Please join us for the 4th and final week of The Month of Books program. On Friday 22nd, together with FCINY we are hosting commissioned contributions by DeForrest Brown, Jr. & James Hoff, and Asiya Wadud. In addition, the event includes a discussion with the webzine Zelda on their current issue focused on the notion of fantasy. As the society is slowly opening up after the Covid pandemic, the event brings forth topics of collaboration, togetherness, connections, and friendship.
DeForrest Brown, Jr. and James Hoff talk on the phone every few weeks and these conversations last for hours. They decided to take this opportunity to take a walk and just continue their normal conversation. Instead of the controlled acoustics of zoom and podcast-type conversations, the outside world has a strong presence in the conversation as the speakers traverse across the city. They talk about all the regular things, such as politics, family life, music and books, including DeForrest’s upcoming book Assembling a Black Counter Culture, a general history of techno and adjacent electronic music with a focus on Black experiences in industrialized labor systems. DeForrest and James each recorded the walk with their phones. Hoff combined the recordings with hard pans left and right, creating a stereo mix with occasional phasing and an intriguing ambience.
→ Listen in and take the conversation on a walk
New York based artist and poet Asiya Wadud’s recent work has included research on the work of the artist Howard Smith (1928-2021). Smith, born in Philadelphia, first visited Finland in the 1960’s and later settled into Fiskars village outside Helsinki. Smith worked in a wide variety of media, including public sculptures, drawing, painting, silkscreen, and textile and paper collage. As her contribution, Wadud has written a poem that takes its form as a dialogue between the poet and Smith’s piece Oracle / Hero (1989). The two-tone poem can be listened to on site at PUBLICS, and also performed collectively by the visitors.
As part of the event, the webzine Zelda is hosting a discussion in the frame of their 2021 yearly theme of ‘fantasy’, as well as their own feminist online publishing practice, which aims to create space for voices that remain unheard in mainstream media. The participants in the discussion are Eveliina Lempiäinen and Santtu Räisänen from Zelda with contributors from the current issue Sophia Mitiku and Autuas Ukkonen.
On Saturday the program starts with a lecture by Pierre Leguillon who talks about his latest publications including The Museum of Mistakes (2021), which is is the first book to present a wide selection of works from the Musée des Erreurs, or Museum of Mistakes. Founded in Brussels in 2013 by Leguillon, the Musée des Erreurs is a traveling exhibition that encamps in the halls of brick-and-mortar museums—like a traveling circus that comes to town—and then moves on. Also part of his lecture and available at PUBLICS, is Ads. (2019), a collection of advertisements that Leguillon has been collecting from magazines for the past twenty years. Ads. reproduces 70 advertisement pages in which artists posed, from Marina Abramovic to Aaron Young. During this event, a film Dubuffet Typographer by Leguillon is screened at PUBLICS. The film focuses on a Dubuffet Typographer book, published in 2014, a tribute to the French artist Jean Dubuffet and to the typographic strategies with which Dubuffet achieves, on a visual level, his plan to destroy language through books and lithographs.
Saturday’s program continues with a conversation between Helsinki based collectives. Sepideh Rahaa and Rosamaría Bolom from the Third Space Collective, and Jonna Karanka and Sakari Tervo from Sorbus will reflect upon their relative curatorial models and forms. This event marks the Helsinki launch of Death to the Curator, a book looking at artist-run culture in the Nordic region. Initiated by Kunsthall Oslo in the Spring 2021, this project included an online conference that brought together 15 artist-run initiatives to celebrate and re-evaluate artist-led practices that promote, explore or extend some form of collectivity. The publication includes contributions from all of the collaborators and some additional texts.
PUBLICS bookshops, including The Temporary Bookshelf and a selection by Mondo Books are available throughout these events.
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The Finnish Cultural Institute in New York (FCINY) works across the fields of contemporary art, design and architecture, creating dialogue between Finnish and American professionals and audiences. In the fall of 2021, they are joining forces with art organizations in Helsinki and New York to organize gatherings as part of a program titled Exercises in Togetherness. The program addresses the situation most of us find ourselves in at this moment in time where gatherings with others have become faded nostalgic memories, and our skills in socializing and being with each other may need some polishing off. The program offers time and space for gentle exercises in relearning how to be together.
