Amogh | Halden Bookworks — Amogh Bhatnagar

In August 2024 I was invited for a two-week artist residency at Norwegian book arts studio Halden Bookworks (HB), supported by art and design publication Irregular Times. With HB’s resources and support in printmaking and bookbinding as creative mediums, I worked on exploring collage as a language, by investigating language itself as a collage, looking into aspects like the origins of letterforms and scripts to the formation of individual and shared languages, all the way to instances of detournement in memes and internet culture. This research took the form of an artist book in a limited edition of (2+1 AP), and a series of posters with a simple, three-word manifesto accompanying it.

As a part of the residency I also presented an an artist talk at Textallmeningen, the Bergen-based archive of art magazines and artist books, and a participatory workshop at Pamflett, a riso print studio. The workshop took a template-based approach, with a series of open-ended “generative” prompts for the participants to create works of art with the same basic prompts but completely different outcomes.