We are looking forward to sharing the event on February 23 from 17:30 at PUBLICS, bringing together the launch of Reaching Out: A Book about Agency, Care, Identity and… with PUBLICS Youth Advisory Board, Tuukka Kaila, Hikari Nishida, Mia Wennerstrand and Gerrie van Noord, with contributions extending from Index Teen Advisory Board and Praksis Teen Advisory Board, and the book presentation of Configurations of Time: Imagining Other Temporalities in the Artist Residency by Angela Serino, followed by a conversation with Taru Elfving.
The publication Reaching Out: A Book about Agency, Care, Identity and… offers insights into how young practitioners approach publishing as a field of relations. In their respective contexts, the young people who developed the content of this publication met with artists, writers, curators and publishers to consider questions of authorship, voice and visibility. The resulting interviews and conversations, reflections and visual contributions offer propositions for how art institutions might use the strategies deployed here to connect with wider communities, different voices and new publics.
This volume is part of “Future Futures: Reaching Out”, a three-year-long collaboration between PRAKSIS (Oslo), Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation (Stockholm) and PUBLICS (Helsinki). Each organisation works with a group of young people who for an entire year act as advisers and collaborators. Through a range of activities, Index Teen Advisory Board (ITAB), PRAKSIS Teen Advisory Board (PTAB) and PUBLICS Youth Advisory Board (PYAB) have reflected on how printed matter is still relevant in a digital world. Collectively they have explored how books, (maga)zines, etc. continue to act as meeting points between people and ideas across time and space.
The book includes contributions from Jo.o Doria de Souza, falk, Amelia and Adam Greenhall (ANEMONE), Sara Kaaman, Hikari Nishida, and Mia Wennerstrand, as well as interviews conducted by PUBLICS Youth with Rami Alwhithawi, Angela Eldips, Sofia Koivuneva, Pepe Sivunen, and Eme Tähtinen.
The book is edited by Gerrie van Noord, with Bilge Hasdemir, Tony Karlsson Savci, Kristian Schrøder, with Index, PRAKSIS, and PUBLICS, designed by Tuukka Kaila; and published by Rooftop Press with Index, PRAKSIS and PUBLICS.
Speakers
PUBLICS Youth Advisory Board 2025: Amran Ahmed, Viivi Auerlehto, Parinaz Estebsary, Aino Kaatra, Casper Langenskiöld, Nea Lähdekorpi, Dasha Taushan, Evi Volosnikova, Miya Zenina.
With
Gerrie van Noord is an editor/curator of publications and educator who is interested in publications as sites for articulation and (re)presentation of both artistic and curatorial practices, with a particular focus on process and expanded understandings of collaboration. She has extensive experience in working with artists, curators, writers, designers and others involved in the production of publishing projects, including catalogues, artists’ books, critical anthologies, magazines and peer-reviewed journals as well as digital formats. She teaches on the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of London.
Mia Wennerstrand (b. Finland) is currently writing her debut novel. The book is commissioned by Publics.In addition to texts, Mia produces performances, considering them both as temporary sites of rest from the ”the crisis ordinary”, following Lauren Berlant. Sun in Cancer, moon in Capricorn, ascending Virgo. You’ve been warned.
Hikari Nishida (b. 1997) is a French-Japanese visual artist based in Helsinki. She graduated from HEAR Academy of Fine Arts in Strasbourg, France in 2019. Nishida’s artistic work focuses on collective initiatives and artist books. In 2021, she founded The Temporary Bookshelf, a platform for presenting and distributing publications as a form of visual art. Nishida is the co-founder of Under the Leaf art book fair and runs ttbbooks press.
Tuukka Kaila is a visual artist operating in the expanded fields of photography, writing and publishing. His work engages with the politics of abstraction, passages between realities and various small shifts. Throughout his career Tuukka has been involved in many artist-run initiatives and spaces with the aim of ensuring access to means of production and retaining a voice in how artistic labour is structured and supported in Finland. Tuukka lives and works in Helsinki and Tallinn, where he’s the professor of photography in the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Founded in 2016 by Tuukka Kaila and Timo Vaittinen, the publishing initiative Rooftop Press focuses on artworks intended for publication form and investigating the role of publishing in contemporary art. To date the imprint’s catalogue consists of around 30 artists’ publications ranging from long-running artistic research projects and ambitious artists’ books to zines, community events and obscure roomsheet leaflets.
With extended contributions from
Index Teen Advisory Board 2025: Vilhelm Rosenstrm Domeij, Kiara Eifert, Mila Frances, Elin Karlsson, Dylan Murray, Diane Nozynska, Tiffany Olafson, riddhima rat, Moa Zhang
PRAKSIS Teen Advisory Board 2025: Hibo Nora Abbi, Sofia Orellana Gamboa, Ingrid Bjermeland Hesledalen, Bror Høgåsen-Hallesby, Helen Ibrahimian, Auguste Karsokaite, Anahita Mollazehi, Assol Sokolova, Noah Visted
The publication and the event are co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, with additional support for the event from Finnish Institute in UK and Ireland, and British Embassy Helsinki.
PUBLICS partners with Saastamoinen Foundation 2023-2028.
The programmme on February 23 at PUBLICS includes a book presentation of Configurations of Time: Imagining Other Temporalities in the Artist Residency by Angela Serino, followed by a conversation with Taru Elfving.
The book offers an alternate lens to rethink how we process art—and life—inside residency time. If you have done a residency, or are going to take part in one; if you are passionate about supporting artists’ processes in the best possible ways; or if you are fascinated by theories of time and how artists have worked with time, then this project amalgamates many threads to help you arrive at possible future ways of thinking.
Looking beyond the conventional and managerial, Angela Serino sets out in search of what is put in motion by the experience of being “in residence” that is not instantly visible or quantifiable. In a culture where the pressure to produce tangible results is paramount, Configurations of Time holds space for an environment that values process in its own right, unlearning and research.
Finding inspiration from a wide range of artists’ works and conceptualisations of time in science and cultural theory, such as Carlo Rovelli, Lisa Baraitser, and María Puig de la Bellacasa, Serino looks at how time is spent in residencies through the different and overlapping concepts of space time, care time, and soil time.
Through speculative storytelling and fostered by analytical hypotheses and first-hand experiences, this book offers an alternative reference guide. It creates a highly poetic space, providing insights into the ethics of the residency field in today’s accelerated and contested times.
Since its publication in late 2024, the book has been presented in the Netherlands and Italy, including at San Serriffe, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, the Jan van Eyck Academie, Casa degli Artisti (Milan), Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (Venice), and the MACTE Museum in Termoli, with the support of the Dutch Embassy in Rome.
Link to the publisher website
Link to author’s website
Bios
Angela Serino is an independent curator and writer based in Amsterdam. Her practice spans exhibitions, research, writing, and education, with a strong focus on residency practices. She is the author of Configurations of Time: Imagining Other Temporalities in the Art Residency (Set Margins’, 2024) and a co-founder of the Art Residency Research Collective (ARRC). Her work engages with questions of time, ecological belonging and collective learning. Since 2025, she has been a member of the Advisory Committee of the UNIDEE Residency Programs at Fondazione Pistoletto.
Taru Elfving is a Helsinki-based curator and writer focused on nurturing undisciplinary and site-sensitive enquiries at the intersections of ecological, feminist and decolonial practices. As director of CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago she currently leads a research residency programme on the island of Seili in the Baltic Sea in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute, University of Turku (FI). She has published internationally and co-edited publications such as Contemporary Artist Residencies (Valiz 2019).
HIAP supports Angela Serino Book Presentation.