A Book of Burning Matches: Collecting Installation Art Documents

Nicolas de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, David Price
Mulberry Tree Press, London, & ME Collectors Room, Berlin, 2015
Design by St. Pierre & Miquelon
Printed by Aldgate Press
164 pages
Edition of 300 copies
ISBN: 978-3-00-0496211-0

Installation art is not an artform that lends itself immediately to being collected due to the medium’s scale, temporality or orientation to a site. The exhibition and publication A Book of Burning Matches presents numerous international installation art projects curated by de Oliveira and Oxley over several decades in the form of documentation. Several hundred items including films, photographs, models, fragments, sounds, drawings and objects were displayed at Me-Collectors’ Room, Berlin/Thomas Olbricht Foundation, that seek to memorialise aspects of these exhibitions ranging from 1986 to the present; the book is a collaboration between the curators and artist and novelist David Edward Price and sets out to examine Installation’s impact on Contemporary art and spectatorship.