A book extending Nikita Gale’s Chisenhale Gallery installation, exploring sound, memory, and the architectures of attention and power. Developed in close collaboration with Gale, this publication translates the conceptual and material intricacies of her exhibition into print. Gale’s installation, rooted in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, delves into themes of invisibility, audibility, and the unstable dynamics between performer and spectator, structure and decay. The design mirrors these explorations, treating the book as an active, spatial environment.

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Structured in three ‘tenses’ – gallery, reflective, and artist – the book moves through distinct visual and material registers. The ‘gallery' tense immerses the reader in image and light; the ‘reflective' tense brings together critical and literary voices in a subtly disrupted archival format; the ‘artist' tense offers four visual essays – Absence, Ruin, Silence, Dog – where annotation, image, and fragment co-exist in layered dialogue. Shifts in paper, layout, and texture reflect Gale’s nuanced engagement with memory, power, and perception.

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Every element has been carefully considered to create a book that is not only intellectually rigorous but emotionally resonant. Its precision and sensitivity reflect the depth of Gale’s thinking, and the clarity with which she approaches both form and subject. Nothing is incidental; the emotional, intellectual and visual integrity of the work flows directly from Gale’s practice. Rather than document the exhibition, the book performs it – sustaining the same complexity, trace, and quiet intensity. It is both container and continuation.

Artist: Nikita Gale

Gallery: Chisenhale Gallery
Edited by: Zoe Whitley & Amy Jones
Contributors: Barbara Kruger, Hilton Als, P Staff, Bénédicte Boisseron 
A Chisenhale Book Published by Hurtwood Books

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All images courtesy of Hurtwood Books and art directed by Billie Temple​