Photobook exhibition 2025

In the photobook exhibition, presented in collaboration with Fotobokfestival Oslo, new titles and rare books will be on display, including books from artists all around the world. The selection is curated by NOUAs Marianne Bjørnmyr & Dan Mariner, who curated the 2023 edition of Fotobok Festival Oslo. 

The photobook exhibition deals with photography’s role in classification - unmanageable systems are made tangible through photography’s inherent technological properties; collecting, measuring, categorising, indexing, and classifying. The exhibition highlights artists obsessively collecting and assembling information, classifying troublesome systems, and creating new structures in order to make historical accounts materially manageable. 

Guided by an interest in this methodology, the artists presented in the exhibition incorporate extensive research within their photobooks, using the photographic narrative to approach current and historical contexts, conveying these visually to the public. The themes explored within the photobooks range from obsessive collection, geopolitics, taxonomy, political agreements, war, technology, perception, science, surveillance, state secrecy to the hidden and the unfamiliar. 

The books in the exhibition present projects and topics including obsessive bread collecting, bee and human interaction, use of photography in fascist regimes, space race deception, deceivingly accurate pseudoscientificarchives of plants and animals, scrutinisation of national security systems, categorising of vehicles of suicide bombers and seized contraband articles. Each artist and photobook provides us with their own unique take on the archival process, which should not be understood literally, but rather put into doubt, and to raise multi-layered questions around experience and memory, authenticity and authorship, and how history can be depicted. 

Books in the exhibition: 

Marte Aas - Sitters, Angle 16°
Marius Svaleng Andresen (NO) - Life in the New
Archive of Modern Conflict (UK) - A guide for the Protection of the Public in Peacetime 
Mathieu Asselin (AR/FR) - Monsanto
Lisa Barnard (UK) - The Canary and The Hammer
Beata Bartecka & Łukasz Rusznica (PL) - How to Look Natural in Photos
Aladin Borioli/Aprian (CH) - Hives 2400 B.C.E. – 1852 C.E
Broomberg & Chanarin (ZA/UK) - Fig
Broomberg & Chanarin (ZA/UK) - Holy Bible
Broomberg & Chanarin (ZA/UK) - People In Trouble Laughing Pushed To The Ground
Broomberg & Chanarin (ZA/UK) - War Primer 3
Lewis Bush (UK) - Depravity’s Rainbow
Lewis Bush (UK) - War Primer 3
Eivind Hofstad Evjemo (red.) (NO) - Så i asken slik at ingenting går
Kalev Erickson - More Cooning with Cooners
Sergio Valenzuela Escobedo (CH/FR) - MÄNK’ÁČEN
Espen Gleditsch (NO) - mmmMarbles
Jacqueline Hassink (NL) - The Table of Power 2
Benoit Jeannet (CH) - A Geological Index Of The Landscape 
Erik Kessels (NL) - In Almost Every Picture Collection
Paul Kooiker (NL)  – Eggs and Rarities
Mariken Kramer (NO) - Muscle, beefsteak…beefsteak run amok
Mårten Lange (SE)  – The Mechanism
Jack Latham (UK) - Parliament of Owls
Julie Lauritzen (NO) - Karanzine #8
Silja Leifsdottir (NO) - GR-09022017
Halldora Magnusdottir (IS) - Serendipity pattern of geomyth
Lalie Thébault Maviel (FR) - Our Daily Bread
Christina de Middel (ESP) - Party: Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung
Magdalene Odundo (KE) – Journey of Things
Ronit Porat (IL) - Hunting In Time
Aleix Plademunt (CH) - Matter 
Walid Raad (LB) - Walid Raad 
Walid Raad (LB) - Let’s Be Honest, the Weather Helped
Robert Zhao Renhui / Institute of Critical zoologists (SGP)  - A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World
Kirstine Roepstorff (DK) - The Archive of Dark
Daniel Shea (US) - Ex Nihilo
Andy Sewell (UK) – Known and Strange Things Pass
Bharat Sikka (IND) – The Sapper
Taryn Simon (US) - The Color of a Flea's Eye: The Picture Collection
Taryn Simon (US) - Rear Views, A Star-Forming Nebula, and the Department of Foreign Propaganda
Clare Strand (UK) - Girl Plays with Snake
Clare Strand (UK) - Fun With Clare Strand`s Photography, Angle 24°
Nina Strand (NO) - Dr Strand
Batia Suter (CH/NL) - Parallel encyclopedia
Batia Suter (CH/NL) - Radial Grammar
Siri Ekker Svendsen (NO) - All the Whisperings of the World
Salvatore Vitale (SH) - How to secure a country
James White (UK) - Evidence
Martin White (NO) - Big Science Issue #001
Sheung Yi (HK/FI) - Ground Truth