The German term nihilartikel is used to describe the little known practice of inserting intentional errors, falsities or fictitious entries into reference texts – academic works, dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, directories – for the purpose of later identifying plagiaries, copies or other infringements to intellectual copyright. Taking this somewhat elusive practice as its subtext, Izabela Pluta’s major new book approaches photography and its central quandaries of authenticity and representation from a series of unsettled and dynamic vantages.
Here, the Polish-born, Australian-based artist forges a syntax using photographs gleaned from aerial drone footage and moving-image stills filmed underwater in Malta and Japan, and traditional darkroom prints made with out-of-print and otherwise obscure oceanic maps. Ancient surfaces and architectures ripple with evidence of their deep time; boulders emerge, stealth-like, from the blue depths; cartography collapses in on itself; all in a sequence punctuated by vibrant interplays of colour, layer, texture and form.
Working in fluid collaboration with designers Paul Mylecharane and Kim Mumm Hansen, Pluta depicts the ocean and its surrounding landscapes as a fallible and contested space. Official accounts are called into question, and expanded photographic materialities, juxtapositions and graphic formalism work to fragment established systems of knowledge. Pluta’s conceptual pith lies in the exploration, repetitions, red herrings and residues. Nihilartikel – which follows the artist’s 2019 book for Perimeter Editions, Figures of slippage and oscillation – echoes the volatility and relationality of our experience of the ocean itself, posing the question of how we can work to unravel the dogmas of conventional modes of looking, making and reading photographs. Here, Pluta dares us to lose ourselves in the undertow.
128 pages, 31.7 x 24cm, coptic bind, softcover, Perimeter Editions (Melbourne).
SPECIAL EDITION
Perimeter Editions and the artist are producing a special edition of 30 copies, which include a signed and editioned chromogenic print. Fallout #1 (Study for 'Variable depth, shallow water'), 2021. Chromogenic print on metallic paper (20 x 28 cm, last image shown).
Regular and Special editions available here
Figures of slippage and oscillation by Izabela Pluta is the winner of the 2019 Perimeter Small Book Prize.
Drawing on a series of darkroom contact prints titled Spatial misalignments – which were conceived by shining light through the pages of three long-out-of-print editions of The Reader’s Digest Great World Atlas – Sydney-based photographer and artist Izabela Pluta’s debut book bears witness to the turbulence, mutability and power structures that both prop up and undermine the static dogmas of the global map. In these richly and elusively detailed images, the world as we knew it blurs and collapses in on itself, flow and miasma gently erasing the borders and demarcations – the strategic fictions and mythologies – to which we’ve anchored our semantics of place.
Underscored by a collaborative text work by Melbourne poet Lisa Gorton and an experimental essay by Art Gallery of NSW Senior Curator of Contemporary Australian Art Isobel Parker Philip, Figures of slippage and oscillation reappraises our philosophical and conceptual grappling with geography and cartography. Here, the fog of arbitrariness bankrupts the law and lore of our oceans and lands; the echo of violence, migration and climatic shift belies our borders. In the process, Pluta whispers to the fragility of our geological, environmental and societal condition. As the oceans wash through our now quaint delineations, she archives our loss.
80 pages, 32 x 24 cm, section sewn softcover with flaps, Perimeter Editions (Melbourne).
Special EditionThe artist and Perimeter Editions have produced a special edition of 20 copies amongst a wider print run of 500 copies of the book. The special edition is signed and numbered by the artist and includes a signed and editioned 30 x 42 cm, handprinted silver gelatin diptych print.
check out Perimeter for sales.
Taken on the same day as the other photo
Izabela Pluta
Taken on the same day as the other photo 2017
artist book 14.8 x 21cm
softcover, 100 pages, edition of 100
Design: Ella Coulter
Publisher: Onestar Press/VOLUME 2015
Production: Deephouse Print Studio
ISBN 978-0-9870916-5-9
an artist book developed during VOLUME 2015, Onestar press, Paris, hosted by Artspace, Sydney
Available from Perimeter Books, Melbourne
retail $20
This artist book takes an original set of eighteen photographs that depict the artist’s father standing in various locations across a city unbeknown to the viewer and presents them throughout the 100 pages of the book. The sequencing and folding of the images play on the temporality of a photograph, the separation of the image from the place and context it was taken, and the resistance of the photograph to exist as a mnemonic object in the space of this book. This work is neither a narrative nor an account of her father's journey, but draws on relations between conventional photographic language and the potential it has to engage with the non-linear and eclectic presentation of images and our encounter with them.
Izabela Pluta: 6 Projects
A compilation of works and documentation of exhibitions spanning 2009-2012
self-published 2012
25×20 cm, 112 pages, hardcover with dust-jacket, uncoated 148gsm paper
Contributions by: Simon Gregg, Emma Mayall, Amita Kirpalani, Ashley Whamond, Izabela Pluta
ISBN 978-0-9870916-2-8
Izabela Pluta: 4 Projects
A compilation of works and documentation of exhibitions spanning 2013-2014
self-published 2015
25×20 cm, 74 pages, hardcover with dust-jacket, uncoated 148gsm paper
Contributions by: Andrew Frost, Izabela Pluta
ISBN 978-0-9870916-3-5