More than sixty-five years after its publication, “Naked Lunch” continues to exert a peculiar magnetism over bibliophiles. Yet their fascination extends far beyond the novel itself. In 1962, stung by a hostile review published in “Time” magazine, William S. Burroughs responded not with a rebuttal but through an act of literary and artistic détournement. His altered version of “Time” lay somewhere between an artist’s book and a political pamphlet: a fractured publication in which the logic of the cut-up method became a deconstructive and critical tool in its own right. In an attempt to untangle the editorial knots of this snowballing story, Metabooks brings together the documents, ephemera, and editions that shaped the mythology surrounding Burroughs’s collectibles. “Naked Lunch” is the fourth show in a series of artist’s book-related exhibitions co-curated by Tiane Doan na Champassak and Larisa Oancea.

“Text as Image” explores the liminal space between reading and viewing. From early conceptual art to the Pictures Generation, typography has been reified as a privileged tool in the production of thought and image. Today, text-based art remains a vital strategy for resisting the imperialism of the icon. At the threshold of a new pictorial turn, this exhibition embraces an intentionally excessive verbality, foregrounding the performative potential of the written word: from its proliferation in concrete and visual poetry to its near-total dissolution in rare instances of entirely white books. “Text as Image” brings together artists’ books by Marcel Broodthaers, Dieter Roth, Joseph Kosuth, Hanne Darboven, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Mirtha Dermisache, Endre Tót, and Fiona Banner, among many others. “Text as Image” is the third show in a series of artist’s book-related exhibitions co-curated by Tiane Doan na Champassak and Larisa Oancea at Studio 454 Venice.

In one of his seminal texts, Gilles Deleuze interprets the world as a body of infinite folds that intertwine in time and space. With this image in mind, “Folded Cities” investigates the representation of urban architecture through a small selection of artists’ books, while echoing a myriad of concepts that defined the transition of the cities from the modern to the postmodern: Walter Benjamin’s myth of the flâneur, Guy Debord’s psychogeography, Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell’s pop architecture and Germano Celant’s radical architecture, to name but a few. “Folded Cities” is the third show in a series of artist’s book-related exhibitions co-curated by Tiane Doan na Champassak and Larisa Oancea at Studio 454 Venice.

“Burning Matter” retraces the multiple uses of fire in the history of artists’ bookmaking since the early 1960s, documenting how this dual element – recognized in the literature as both a destroyer and a symbol of knowledge – has been absorbed into the creative research of a number of artists working with printed matter: Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, Roy Adzak, Jonathan Monk, Bernard Aubertin, Barbara Kruger, The Guerrilla Art Action Group, John Latham, John Riddell, François Dufrêne, Daisuke Yokota and Tiane Doan na Champassak. “Burning Matter” is the first show in a series of artist’s book-related exhibitions co-curated by Tiane Doan na Champassak and Larisa Oancea at Studio 454 Venice.