Hijacked III Australia/UK

BACKGROUND Recent scholarship on the relationships between artistic, editorial and curatorial practices, argue that alongside the curator's expanding role since the 1960s, the book has gained momentum as an exhibition space, becoming a site to be dynamically designed through its spatio-temporal organisation of information for the purpose of physical affect (Springer, 2012). This practice-led research tests how publication design may influence this potential for the book to become an exhibition space in itself. CONTRIBUTION This 340 page, hard-cover publication was produced for the HIJACKED III exhibition in PICA. Simionato's art-direction and book design, with its innovative treatment of the artworks, was an integral part of the wider curatorial process and was described by Leigh Robb (chief curator of PICA) as having influenced the exhibition directly rather than the exhibition driving the publication: "Simionato... really took the book, and in turn the exhibition, on a different course" (Robb, 2012). This practice-led research embodies a radical inversion of the traditional exhibition/publication dichotomy, and proposes a co-development and co-design of exhibition publications as integral to contemporary curatorial practice. SIGNIFICANCE Hijacked III launched at PICA (2012) in the context of the prestigious PIAF and FotoFreo, later touring around Australia and the UK. Co-published by Big City Press (Perth, Australia) and Kehrer Verlag (Heidelberg, Berlin, Germany) and supported by peer-reviewed competitive grants from Government of Western Australia, Wesfarmers and Department of Culture and the Arts and Australia Council. Simionato's design statement "What Remains is the Book," was published alongside a number of critical texts by authors including Robert Cook and Katrina Schwartz.