DEFORREST BROWN, JR. is an Alabama-born, Ex-American rhythmanalyst, writer and representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. He produces digital audio and extended media as Speaker Music. His work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music. He has lectured at Spotify for Artists: Co.Lab, Brown University, Yale University, and has written for Artforum, NPR, Mixmag, and Afropunk. He is currently teaching a studio course titled (alt) reality at Parsons School of Design | The New School with Jazsalyn Nachelle of black beyond. He was also the inaugural Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow at Issue Project Room, and a resident at the Rauschenberg Residency. On Juneteenth of 2020, he released the album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu, and Primary Information will publish his first book Assembling a Black Counter-Culture in 2021.
JAMES HOFF is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, N.Y. His work encompasses a variety of media, including painting, sound, and performance, as well as a publishing practice with the organization Primary Information, which he co-founded and edits. In recent years, his work has focused on language and ambient media at the intersection of developing technologies, military/industrial technologies, and networked communication in relationship to social/political space. He has exhibited or performed at Artists Space, Bergen Kunsthall, Bielefelder Kunstverein, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), Hessel Museum of Art, ICA London, The Kitchen, Kunsthall Oslo, LAMPO (The Graham Foundation and Rebuild Foundation), La Monnaie/De Munt, MassMOCA, MoMA/PS1, Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), and the Onassis Cultural Center, among others.
ASIYA WADUD is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, day pulls down the sky/ a filament in gold leaf (written with Okwui Okpokwasili), Syncope and No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. Her recent writing appears in e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine, Poem-a-Day, Chicago Review, Social Text, FENCE, and elsewhere. Asiya’s work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (River to River: Four Voices 2020; Governors Island Arts Center residency 2019-2020; Process Space 2017), Danspace Project, Brooklyn Poets, Dickinson House, Mount Tremper Arts, and the New York Public Library, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School, Columbia University, and Pacific Northwest College of Art.
ZELDA is a webzine that publishes writing, images and art across genres from a personal and/or theoretical perspective. Zelda’s practice is based on intersectional feminism and care for the planet and each other. Their aim is to give a voice and space to ideas that may not be expressed in the mainstream media. Zelda is published on a thematic basis, and the coverage of the theme runs throughout the year. The theme for 2021 is fantasy.
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PIERRE LEQUILLON (1969, lives and works in Paris) is an artist, curator, photographer, critic and writer who has become known for transforming the slide-lecture format into an enlightening, poetic, and witty form of performance art. For the past fifteen years, Pierre Leguillon has re-worked major works from the 20th century, which he considers to have been paralyzed by history. As a protean artist, he works essentially on the production and reproduction of images, of which he has an large collection, now gathered in its Museum of Mistakes, based in Brussels.
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ROSAMARIA BOLOM (Mexico-Finland) is a psychologist, multidisciplinary artist and cultural promoter living in Helsinki since 2009. She is mainly focused on cultural productions and pedagogical art-workshops aimed to promote multiculturalism, art, human rights and especially children´s rights. Sculpture, painting, engraving, poetry & performance are the medium for Rosamaría’s expression. As artist Rosamaría is convinced that the universal language comes from the soul and it is the best weapon to combat misunderstanding, prejudices, racism, ignorance, fear and other contemporary ills.
SEPIDEH RAHAA (1981, Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and educator based in Helsinki. Through her practice, she actively investigates/questions prevailing power structures, social norms and conventions while focusing on womanhood, storytelling and everyday resistances. Currently she is pursuing her doctoral studies in Contemporary Art at Aalto University. Her research interests are matter of representation, collaboration as practice, decolonisation, feminist politics and intersectionality, global social justice, silenced histories and critical race studies in contemporary art. Since 2015 Rahaa has been an active collective member at Third Space and one of its current founder.
JONNA KARANKA is a multidisciplinary artist working with textile, sound and sculpture. She was part of the artist-run space and collective Sorbus in Helsinki. She makes electro-acoustic music as Kuupuu and plays in such bands as Olimpia Splendid and Hertta Lussu Ässä. At the moment she’s part of an artist group that will be opening a new art space K17 in January 2022. The historical greenhouse building is situated in the old mental hospital area in Nikkilä, Sipoo.
SAKARI TERVO is a university teacher at Aalto ARTS and before that, he was the lecturer of exhibition studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts. Tervo has done independent curatorial work with a series of online publications and has been an active member of the artist-run spaces Sorbus in Helsinki and Titanik in Turku. “For me, art is a social weave where other possible worlds exist.”