In July 2025, twenty Brazilian artists cross the ocean carrying books that have no end in pages. They are fragments of worlds, traces of memory, bodies that fold the time. The exhibition ‘Art crossing borders with artists’ books: Bristol welcoming Brazil’ starts with the generous invitation of the artist and researcher Sarah Bodman, and welcomes in Bristol a constellation of works of art originating from the Study Group ‘Artists’ books, book-objects: among traces and effacement’, based in São Paulo.

As its name suggests, the group is dedicated to investigating artists’ books in their multiple layers: object, memory, silence, presence, and absence. Meeting every other week—sometimes online, sometimes in a hybrid format—it welcomes artists from various regions of Brazil (and the world), intertwining experiences and voices through reading, practicing, and listening. Each meeting is a fold in time: a space of shared creation where individual poetics flourish and collective suggestions take shape.

The exhibition in Bristol reveals this living organism in motion. They are books that expand beyond paper—collages, embroidery, prints, photographs, installations, video, and sound. The themes are diverse: intimate and ancestral stories, emotional and social landscapes, political and existential questions, traces of a time that keeps returning. Each work is an attempt to hold onto what slips away—a gesture of remembering, reinventing, displacing. Walking through these margins, the exhibition proposes not only the encounter between those countries, but between ways of narrating, seeing, and listening to the world.

The books presented do not follow a single line: they are bifurcations, detours, traverses. More than objects, they are processes. More than answers, they are questions made by hands.

Art Crossing Borders with Artists’ Books is, thus, a crossing. A careful listening to what pulses between the folds—in the pages and between the lines, in the emptiness and in the presences. It is also a celebration: of art as a living language, of books as a territory of invention, and of encounter as a form of resistance and creation.

Fabiola Notari, curator.

Download the exhibition catalogue with information on each of the artists’ works here.

For more information about the Study Group ‘Artists’ books, book-objects: among traces and effacement’, please visit the Instagram pages: livrosdeartista, nucleolivrosdeartista or ser.criativo.agora.

For more information about Fabiola Notari, visit Fabiola’s website.

This exhibition is open to the public Monday – Friday 9am-5pm. No booking needed. The library is on the first floor of B block. Public parking on meters on main road or at Ashton Court.

For more information on Bower Ashton Library, visitor access and campus map, see the library website.

UWE Bristol, City Campus at Bower Ashton, Kennel Lodge Road, Bristol BS3 2JT.