The collaborative artistic practice of Annette Kierulf and Caroline Kierulf is well known for their shared interest in woodcuts, often with texts integrated in the image, as well as their explicit wish to re-position printmaking as a critical space for reflection. In their exhibition configurations they add sculptures and installations to create connections between the prints, thus breaking with the serial or narrative reading of these works and expanding their potential spatially.
During their exhibition at Hordaland Art Centre in Bergen, Norway, in 2013, the centre organised a seminar on artists’ books. The seminar was also the occasion during which the new book series ‘Dublett’ was launched, the first one focusing on the practice of Annette & Caroline Kierulf.
Each ‘Dublett’ consists of a new artist book and an anthology of commissioned texts. These twin publications focus on an artist’s practice, an artistic collaboration or an artistic project. The Dublett series is initiated by Hordaland Art Centre, taking the Hordaland region as its point of departure. Dublett – Annette Kierulf & Caroline Kierulf features texts by Gunstein Bakke, Paul Coldwell, Geir Tore Holm, Ika Kaminka and Jan Svenungsson, as well as a joint artist’s book made by the artists.
The combination of two elements allows on the one hand for the artist’s practice to take centre stage and made manifest in the artist’s book, while the essay element that accompanies it offers an in-depth reflection on that practice through texts commissioned from a variety of authors. It challenges the notion of what a publication can be in relation to artists’ practices head on, an area that I am particularly interested in. Copy-editing and proofing the texts, which from various angles also tried to unpick the position of the woodcut in contemporary practice, resonated with the Andrea Büttner book I worked on several months later (see the Büttner post).
Gerrie van Noord 