The second week of The Month of Books focuses on publishers and pop-up bookshops by The Temporary Bookshelf and Artic Art Book Fair / Mondo Books available at PUBLICS on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday between 1–4pm. The exhibition, currently highlighting the Stockholm based magazine OEI, will include works by Nick Thurston, looking at digital scan-archives, publicness of libraries and public publishing practices. On Wednesday evening at 5pm you are welcome to join for Results and Prospects: Seven Years of Rab-Rab Press talk where the editor of Rab-Rab, Sezgin Boynik, will present the latest two Rab-Rab publications and talk about future plans and collaborations.
Rab-Rab Press is an independent publishing platform based in Helsinki dedicated to merging experimental artistic forms with leftist politics. The focus on Wednesday will be on the sixth issue of Rab-Rab journal of political and formal inquiries in art. With this issue, the journal started a new course: more contemporary, political, and engaging. Boynik will talk about the theoretical and conceptual background of this shift and give more detailed information on this engagement. Boynik will also present another new publication of Rab-Rab Press, Peter Gidal’s The Author as Producer of Nothing. This includes Gidal’s lost essay from the late seventies, and the afterword discussing the political relevance of experimental film forms. Departing from this work, Boynik will also explain why Rab-Rab is publishing more and more books, and in which way these books, actualising the avant-garde, are also about contradictions in our contemporary times. This will be an opportunity to hear of the future plans of Rab-Rab.
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Mondo is a Tromsø based independent, artist-run initiative that focuses on art publications, fanzines, and printed matter, mainly from young and newly established artists from the circumpolar North. We distribute materials from artists such as Animals, IMA READ, MONARCH, BBOOKS, Lubok Verlag, amongst many others. Alongside book distribution, we also host events, readings, performances and spatial installations. Mondo plays an important role in both the local scene as well as on the national level, since it is the only independent art book platform and distributor in the Northern region.
Mondo is run by Tanya Busse, Marion Bouvier, Anne Lindgaard Møller and Nicolas Siepen. For The Month of Books, they selected books from their Mondo Bookstore and also from the Artic Art Book Fair, whom they are the host of. The selection is made up of a diverse group of materials from the circumpolar north, that both celebrate productions from the arctic and also show how printed matter connects with larger social movements. They’ve tried to highlight works and voices that have been left out of the canon – publishing houses, photography, literary works, etc. The north has historically been considered a periphery – and if it has been included at all – it is largely by outsiders (tourists, anthropologists, ethnographers) and is often mis-represented. They see the presentation of these books as one little part of a larger decolonial process, which aims to highlight an area and perspectives that have, in one or another, been under-represented.
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The Temporary Bookshelf is a non profit art bookshop specialized in self publishing & independent publishers – from Finland and abroad. All proceeds go directly to the author by MobilePay and PayPal. The Bookshelf is usually hosted at Kosminen art space, it also organises book related events in Helsinki and present a curated selection of their books within satelitte events.
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Selection of Material from artist Nick Thurston’s projects including The House That Heals The Soul (2017-18), a touring group exhibition about the publicness of libraries and art galleries that featured a functioning public publishing studio. A sample of publications made on-site are included here, as is a complete digital scan-archive of everything published during the show, indexed in a two-volume print-on-demand catalogue of that scan-archive.
Drag-Nets (2017) is an adjusted re-print of a little-known dust jacket for a fictional book by a fictional author, which was originally produced by a bookseller in Chicago so that suppliers in Europe could wrap copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses and send them to the US before the censorial ban on the novel was lifted in 1933. The ‘adjustment’ is an ISBN designation, so the jacket can be used today to wrap and smuggle any volume it fits.
Free Libraries (2017) is a digital composite of sandstone lettering from the facades of former public libraries in Leeds, England. Floating within a margin of black space like a giant flatbed scan, this faux-lintel is part virtual and part actual, turning a Victorian form of street signage into a protest banner supporting the future value of public libraries.
ME—WE Library (2018-) is located on PUBLICS browsable bookshelf. Participants are invited to re-print copies of anything they like form The House That Heals The Soul scan-archive and also photocopy anything they wish from the bookstore or library hosting the workshop; splicing the source material into a bespoke reader.
Nick Thurston is a writer, editor and the author of two experimental books, Reading the Remove of Literature (2006) and Of the Subcontract (2013). He writes regularly for the literary and arts press, as well as for independent and academic publications.