Welcome to our Shop!

We run a non-profit bookstore & shop on our premises in Vallila, Helsinki.

Our bookstore includes titles co-produced and/or co-published by PUBLICS and a small selection of titles by local and international publishers. We also house a small number of publications from various projects that have been hosted and launched at PUBLICS as part of our bookstore. Visit us to see and browse all items that we have at the moment!

Books & records co-produced and/or co-published by PUBLICS

Curious
Edited by Paul O’Neill & Gerrie van Noord, co-published by Open Editions, PUBLICS and Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2024, 25 eur

Ever wished you’d had an opportunity to gain inside information from an art world luminary in your field? Well, here’s your chance. Studying this book feels like doing primary research. All the questions you might wish to ask get better-than-hoped-for replies. The sense of intimacy generated by this form of inquisitive writing is palpable throughout. Wonderful to be reminded that the printed page still has the power to transport, enlighten, entertain and make mischief – especially in the realm of intellectual life.’ Yes, there is still plenty of value in the printed page, even when what has been revisited has been published before.

Not Going It Alone
Edited by Paul O’Neill with Elizabeth Larison and Gerrie van Noord, published by apexart, 2024, 20 eur

In recent years, collective approaches to curatorial practice have become prominent, and not for the first time. While the myth of the stand-alone curator has been largely dismantled in favor of recognising the myriad other actors and agencies—from artists to installers, from gallery attendants to directors—and others who make their work possible, contemporary curatorial practices encompass far more than bringing simply more collaborators together.
Through a collection of essays and experimental texts, Not Going It Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating offers readers a layered and contextual understanding of this phenomenon, its debates, and possibilities across a range of temporalities, positions, and geographical perspectives.

The Voice That Remains
Edited by PUBLICS, co-published by Lugemik & PUBLICS, 2023, 15 eur

The Voice that Remains is a kind of retrospective. Looking back at the material, digital and archival traces left behind within the physical and situated space of PUBLICS, and in the bodies, voices and memories of those who have worked with PUBLICS in the past years. Each photo, mark and word collected in these pages reflects a collective happening and the labor undertaken to bring a work of art or a piece of research into PUBLICS to be shared with others.The Voice that Remains is a snapshot of PUBLICS’ present, where we, who have only recently come to be part of its making, have gathered some of the traces of its programme, keepsakes and leftovers of the last half decade or so. What’s left behind as reminders, remainders or rememberings of what once was, is what we have had to work with – to learn how to be PUBLICS, to decide on how to move next, to insert ourselves into the shapeshifting of a small cultural organization.

Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life
Edited by Gerrie Van Noord, Mick Wilson & Paul O’Neill, co-published by HDK-Valand, PUBLICS & The Showroom, 2023, 10 eur

This book critically profiles, contextualizes, and theoretically elaborates the unique practice of the UK-based German artist Kathrin Böhm. Combining visual and textual material, it offers an overview of Böhm’s exceptional modus operandi that is rooted in a highly original artistic synthesis of a range of practices. Over the last three decades, Böhm has expanded the terms of socially engaged ways of working to an unprecedented scale and breadth by producing complex organizational, spatial, visual, and economic forms. Offering a significant addition to debates on contemporary art and architecture, social action, and public culture, Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life brings together critical reflections by internationally acclaimed contributors.

Letters and Banners
By Dave McKenzie & Bhavisha Panchia, co-published by PUBLICS & Rooftop Press, 2023, 10 eur

Dave McKenzie’s artist book is based on a set of banners and letters completed in 2021. The work combines the visual appearance of public political activism with the intimate language characteristic of private correspondence. The book starts the series of Coupling Words publications, which brings together people in the field of art who have not known each other before. Letters and Banners is Jamaican-born McKenzie’s first artist book, published by Rooftop Press in collaboration with PUBLICS and PALO. The book explores multiple forms of personal and public address, employing words as personal and political forms that continuously shift emphasis between direct and ambiguous meanings.

Stupor LP
Co-produced by Performa, PUBLICS & Other Power, 2023, 25 eur

A musical alchemist, KMRU places his listeners’ ear into a sonic-spatial matrix in which he transmutes his trans-local experience of place into elevated sonic dimensions that demand a kind of listening that you need to surrender to. If listening positions you inside an event – into a relational, social and cultural act that also positions us in the world – then listening to this album projects you inside an indeterminate unfolding, thick with tensions of movement and transitions. The artist’s pursuit of sounding out and responding to the world is undertaken through a creative mode of listening, recording and production, in which his ‘voice’ reverberates in his compositional arrangements.

How do we know? Institutional listening and young agency in the arts
Co-created by the Teen Advisory Boards of Index (Stockholm) and PRAKSIS (Oslo) together with PUBLICS Youth (Helsinki) and organisers at Index, PRAKSIS and PUBLICS, 2022, 10 eur

Institutional listening and young agency in the arts was co-created by 16-21 year olds participating in the Teen Advisory Boards of Index (Stockholm) and PRAKSIS (Oslo) together with PUBLICS Youth (Helsinki) and organizers at Index, PRAKSIS and PUBLICS, as well as others they met along the way. The young boards at these organisations convene regularly and work to improve artistic and institutional practice from the inside. This book represents two years of activity and features contributions from both the 2020-21 and 2021-22 Teen Advisory Board membership. The first part of the book reflects 2021-22 activities, including TAB members meeting in person together with Publics Youth in Helsinki where they participated in the conference, Today is Our Tomorrow at PUBLICS. Supporting this are lightly modified reproductions of TAB zines generated in 2020-21: PRAKSIS’s publication In Character: The Game Manual, and Index’s magazine In Character: Index Teen Advisory Board. Together, the three sections offer three distinct perspectives on TAB members’ explorations and discussions.

Maryam Jafri: Independence days
Edited by Maryam Jafri & Nina Tabassomi, text by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Paul O’Neill, Nina Tabassomi, co-published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig & PUBLICS, 2021, 30 eur

Independence Day 1934-1975 features over 60 archival photos culled from more than 30 archives of the first Independence Day ceremonies of various Asian, Middle Eastern, and African nations. A key feature of the work is that the photos are sourced primarily from public archives in the Asian and Africa countries themselves. The first Independence Day, leading up to and including the formal ceremony, unfolds as a series of highly codified rituals and elaborate speech acts enacted across public and elite spaces. The swearing in of a new leadership, the signing of relevant documents, the VIP parade, the stadium salute, the first address to the new nation, is all supervised and orchestrated by the departing colonial power. The photographic material is strikingly similar despite disparate geographical and temporal origins as it reveals a political model exported from Europe and in the process of being cloned throughout the world.