A new, free, art book fair, celebrating non-profit, collaborative, and interdisciplinary publishing, will take place in London this week. The inaugural Inventory Art Book Fair is a celebration of the breadth of artist publishing in the UK, bringing together the best in photo books, queer zines, risograph, theory, contemporary art and poetry.
It will take place at Cromwell Place, South Kensington, between Friday 7th June – Sunday 9th June, with an opening evening of performances on Thursday 6th June. The fair will include a book market and reading room, alongside a rich public programme of free events. Welcoming everyone from established presses, occasional publishers and zinesters, to those making their first experiments with print, Inventory aims to encompass the past, present, and future of the printed form – as part of a wider conversation around artistry and activist practice.
It is with great joy that we present this new art book fair at Cromwell Place. I began speaking to Lillian and Ben about the project in the early days of my role, bringing together shared ideas of hosting, openness, working across multiple forms and collaboration. This fair is for everyone and I’m excited to experience it with you all.
Helen Nisbet, CEO and Artistic Director, Cromwell Place,
Public Programme
The free public programme of events aims to instigate conversations across the ecosystem of artist publishing and propose new intersections between publishing, performance, sound, and installation.
Inventory opens with a celebratory evening of happenings on Thursday 6th June underscoring intersections between publishing, performance, architecture and the voice. Ibrahim Azab will perform EV3RY(TH1NG’5)MOV1NG: BUT_I’M(STILL)H3RE, a new, site-specific performance exploring ideology and the subconscious via movement and positioning, delivered whilst the artist manoeuvres around and engages with the audience. Folium will present Sometimes Making Nothing Leads to Something, an homage to and inverse of Francis Alÿs’ Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes making something leads to nothing), in which spectators are invited to become participants in the exploration and recording of the space using graphite rubbing, leading to the production of a live-printed collaborative publication to be distributed on the night. There will also be performative interventions by Rose Nordin. A drinks reception will follow.
On Friday 7th June, Book Works present a panel of speakers and participants to discuss and expand What Did You Do…? (2024), a poster project commissioned by Book Works to mark 40 years of commissions and bookmaking. In response to the urgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza overshadowing all activity, Book Works have invited artists to contribute work that speaks to ideas of solidarity with the oppressed, and liberation for the occupied, for a series of A3 posters. Any proceeds from this project will be donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). A publisher-generated programme of readings and launches will unfold in the Inventory Reading Room at other times.
Inventory closes with an immersive series of performances on Sunday 9th June drawing connections between the written word and sound, projection, moving image and the psychedelic. Jessica Higgins will perform the latest iteration of you over there in the trojan horse, a spoken word and sound collage project about a fictional monologue and the voice that delivers it. As the monologue tries to convince the people in the room that they are future versions of themselves, the voice grapples with the structural politics of the performance itself, oscillating between the art of persuasion and the craft of vulnerability. Raheel Kahn & Amrit Randhawa will perform a new collaborative piece, creating an experimental collage of archival video works accompanied with a live sound piece tracing the upward social mobility of both their Punjabi and Kashmiri roots, focusing on British Asian music and its post-industrial genealogy. The evening will close with sets from Ghostlore of Britain and Sanctuary of Praise. Ghostlore of Britain (Kieron Livingstone & Sarah Hartnett) deliver musical vibrations and meditations to break through the veiling power of Maya and self-perpetuating control mechanisms. Their investigations and experiences across the psychic and embodied landscape in the South of England have informed the basis of Ghostlore’s music and film, undertaking psychic quests as their methodology, traversing the landscape as an embodied pursuit to unearth a complex politics of memory. Sanctuary of Praise make music oscillating between the murky and the jangly, creating a unique sound that’s a greyscale-rendered grab bag of lo-fi aesthetics. Equal parts melodic, motorik, and miserablist, their sound is reminiscent of Lives of Angels through a chorus pedal, with a significant devotion to The Cure. The dulcet tones of the singer Swirly suggest they’ve witnessed many sunrises.
London boasts vibrant communities of independent publishers, and we are thrilled to unite these communities at Inventory to celebrate the rich landscape of independent arts publishing in the UK. As long-time publishers and editors ourselves, we see Inventory as an acknowledgement not only of the expansiveness of the printed form but also of the friendships and mutual support that flourish within and around it. At Inventory, we’ll showcase the best in photo books, queer zines, risography, visual culture, theory, and poetry, celebrating publishing as a dynamic, time-based art form. Our public programme this year eschews traditional, one-way formats, and instead situates the audience—and acts of publishing—within performance, sound installation, moving image and site-specific activations, whilst our Reading Room offers a space for more intimate engagement and reflection. We are immensely grateful to Cromwell Place for the trust and enthusiasm the team has shown to this programme, and look forward to introducing new audiences to what is becoming a key destination for critical and multidisciplinary arts practices.
Lillian Wilkie & Ben Goulder, co-founders of Inventory Art Book Fair,
Inventory Art Book Fair, 7th – 9th June 2024, Cromwell Place
You can keep up with the latest updates on Inventory Art Book Fair at @inventory_projects
About
New Dimension is an organisation aimed at providing accessible services to galleries and publishers of artist books. Core services include distribution, publicity and digital advertising. It aims to provide affordable and approachable services to the independent arts community to help it grow.
Lillian Wilkie is a writer, editor, publisher and lecturer based in London and East Sussex. Her practice and research focus on artists’ publishing and its communities, photography and its contexts, and marginal fashion media. She is the Director of Chateau International, an independent imprint producing books, zines, editions and programming.
Lillian is co-director of Bound Art Book Fair at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, and Inventory at Cromwell Place, London. She works in the book programme at Aperture. In 2017 her book The Origin of Springs was published by Tenderbooks.
Her writing on photography, arts and publishing has appeared in a range of titles including Modern Matter, Elephant, 1000 Words and C4 Journal. She is regularly invited to programme and speak on panels and roundtables on arts and photography publishing. She currently lectures on photography and fashion media programmes at London College of Fashion and Central Saint Martins.
Ben Goulder is a London-based publisher, distributor, and consultant. He spent four years as Head of Media Strategy at Dazed Media (Dazed, AnOther Magazine, Nowness) before leaving in late 2022 to consult at publications, including Vice, i-D, Refinery29, The Face, and Rolling Stone. In 2023, he founded New Dimension, a platform providing distribution and marketing services to the arts and independent publishers.
