BRISTOL, UK.- Arnolfini presents today The Cover of a Book is the Beginning of a Journey, on view through January 11, 2009. This exhibition at Arnolfini uses a specific tendency in bookworks to generate an energetic series of events and activity. Focussing on books that either offer sets of instructions to the reader or are derived from instructions – the books unsettle the usual distinctions between writers and readers, artists and audiences, and act as prompts to their readers to go beyond the conventions of reading.

Partly drawing from Arnolfini’s archive, which includes several hundred artists’ books, many of which dating from the 60s and 70s, the exhibition presents a whole range of publications by renowned and emerging artists including: Lawrence Weiner, Melanie Carvalho, Don Celender, Douglas Huebler, Susan Hiller, Ed Ruscha, Angela Bulloch, Sophie Calle, and Boem Kim, amongst others.

It will also include art books curated as exhibition projects in themselves. For example Hans Ulrich Obrist’s do it - a collection of instructions for art projects written by artists inviting the reader to undertake them, or The Paper Sculpture Book: A Complete Exhibition in a Book with 29 Buildable Sculptures edited by Sina Najafi, Editor in Chief of Cabinet Magazine.

The exhibition space will become an active environment using the publications as a starting point to be used by artists and the public alike. The Bristol based Performance Re-enactment Society are developing a series of four Saturday afternoon events as part of the exhibition, involving audiences in attempts to carry out some of the more involved instructions from a selection of the books.

In keeping with the spirit of the exhibition - to be led by the content of the books, rather than simply display them - the title of the exhibition was determined by following Jonathon Monk’s instructional book Meeting #13, published in 2000 by Book Works, London and Yvon Lambert, Paris, which invites all to a future meeting at “A la Tour Eiffel, le 13 October 2008 a midi”.