New
Artist’s Book, Digital edition
Jane Birkin & Walter van Rijn, To Perform: SO: To Speak (2020)
52 pages, 4 b&w illustrations, ISBN 978-1-9164523-3-6. £10
A book which covers the text-based work we showed & performed during our performance at the SO: To Speak festival of words in Southampton. See my earlier post about the performance. It is a book that needs to be read out loud or displayed as a form of silent performance.
It gives a good overview of Jane Birkin’s artwork leading up to 2017 and my artwork with texts and sounds between 2005 and 2017. It also features the Being Human font and its particular way of interacting with the text. I wanted to publish a digital edition during the COVID-19 pandemic because in 2017 I only made a limited edition of 20 hard copies and it is sold out. Today’s context is also relevant. At this point in time, art stops being shown as an object or an event in its designated space. Now the art has to come to you, disembodied, as a digital thing, in order to allow us, our bodies, to stay home or ‘socially distanced’. It is quite remarkable how a virus, we can’t see with the naked eye, is able to jump outside its ‘normal’ host and change life as we know it. Not only in a literal sense of ‘life and death’ but also how we live and behave.
The art featured in this book taps into similar ideas about what happens if you jump certain boundaries, for example from a tactile thing to a digital one or from a personally experienced event to a recorded or photographed one. Besides location, time is the other vital quality that needs to be considered. While doing so it all starts to unravel… Time is distance. It creates a new perspective and a new pair of eyes. The law of entropy starts to kick in. Who is looking/ seeing/ reading/ speaking? What is recorded/ printed/ dispersed? Where and when is/ was this happening?
Talking about new areas to explore: I have added a shop to this website where you can buy my art. Have a go!

Jane Birkin & Walter van Rijn, To Perform: SO: To Speak (2020)
Artist’s Book, Digital edition (PDF and E-book); ISBN 978-1-9164523-3-6; 52 pages, 4 b&w illustrations. [After receiving payment I will send you an email with the PDF and e-book attached.]
£10.00