It's a garden
23.03.2024
For this year’s It’s a book, ... an exhibition of award-winning books will be held for the first time. It’s a garden includes the selected publications from the It’s a book, ... Student Projects, the awards from the Best Book Design from all over the World competition and the prize-winning books from the Walter Tiemann Prize.
Following on from the annual theme, we want to capture the moment of growth in the conception, production and distribution of books and knowledge and transform the HGB Gallery into an abstract botanical garden for the day of the fair. Aspects of selection, consolidation and representation will undergo a similarly ambivalent process through the awarding of prizes as the conception of a botanical garden.
The prize-winning books become exhibits in a garden that is formed on the one hand from plants from the offices and workshops of the HGB Leipzig and on the other from Inga Kerber’s artistic position. In this garden, questions about the conditions and infrastructures of awarding prizes are critically synthesized. The space invites visitors to linger and explore both material and immaterial spaces of growth and flourishing.
Gardening activity is of five kinds, namely, sowing, planting, fixing, placing, maintaining. In so far as gardening is an Art, all these may be taken under the one head, composing.
Finlay, Ian Hamilton, “More Detached Sentences Exile, Gardening and Pebbles”, PN Review 42 11, no. 2 (1985), 18–20
This exhibition was evolved and designed by Lam Funke, Janine Sauter and Leonard Siegwardt in cooperation with the artist Inga Kerber and Stephan Schürer (Gärtnerei Belgershain)
Special thanks to Julius Brück, Sebastian Cewe, Markus Dreßen, Bettina Francke, Inga Kerber, Ilse Lafer, Mirko Lehmberg, Stephanie Marx, Petra Natascha Mehler, Johannes Oestringer, Sabine Schmid, Stephan Schürer, Yvonne Schürer, Uwe Wellmann and many more
An event of the open book society e.V. in cooperation with the HGB Leipzig
Kindly supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the HGB Leipzig
Co-financed by tax funds on the basis of the budget passed by the members of the Saxon State Parliament