2011–2012
Again, A Time Machine is a Book Works' touring exhibition in six parts.
It looked at how artists play with words – raiding archives, bringing the dead to life, making the living look dead – and how they forge a practice through words, images, books, and ephemera, beginning to anticipate the past, forecast possible histories and re-visit alternative futures.
Again, A Time Machine was a fluid tour, reinventing itself as work moved from venue to venue. Based on new commissions and archival presentations, it generated ephemera, performance and printed material, in response to a theme that plays with and inverts notions of time, archive, distribution and received pasts and perfect futures.
Venues included: Eastside Projects, Birmingham (Part one), Motto, Berlin (Part two), The Showroom, London (Parts three and six), Spike Island, Bristol (Part four), White Columns, New York (Part five) and SPACE, London (Part six). Projects organised in collaboration with The Showroom were performative talks Archival Pleasure, Future Orientation and Confrontational Perspectives, and exhibitions Sarah Pierce: The Artist Talks and Make the Living Look Dead.
Book Works published Again, A Time Machine: from distribution to archive, an assemblage of material that extends the touring exhibition, in 2012.