BOOKMORPHS: Artists’ Books from Greece & the UK, is an interactive exhibition held at the Hellenic Centre in London that brings together a diverse selection of artists’ books, book works, book-art objects, ephemera, and journals by 44 visual artists, curators, publishers, and theorists from Greece and the UK. In an era defined by digital immediacy and dematerialized culture, BOOKMORPHS reasserts the physical, conceptual, and performative dimensions of the book as an artistic medium.
In this context, the book is not merely a vessel for text, but a site of transformation and resistance—an evolving object that questions its own ontology. The works assembled explore the codex as both medium and metaphor, emphasizing its capacity to contain, conceal, and reveal knowledge. BOOKMORPHS unfolds as a dialogue about art, language, and materiality. It celebrates the tactile and the conceptual. Most significantly, it asserts that the book, like art, resists singular meaning, revealing endless ways of being experienced and understood.
BOOKMORPHS explores the book as an expanded field of artistic practice, reconsidering the material, conceptual, and participatory potential of the artists’ book. Through experimental engagements with the codex form, the works on view interrogate the boundaries between reading and viewing, text and object, and art and archive.
The book as artwork occupies a liminal territory between literature and visual art, between the intimate act of reading and the public experience of viewing. As both material object and conceptual form, it challenges inherited notions of what constitutes an artwork, expanding the field of artistic practice into the realms of language, structure, and reproduction.
The project foregrounds cross-cultural intersections between Greek and British practitioners while situating the book as a vital site of inquiry in contemporary art. Reading becomes an embodied, participatory act and artistic production extends beyond the printed page. Most importantly, it reminds us that the book—like art itself—offers infinite modes of reading, interpretation, and engagement.
Unlike the traditional book, which privileges linear narrative and authorial authority, the artists’ book often subverts these conventions, inviting the reader to fold, touch, or reconstruct it, transforming passive reading into active participation. In this sense, the artists’ book functions not only as an artwork but as a process—an event unfolding through time and interaction.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a shared belief that books can—and should—provoke, notes Nayia Yiakoumaki, Director of the Hellenic Centre, pointing out that In an age dominated by endless scrolling, BOOKMORPHS celebrates the materiality of the book, the disruption of legibility and the thrill of the tactile. In this spirit, the works morph, bend, twist, and transform into sculptures, poetry, political commentary, and other unexpected objects.
Meticulously curated by Project 2 Athens (Fiona Mouzakitis & Despina Stavrou) alongside Christina Mitrentse, the exhibition borrows its title from a term used by art writer Michael Hampton and seeks to foster dialogue and exchange between Greek and British artists. Showcasing a wide range of techniques and media—including painting, printmaking, drawing, writing, poetry, digital printing, découpage, bookbinding, sculpture, sound, and photography—the exhibition highlights the experimental and material richness of the book as an artistic form.
BOOKMORPHS invites audiences to engage with books through unconventional forms of ‘reading’: holding, touching, and activating. Here, books transform into vehicles for unique, interactive experiences, allowing visitors to explore the anatomy of the book and engage more intimately with its content. By re-examining the meaning and history of the codex, the works address a range of social, political, cultural, ecological, and gender issues. Personal narratives and subversive themes are reimagined within the artists’ book format, expanding the ways books can be created, read, and understood as cultural artifacts.
BOOKMORPHS is the first contemporary Greek artists’ book show to be held outside of Greece, notes art historian and visual artist Fiona Mouzakitis. It presents a wide range of approaches to the concept of the artists’ book, exploring diverse materials and themes while offering a snapshot of contemporary art production in Greece. It also opens a dialogue with UK-based practitioners, who have a long-standing tradition of creating conceptually and critically driven artists’ books, fostering collaboration and intellectual exchange.
Artist and curator Christina Mitrentse offers further insight into the complex relationship between art, books, and book art. Reflecting on the history of artists’ book criticism, Clive Phillpot defines artists’ books as “a book of which an artist is the author,” emphasizing the artist’s central role in creation. In the 1960s, the term was often applied loosely to almost anything within an art context resembling a book, including works by musicians, poets, designers, choreographers, and philosophers.
Within this framework, BOOKMORPHS reinterprets—both literally and metaphorically—the term (bōk + μορφ), expanding the contemporary definitional boundaries of artists’ books. The exhibition highlights the fluid boundaries of the genre and the role of information and language in artists’ books, which exist at the intersection of visual art and literature.Artists’ books continue to disrupt literary conventions, creating “specific reading conditions” where participants explore new ways of engaging with books.
Leonie Yagdjoglou, Welcome to Diversity
Participating Artists: Eleni Angelou, Nikos Arvanitis, Rania Bellou, David Blackmore, Sarah Bodman, Ismini Bonatsou, BOOKEND (Matt Hale & Nick Cash), Maria Bourbou, Thodoros Brouskomatis, Jonathan Callan, Natassa Chelioti – Naga, Ioanna Delfino, Joe Devlin, Anna Dimitriou, Stephen Emmerson, SJ Fowler, Michael Hampton, Rowena Hughes, Inscription Journal (Gill Partington, Simon Morris, Adam Smyth), Antonia Iroidou, Eleni Kastrinogianni, Peggy Kliafa, Alexia Kokkinou, Georgia Kotretsos, Nikos Kryonidis, Vasiliki Lefkaditi, Eleni Maragaki, Kyriaki Mavrogeorgi, Despina Meimaroglou, Christina Mitrentse, Fiona Mouzakitis, Kiki Perivolari, Stamatis Schizakis, Ifigeneia Sdoukou, Christina Sgouromiti, Danai Simou, Dimitris Skourogiannis, Annetta Spanoudaki, Nectarios Stamatopoulos, Despina Stavrou, Aris Stoidis, Evangelos Tasios, Yannis Tzortzis, Leonie Yagdjoglou.
D.T.
Featured image: Ismini Bonatsou Little Red Riding Hood
TAGS: ARTS
