Chamaeleons
and Butterflies

All of the works on display are ‘book objects’ —hybrids of unique artworks and mass-produced artefacts that oscillate between sculpture and publication. Michalis Pichler uses antiquarian books as his main material and subjects them to surgical interventions that highlight their physical fragility and their cultural resilience. Through precise cuts, excisions, and rearrangements, these once familiar volumes become altered entities, revealing the hidden structures of their bindings, margins, and paratexts. These objects encourage visitors to reconsider where a book begins and ends, and how much can be removed or transformed before it becomes something else.

This exhibition focuses on two major series: ‘Butterflies’ and ‘Chameleons’. In ‘Butterflies’, Pichler opens, folds, and fans out pages so that the fragments spread across the spine like wings, capturing a moment of arrested flight between legibility and pure form. In ‘Chameleons’, the animals brought to life by their absence. They have been cut out to reveal the pages behind them, blending their altered forms seamlessly into their textual environment, much like the reptile they evoke. Together, these works propose a taxonomy of transformed books, with each species being defined by a particular mode of intervention and metamorphosis.

Michalis Pichler is an artist and editor who works on the imaginary border between visual art and literature. He co-founded and organizes Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Fair and the Conceptual Poetics Day. His latest publications include Publishing Manifestos (MIT Press and Miss Read 2022), Coup de Dés (COLLECTION) (The Center for Book Arts and Spector Books, 2024), Pathosformeln #1&2 (COLLAGE, 2025), and (co-edited with Pascale Obolo and Parfait Tabapsi) Reading Ecologies: Transforming Publishing in Africa (Miss Read 2025).

Image Credits © Claudia Peppel and Michalis Pichler

Michalis Pichler in conversation with Verónica Stedile Luna, Monika Jarecka and Christl Mudrak.

Rachel Robinson
and Verónica Stedile Luna

An ICI Berlin event in cooperation with University of Galway

• No registration required.
• To attend the symposium (registration required), please visit the dedicated event page.

The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin.
If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.

Image credit © Michalis Pichler, Chamaeleon #288