cpress books films

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press (*1966, England) explores gender, collections, and publishing through a practice spanning forms as varied as drawing, sculpture, performance, and moving image. Her early work took the form of ‘wordscapes’ or ‘still films’ – blow-by-blow accounts written in her own words of feature films, (whose subjects range from war to porn) or sequences of events. These pieces evolved into solid single blocks of text, often the same shape and size as a cinema screen. Banner later turned her attention to the idea of the classic, art-historical nude, observing a life model and transcribing the pose and form in a similar vein to her earlier transcription of films. Often using parts of military aircraft as the support for these descriptions, Banner juxtaposes the brutal and the sensual, performing an almost complete cycle of intimacy and alienation. With an interest in how historical events become fictionalised over time and how conflict is mythologised through popular culture, the constant power struggle between words and their meaning is central to Banner’s conceptual approach that examines conflict, language, and its limitations. Whilst her current work encompasses performance, sculpture, drawing and installation, text is still at the heart of Banner's practice. In 1997 she started her own publishing imprint The Vanity Press, which has been the backbone of her work ever since. Banner toys with the snobbery inherent in the title by publishing posters, books, objects and performances that deploy a playful attitude and utilise pseudo grandeur.

The work of Claudia Barth (* 1987 in Herrliberg, Switzerland) is centred around a performance practice based on speech and movement. As part of her socially and politically engaged artistic activity, she also creates video works, sculptures and large paper cuts. For Barth telling, passing on and collective remembering of stories is part of the tradition of a feminist practice that makes systemic power structures visible and powerful and solidary connections tangible. Her work is about creating a framework in which collaborators, companions, and partners can engage and move.

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Erick Beltrán (*1974, Mexico City) analyzes and reflects on the edition concept and the discourse constructions. He investigates the power that the different graphic means exert in their distribution of information, as well as explicit treatment on different conducts and values. He works with diverse formats as the multiple or the book; he experiments and investigates the link between public art and the diverse graphic languages. The archive, the museum and the library are tools and natural means in their investigation process. A process in which the edition concept focuses all the work, understanding it as the mechanism with which communication through images that create political, economical and cultural discourses in contemporary societies are defined, evaluated, classified and reproduced.

Jamie Crewe was born in Manchester and raised in the Peak District. They now live and work in Glasgow. They have presented three solo exhibitions: But what was most awful was a girl who was singing (Transmission, Glasgow, 2016); Female Executioner (Gasworks, London, 2017); and Pastoral Drama (Tramway, Glasgow, 2018). They have also participated in many group exhibitions, including: STILL I RISE: FEMINISMS, GENDER, RESISTANCE ACT 2 (De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill On Sea, 2019) and ACT 3 (Arnolfini, Bristol, 2019); I, I, I, I, I, I, I Kathy Acker (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2019); and Cellular World, part of the Director’s Programme for Glasgow International 2018 (Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, 2018). They have also presented their performance lecture Potash Lesson at a variety of venues in the UK and Europe, and authored a book titled GLAIRE (published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2017). In 2017 they were awarded a commission by KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, as part of the KW Production Series. The resulting moving image work — a two channel video titled Pastoral Drama — was exhibited at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Berlin alongside fellow award recipient Beatrice Gibson’s I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead. In 2019 they were announced as the tenth recipient of the Margaret Tait Award, Scotland’s most prestigious prize for artists working with moving image. The resulting work — a rural horror film titled Ashley — will be premiered at Glasgow Film Festival in early 2020.

Claire Fontaine is a feminist, conceptual artist, founded in Paris in 2004.

Liv FONTAINE (b.1989 Southampton) is a multi disciplinary artist working across mediums that include drawing, performance, writing and video. In 2021 she was included in the group exhibition Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down curated by Cabbage Arts and showed a new video work produced by Civic Room as part of Glasgow International Art Festival. A solo show of her drawings curated by Roisin Mcqueirns was presented on the Richard Saltoun website as part of their woman 2.1 Online programme and she was the recipient of a Resilience Grant from Cabbage Arts. She has exhibited and performed in numerous group shows and solo presentations over the last 10 years in venues such as galleries, artist led spaces and bars. This has included at Elephant West, London; David Dale Gallery, Glasgow; Celine, Glasgow; SuperNormal Festival, Oxfordshire; Raven Row, London; CCA, Glasgow; Matthew Gallery, New York; BLOC Projects Sheffield; ICA, London; Caustic Coastal, Salford; HAHA Gallery, Southampton; Austrian Cultural Forum, London; Serf, Leeds and Academy of Art, Vienna.

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Tom Huber graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Art & Design) in Amsterdam in 2002. He has since been making his own art and music as well as working on various international assignments (photography and music performance/composition)

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Christof Nüssli (*1986) works with (moving) image, text, installation and print graphics. The artist is concerned with power, obtaining and archiving information, state repression, and architecture. He searches for alternative networks, new forms of narration and interstices. He often focuses his attention on incidents that superficially seem banal and meaningless. He shifts these into a new context and thus enables a different kind of reader.

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Christoph Oeschger (*1984 in Zurich) is an artist, publisher, and since autumn 2017 artistic associate in the Department of Transdisciplinarity at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He studied media art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) and photography at the ZHdK. His most recent publication was the artist’s book Miklós Klaus Rózsa (with Christof Nüssli). His work has been shown at a variety of venues including the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Fotomuseum Winterthur, and Kunstverein Amsterdam. In 2014 he founded the cpress publishing house together with Christof Nüssli.

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Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs (Swiss, both b. 1979) work collaboratively in photography, film and installation.

Leslie Thornton (b. 1951) is an American filmmaker and artist. Currently, she lives and works in both New York and Rhode Island. Leslie Thornton was born in 1951 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Leslie Thornton creates vigorously experimental film and video. All her work delves into the mystery and ongoing investigations into the production, creation, and distribution of meaning through and within media. One finds that with Leslie Thornton both form and content are critical and inform each other. Thornton is a professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Leslie Thornton’s film and media works have been exhibited across the world, in venues including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Biennial Exhibition; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Rotterdam International Film Festival; New York Film Festival; CAPC Musée, Bordeaux; Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley; and festivals in Oberhausen, Graz, Mannheim, Berlin, Austin, Toronto, Tokyo, and Seoul, among many others. Leslie was the only female experimental filmmaker noted in Cahiers du Cinema’s “60 most important American Directors” publication. Leslie Thornton’s project Peggy and Fred in Hell received numerous accolades in various annual best lists including: The Village Voice and The New York Times. Leslie Thornton’s films include: Minus 10 (2005), Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 10, 9, 8, 7… 20 (2004), Peggy and Fred in Hell; End in New World, a definitive linear version of this 20 year long project (2003), Paradise Crushed (2003), Origin (2003), Temporary Modern (2003), The 10,000 Hills of Language (2002), The Great Invisible (2002), Peggy and Fred on Television (2002), Paradise Crushed (2002), Bedtime v.2. (2002), Document of an Installation (2002), The Splendor (2001), Have a Nice Day Alone (2001), Quickly, Yet Too Slowly (2000), Bedtime (2000), Chimp For Normal (1999), and Another Worldy (1999).