Artist's book accompanying a sequence of exhibitions by James Richards in Norway, England, and Germany. The publication contains a series of visual essays by the artist, documentation of recent exhibitions, as well as essays by Dan Fox, Ed Atkins, Steve Reinke, Chris McCormack, and Fatima Hellberg.
In Richards's work, images and sounds are merged into highly affective videos that combine footage from a wide range of sources to form elegant compositions. His recent projects separate these elements out again, allowing space for multichannel audio installations that combine sound in a way that is physical and spatial. The video works convene materials according to the silent rhythms and movements of the footage they contain—footage from newscasts, medical documentaries, and French erotica as well as the institutions' own archives of video documentation—composing a lyrical meditation on the body as a site for the flow of material and sensation.
This book, the most significant publication on Richards's work to date, is an extension of the shows, transposing the strategies of his exhibition making into the rhythm of printed matter. The artist has developed a new series of collages specially for the book, comprising promiscuous relations and dissonant juxtapositions between photographic documentation of the works in the exhibitions, the artist's personal photographs, and found images.
Published on the occasion of the artist's exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway, from February 26 to April 3, 2016, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from September 21 to November 13, 2016, and the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, from December 3, 2016, to February 12, 2017.
James Richards (born 1983 in Cardiff, lives and works in London) graduated from Chelsea School of Art in 2006 where he made videos with sampled video and sound material.
Known for his provocative and visually seductive moving-image works that collage together a wide range of source material, James Richards's work, taking the form of curated video programmes, sculptures or live events, carves out a space where personal politics and digital materiality might meet.
