Artport’s Art Bookfair was founded in the winter of 2015 and has become a winter tradition, attracting thousands of visitors to a weekend of books and art.
The fair, the largest of its kind in Israel, focuses on artist books and allows a glimpse into unique objects that usually cannot be found in regular bookstores. Some of the books are handmade, some are professionally designed and printed, and others are individually painted and bound. The Bookfair features books that continue a project that started in an exhibition, as well as those that exist only as stand-alone printed matter.
Artport also takes part in international book fairs around the world, presenting books and catalogues by artists that have been part of our residency program.

Artport's Art Bookfair

Artport's Art Book Fair

May 3rd - May 6th, 2023

The first and largest artist book fair in Israel is back!

Over 400 books by more than 200 artists, 20 events that include conversations, panels and book launches, alongside 4 art performances about books, fanzines and other surprises, in a weekend dedicated entirely to books and art.

The first artist book fair in Israel was held in Artport since 2015 and immediately attracted thousands of visitors and shoppers for a weekend of books and art. The fair raised great interest and led to a flourishing in the field of artist books throughout the country.

Many of the books in the fair are unique standalone objects that extend the artist’s practice, some are a continuation of an exhibition, and some summarize a period of time, but all open a window to a new world that exists between the pages. Photography, painting, printing and illustration, hard leather bindings alongside pages stapled together, words woven into images, images that become a story, page-turning that becomes a journey – the art book fair is an exciting and sensational experience.

The selection ranges from books that were painted and hand-bound to those that were printed in a printing house, in workshops, or were made at home, using copiers, from editions of a thousand copies to one-off, unique, special books. The “White Gloves Room” will be dedicated to rare and valuable artist books that were handmade in different printing techniques, independently or in workshops (such as Harel Print Workshop in Tel-Aviv and the Jerusalem Print Workshop). These books are so delicate and precious, that in order to browse them, gloves must be worn.

Alongside the books, the fair will hold talks and panels on artist books featuring artists, curators, editors and designers, launch events for new books, different performances dealing with artist books created specifically for the fair, a ‘White Gloves Room’ featuring special editions, alongside a fanzine workshop where artist booklets will be produced and printed during the fair.

The fair is being held in collaboration with Magasin III Jaffa, and its artists bookstore, Magasin III Jaffa Books.

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Artport's Art Book Fair

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Fairs Around the World

Friends With Books

Art Book Fair, Berlin 2018 5-7.10.18

Artport will be participating at Friends With Books: Art book Fair Berlin for the first time, with many books by the programs Israeli artists.
In this fair, there are over 200 artists, art institutions and book publishers, and has a diverse program of lectures, shows and art exhibitions.
Free entrance.

Come visit us at booth Q2!

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Artport supports art books by the residency alumni, hoping to strengthen and enrich the local art book scene.
We believe that these books complement the artist’s work and allow the art works to travel the world and go places beyond where the artists can visit themselves. Often the books are the only place where projects are documented and archived, and they allow a deep and thorough exploration into the artist’s work.

The Books

Guy Pitchon, Love Child

Having served as a principal object of courting and admiration for the second half of the 20th century, “youth” is the great neglected of recent years.
The advantages of youth have been stolen for the sake of the new class of the “young”, which is extended without limit, until the body does not afford us liberty any longer. The status of youth has grown weak as an economic power. It lacks behind the status of children – who are more loved, more endeared, the new extortionists of money and blame, and also behind the economic power of the adult bourgeoisie. The youth have nothing to offer: they have neither hope nor wallet; they are after sexual discovery and before uncovered sexuality. We have taken away from the youth all that they had, and now they are our martyrs, expressing with .The youth of Pitchon crash on the cement of the shopping centertheir own bodies the boredom, the cruelty, the confining spaces of the 21st century

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Literally translated, “love child” seems an ironic title to an exhibition that displays children or youth that at least seem to suffer from some lack of love or care. Correctly translated – “lovechild” is “bastard”, and in its figurative colloquial sense there is suitability: here they are, those little bastards. The title, like some of the works in the exhibition, belongs to tattoo clichés: Mother, Love Child, images of the Holy Virgin. The surprising incorporation of Christian motives in the exhibition seems at first sight as trashy pop, but the plea for mercy on the “children” is simultaneously genuine and deriding. It appears as though Pitchon presents a closed and hopeless world, in which all laws are clear, where money rules, the architecture serves as a system of control (echoing “free masons” conspiracy theories) and the only way to manifest an “I” is to engrave on your own body or otherwise harm it. However, Pitchon allows himself and the love children – are they anything but a collection of images of himself? – the right to pray.

The work “…refuse… resist…” summarizes the subject matter well: The silver pyramid with Big Brother’s Cyclops eye is ruling from above. Underneath a nailed cross, the skater, in his usual uniform, sits again on the same pyramid – now one that can be used as a slide – and is occupied in what is seen to be a meek and passive prayer. The call: “refuse, resist” is surrounded, in the stammered language of text messaging, by endless dots that weaken it from all sides, rendering it ironic.

Pitchon’s love children’s oblivion is much more dim and limp than Larry Clark’s, for example: instead of heroin there is Goldstar, instead of syringes – an improvised bong; the guns are toy guns, they cannot kill you. The absence of shock enables the situation to persist: there is no sex, there is no death, there is limbo. To return to Avidan: “The title ‘young’ is nothing more than labeling an intermediate state in a very long waiting room”.

As someone who has been moving for several years between commercial and artistic photography, between art and pop, between primitive engraving in wood and glass and digital photography, between the street and the establishment, between the adults and the teenagers, Pitchon himself is a Love Child, a bastard in the world of art. Let us pray for him.

Michal Baror, The Book of Plunder

A temporary summary of questioning the complex and fascinating relationship between the concept of plunder and the object of artistic display

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Michal Baror’s Artist Book, 2018
22.5×16.5 cm, 208 pages, The Center of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv
Book designed by Studio Gimel 2 – Nomi Geiger & Dana Gez
Editor: Chen Tamir
Cover Calligraphy: Ahmad Zoabi, Daniel Grumer
Photo: Yair Meyuhas

Guy Goldstein, Once, a Beat, Second Hit

The book “Once, a Beat, Second hit” accompanies Guy Goldstein’s solo exhibition at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art (2018) under the same title, and summarizes Goldstein’s artistic work over the past decade. The book presents the artist’s canonical works, which deal with the connections between the visual and the audial, in terms of noise and harmony in time and space, in words and music.

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Editor: Drorit Gur Arie
Design and production: Koby Levy, The League
Text editing: Daphna Raz
English translation and editing: Daria Kassovsky
Installation photographs: Elad Sarig
Additional photographs: Tal Nissim
Printing: A.R. Printing Ltd., Tel Aviv

Petach Tikva Art Museum
ISBN 978-965-7461

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