Perimeter Editions x Izabela Pluta | Melbourne Book Launch
Perimeter Editions is proud to announce our second publication with Australian-based artist Izabela Pluta, Nihilartikel (Perimeter Editions 076). To celebrate the book's release and to learn more about Izabela's fascinating photographic practice, come along to the Melbourne launch at Perimeter Books (734 High St, Thornbury) on Friday January 20, 6pm–8pm. The launch comprises an artist talk between Izabela, designer Paul Mylecharane and Daniel Boetker-Smith, esteemed writer and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography. A signing and celebratory drinks will follow. All welcome!
MELBOURNE LAUNCH
Perimeter HQ
734 High St, Thornbury VIC 3071
Friday January 20, 2023
6pm–8pm
This is a free event, with no reservations required.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The German term nihilartikel is used to describe the little known practice of inserting intentional errors, falsities or fictitious entries into reference texts – academic works, dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, directories – for the purpose of later identifying plagiaries, copies or other infringements to intellectual copyright. Taking this somewhat elusive practice as its subtext, Izabela Pluta’s major new book approaches photography and its central quandaries of authenticity and representation from a series of unsettled and dynamic vantages.
Here, the Polish-born, Australian-based artist forges a syntax using photographs gleaned from aerial drone footage and moving-image stills filmed underwater in Malta and Japan, and traditional darkroom prints made with out-of-print and otherwise obscure oceanic maps. Ancient surfaces and architectures ripple with evidence of their deep time; boulders emerge, stealth-like, from the blue depths; cartography collapses in on itself; all in a sequence punctuated by vibrant interplays of colour, layer, texture and form.
Working in fluid collaboration with designers Paul Mylecharane and Kim Mumm Hansen, Pluta depicts the ocean and its surrounding landscapes as a fallible and contested space. Official accounts are called into question, and expanded photographic materialities, juxtapositions and graphic formalism work to fragment established systems of knowledge. Pluta’s conceptual pith lies in the exploration, repetitions, red herrings and residues. Nihilartikel – which follows the artist’s 2019 book for Perimeter Editions, Figures of slippage and oscillation – echoes the volatility and relationality of our experience of the ocean itself, posing the question of how we can work to unravel the dogmas of conventional modes of looking, making and reading photographs. Here, Pluta dares us to lose ourselves in the undertow.
128 pages, 31.7 x 24cm, coptic bind, softcover, Perimeter Editions (Melbourne).
