Saturday 1/4 2-4 pm
Release event for Things Change Anyway by MC Coble & Louise Wolthers.
The artist book Things Change Anyway is a collaboration between non-binary, trans* artist MC Coble and art / photo historian Louise Wolthers about various kinds of metamorphosis in life, bodies, relationships, and nature. The book first and foremost consists of photographs from the couple’s image archive, spanning a decade and presented in radical, non-linear editing. Intersecting the image flow are five essays by Wolthers and twelve drawings by Coble. Above all, the book is an examination of the meaning of photography, looking and being seen.
One strand of photographs in this book documents Coble’s ongoing gender affirmation, another theme is Wolthers’ struggles with menopause. Other strands include still lifes and snapshots from the everyday – with all its vulnerability, imperfection, and impermanence. The image strands are woven together to form a dynamic montage across time and space reflecting what change, non-human connectivity and queer kinship might look like. Wolthers’ personal essays contextualize single images with a wider body of photo history and gender/queer/trans* theory. Coble’s drawings form a visual, non-linear diary and synthesize various experiences – dealing with depression and during COVID, of being put on hold by the system, and of ways of transitioning and gaining agency.
Things Change Anyway (192 pages) is co-published by Breadfield Press (Sweden) and forlaget *[asterisk] (Denmark).
Colour photographs by Coble and Wolthers, black and white drawings by Coble and essays by Wolthers titled: Re-enacting Representation; Connected by Blood, Related by other Substances; Mirroring Bodies; Queering Landscapes, Changed by Nature and Pictures Never Taken.
Graphic Design by MC Coble and Louise Wolthers with support from Tina Enghoff
Printed 2023 at Narayana Press with supported by The New Carlsberg Foundation.
Coble is a non-binary trans artist, living and working in Gothenburg.
They work mainly through performance art and photography.
Louise Wolthers is an art historian, writer, and curator. Since 2012 she is head of research at The Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg.