist’s bookwork, an online exposition, exhibitions, publication, and teaching content.
Sandborg+Higgins ask, can art produce and share moments of remembering?
The art this produces is exploring what is inherent in the act of producing and reading images, specifically, how in combination photographic and painted image-making, can be a catalyst for understanding, a storytelling form to enable and share critical reflection both personally and culturally.
Sandborg+Higgins see this within an image-saturated culture where images are produced and read as instantly disposable and forgettable, and how this is consumed in a changing material relationship in both physical and digital forms. They are examining the demand for belief in representations and how that belief shapes or erases us in an image-saturated culture. They ask how art can contest, produce and directly communicate these moments of erasure, to contribute to an understanding of historical and personal narratives that directly refer to specific moments of displacement, belonging, and places with the shadows of historical violence.
The books are produced in a collaborative co-production, a dialectic method, a place for the tension between conflicting ideas and investigation to be explored through discussion.
Presented here are the 5 large unique handbound physical books – red book, grey book, yellow book, blue book, and green book. Each has its own story to tell, and together they create an intertwined, physical, and creative narrative. Moments collide, materials clash, images appear and dissolve, time shifts, places are found and then lost, histories speak, a story without a straight line, no beginning and no end creating a dazzling, provocative, and powerful visual dialogue.
Sandborg+Higgins invite you to come and see the book hive, read and look at the 5 unique large format books and share in a conversation that this opens up with them.
As David Levi Strauss recently put it, “If we are to believe in the world, we must have images of it, and we must have something to do with those images”
