We followed the rationale developed for the organization’s publications with slight variations to emphasize the Biennial’s visual language: the addition of printer’s red to the customary black-and-white text presentation, and a partial inversion of the Ox typographic standards, leading with the sans-serif (Kris Sowersby’s Söhne) we typically reserve for supplementary information.

The uncoated partial dustjacket reveals an image showing Maxx Katz’ performance of Yelling Choir held at Ox on 01 June 2024.

Ox’s publication standards are designed for compression, using as much real estate as humanely possible for images and essays. We do reserve the right to use whitespace for pacing (see fig. 5), but typically we jump into main content on page one, pushing the custodial/ceremonial stuff (copyright, credits, etc.) traditionally handled in front matter to the inside front and back covers. Here, we start with the curators’ thematic statement rendered in large type.

And from there, a complete eye-level overview of the exhibition, played out over several spreads, so that the reader may get a sense of the exhibition as installed before drilling down into individual works. This overview occurs before any other writing is presented.

Main title pages, showing a detail of Vo Vo’s 2024 tapestry The collective nightmare of witnessing a genocide but from a distance far enough to remain passive, whilst not quite resolving the question of what our role is and would be when push comes to shove in our own settler occupation/s.

The table of contents is an example of whitespace deployed as a brief cæsura before getting further into the book.

The book’s various sections were broken up by spreads showing performance images rendered in black and white overprinted with the red of the exhibition’s theme. Here is Bean Gilsdorf performing “Epistemics for Artists” on 15 June 2024.

Opening of Jackie Im’s essay Entanglement with a detail of Rainen Knecht’s 2024 work Gorgon 3 Graces. We follow a philosophy of “direct labeling” whenever possible, wherein the artwork is shown as it is mentioned in the text (the paragraph in red references Knecht’s piece) so that the reader gets both image and information at once without having to page back and forth. Footnotes are handled similarly, hanging from the line containing the reference in an exterior column.

Interior essay pages, here showing a detail of Bridgette Hickey’s 2024 installation who remembers love at the river’s edge.

Each contributing artist received full coverage of their contribution, starting with a page or pages overlaid by the exhibition’s theme red, creating a divider and container for the artist’s statement and biographical information. Shown here and over the next several figures is Carla Bengtson’s Other Nations.

Detail of Ms. Bengtson’s Other Nations showing overlaid notes. Some of the works included in ablaze with our care, its ongoing song contained detailed annotation from the artists. The standards contain a system by which that information could occupy two tiers of space lower on the page, but integrated with the image. This is both a decision of convenience (as much of our photography is in situ) and of philosophy: the documentation is a reproduction and not the actual work; the act of reading and looking is different in a book than in an exhibition and shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Another example of the annotation system contained in the standards. The in situ photography often contains a fair amount of framing space that we can use gracefully for this purpose. We might not do this in an artist’s monograph, but these books are exhibition documentation, not catalogues in the formal sense.

The Biennial featured several performances (here, a scent-sharing ritual as part of Carla Bengtson’s Other Nations). For publication, we graded performance photography in black and white to separate it from the static works and emphasize the ephemerality of the performances.

Final section divider with biographies of the curators overlaying a photograph of them presenting the first day of performances.