Description

The ontology of paper. Or paper’s existence. ”Eight Paper Events” is a new artists’ book by Karl-Johan Stigmark, created under the ”innocent people” project. Eight Paper Events is Karl-Johan Stigmark’s seventh book and the first to be published by FAS Publishing SE. Stigmark is an artist and has in several previously published books materialised subject matters with titles such as Fläckar Ord (“Stains Words”), Sprickor Och Andra Sprickor (“Cracks and Other Cracks”) and Loose Threads.

Most of Karl-Johan Stigmark ́s art projects are meant to be experienced in real time, and the accompanying photographic documentation is meant to be viewed more as a stand-alone artwork, where the artist allows the images and the text to engage in a symbiotic relationship on a completely new level. Stigmark does, however, also have another photographic practice where he points the camera at things and areas in life that are usually overlooked.

Eight Paper Events is an artist book where the material is produced primarily to be shown in the format of a book. The book consists of eight parts, which in different ways shape events that emanate from the ontology of paper or its being. Here, in the introductory photographic series one can see visually beautiful excesses meet the documentation of the score On Paper – where the acoustics of specifically paper is portrayed. Performances from the rivers of Paris are then followed by a dissection of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.

Different paper qualities are also experimented with, where multi-paged fold-outs and statements are embedded into the cover page and the end sheet. In Allt papper i min studio (“All The Paper In My Studio”), language is reduced and left aside to the visual, that of which we can see or perceive beyond the cognitive.

There are often obstacles in the language or image that become existentially insurmountable, but that in the everyday on a physical level, nearly always needs to be overcome or forced to any price.