Medium M Media Group
2022

The Medium P Media Group Bookshop is an installation that exploits a disappearing commercial enterprise—the bookstore—as a means of indexing the wide-reaching social ties that constitute artistic life. In a moment when “print” is supposedly dying in favor of flashier forms of media, our own media agency relishes in the vitality to still be found in published books. Rejecting the authoritative posturing of most bookstores, our own Bookshop is unapologetically personal and biased, collecting together the  publications of friends, friends of friends, people we want to know better or people who’ve for whatever reason struck a chord. The entire installation is continually surveilled by a group of security light bulb cameras, with the footage being displayed on phones in the upstairs gallery space—linking the two projects while highlighting the performativity of consumerism. The Bookshop is the latest in a series of projects by Medium P that mimic the programming of actual institutions in a tongue-in-cheek manner, thereby parodying the conventions of art institutions and forming a wry update on the by-now canonical genre of institutional critique. The Bookshop has also become an impetus for a number of artists to create unique limited-edition publications. Within a purportedly capitalist structure, we make a snapshot of a scene, a library of artistic moods, a mapping of fleeting thoughts and notions.