Bookworks, which is a two-part exhibition showing almost simultaneously across two galleries, is the artist Ringo Bunoan’s ode to the form. In the second part of the series to be held at MO_Space, her meditations on this ‘ready-made instrument,’ in the same way Barthes had described language, assumes a nearly invisible form.

While the first Bookworks tackled the materiality and object-hood of books as a possible art form, the second part explores the role of books as the measure of meaning in art itself. Inside the gallery, Bunoan fills the floor with cement blocks in different shapes and sizes. Each of the blocks’ color and texture matches the surface from where they are placed, making their presence almost indistinct from the floor’s own appearance. What stands out instead from these hazy juxtapositions are the shapes of the blocks themselves—which resemble the forms of books and other printed matter: catalogues, magazines, and brochures. They are spread out on the floor like un-shelved tomes, but in their silence and their vague union with the ground, they appear more as gravestones. An air of lamentation can be drawn from this picture which is not entirely baseless: the different blocks and tablets serve as sarcophagi to several books on art which Bunoan has sealed in cement. These are actual writings in the form of catalogues, brochures, and pamphlets that accompany artists’ works and that had graced the galleries that housed them.

This disappearance, this eradication, this sealing off, is a form of statement on writings about art. It subsumes the role of texts and the printed word in terms of drawing meaning. ‘Where does meaning come from?’ is a question that can be put to the test with another: ‘Can artworks survive without text? Without discourse?’ In her present work, Bunoan tries to grasp the possibilities of supplying an answer with self-referential instruments that draw attention to their own deaths. These are actual texts—descriptions, explanations, and possible sources of meanings in the form of printed matter, sealed off from the reader’s eyes.

What past demonstrations have shown against the arbitrariness of writing, particularly history and the setting of canons, through art that took shape almost always violently—through shredding, dismantling, and burning of books, Bunoan has managed to approach subtly and silently, and in such restrained and self-effacing minimalism.  

Bunoan’s minimal and quiet sculptures of entombed books, as they eliminate written words and history, seemingly transform the gallery into an empty space, into a kind of clearing. And this dichotomy between presence and absence is a theme that keeps re-surfacing in Bunoan’s art. Her works, in a way, have become continuing meditations on what is and what is not there, on memory, and on the susceptibility of meanings that accompany them.

And it works in another way: this uniformity that the space has arrived at—this oneness between the art work and the room which it was supposed to transform, is a kind of union between imagination and actuality. This is where they all merge, where everything becomes absorbed by the other—space, object, memory, and meaning. This is where we can draw confidence from knowing that the word is nothing but an index, and an unreliable one. And this is where the word should stay silent, buried. And where one should say no more.

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