PWA proudly presents the artist’s books and photobooks by Danish visual artist Nanna Debois Buhl in an exhibition that displays all her
works in book format.
The book is one of several formats that Debois Buhl explores in her artistic practice; a practice that revolves around history writing, representation, and material investigation. Buhl considers her artist’s books as mycelia—the root-like underground network of fungi—as networks of roots that nurture her artworks. Yet, created with great attention to material, font, layout, and structure, the books are also artworks in and of themselves. They serve as spaces that allow fordwelling on some of the materials, ideas and conversations that inform her work; they can explore adjacent ideas and further expansions of the subject matter.
Climate change, sustainability and the constructed relationship between nature and culture are also themes that Debois Buhl discusses in her art, and which play a central role in her artist’s books and photobooks. In these conceptual works with titles such as Botanizing on theAsphalt, Palm Tree Studies in South Tyrol and Beyond, and Cloud Behaviour, she challenges canon and normative understandings through historical photographs, scientific data visualizations, and mythological imagery alongside her own photographic experiments. Debois Buhl is interested in representations as tools for mapping knowledge and for speculating. She examines photography and the photobook with an experimental approach, where historical and new technologies are often combined in surprising or quirky ways that push their limitations. In this way, Debois Buhl creates new narratives about natural science and its epistemology. In her books, in which she often combines different literary genres and visual forms in hybrid montages, she thus questions and rewrites common cultural codes and connotations
The exhibition is curated by Anne Elisabeth Toft in collaboration with Nanna DeBois Buhl
