We’re thrilled to present this year’s edition in collaboration with Drifts Festival, which will
allow for new kinds of exploration and connection throughout the artist publishing community, and a more diverse and international fair experience. The entrance to the festival and fair is free. The third edition of Under the Leaf will host more than 60 local & international publishers.
DATE & VENUE
Taidekoulu Maa (Suomenlinna, B 20 F, 00190 Helsinki)
Saturday 7th - Sunday 8th September 2024
12-18.00 both days
Free entrance
PROGRAMME
We are honoured to count as our Special Guests:
Leomi Sadler ✩ Nygel Panasco ★ Iona Roisin ✪ MMS Collective ✧ Not Just a Collective ✯ Limestone Books ✮ Rab-Rab Press ✦
The book fair is the occasion for a series of book launches:
Not Going It Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating with Paul O'Neill
Leaning In, Hearing Out: Conversations on Photographic Art, Association of Photographic Artists & Utu Press
And a surprise participation of:
Koekeittiö: Sonja Donner & Koira1
SATURDAY 7.9.
13.30 Natural Enemies of Books – A Conversation
MMS Collective Panel discussion (MMS Collective, Arja Karhumaa)
14.00 Mapping Self Publishing Practices
Not Just A Collective Talk (Femke Kersten, Lu Lin, Doğa Gönüllü, Heike Renée de Wit)
(30 min BREAK)
15.00 Here’s where I fold the days into themselves: a poetry reading
Iona Roisin Performance
15.30 Mr Birthday Cake; I tricked myself into writing a comic.
Leomi Sadler Talk, performance
16.00 Not Going It Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating
Paul O’Neill Book Launch
SUNDAY 8.9
13.30 Mist
Nygel Panasco Performative reading
14.00 Bookshop as a community-centric practice
Limestone Books Talk
(30 min BREAK)
15.00 Rab-Rab Press in Retrospect
Sezgin Boynik Talk
In joint programme with Drifts Festival
15.30 Leaning In, Hearing Out: Conversations on Photographic Art
Association of Photographic Artists & Utu Press Book Launch
More information:
(Sat) 13.30 Natural Enemies of Books – A Conversation
MMS Collective Panel discussion (MMS Collective, Arja Karhumaa)
A conversation between Arja Karhumaa and MMS collective about the book Natural Enemies of Books – A Messy History of Women in Printing and Typography, an anthology edited by MMS on histories of typographic labour, unionising and feminist collectives.
The book was published in 2020 by Occasional Papers and in September 2024 Multipöly (Arja Karhumaa and Maarit Bau Mustonen) will publish the Finnish translation of the book.
About MMS
MMS is a Stockholm-based group of graphic designers (Maryam Fanni, Matilda Flodmark, Sara Kaaman) collaborating since 2012 on investigations and writings on visual culture, graphic design and historiography from feminist perspectives.
About Arja Karhumaa
Arja Karhumaa is a graphic designer and educator, and Associate Professor in Visual Communication Design at Aalto University. They are co-founder of the experimental publishing collective Multipöly.
14.00 Mapping Self Publishing Practices
Not Just A Collective Talk (Femke Kersten, Lu Lin, Doğa Gönüllü, Heike Renée de Wit)
What do you need to consider when you want to self-publish in the Netherlands? This is the main question our Survival Manual for Self-Publishing in the Netherlands navigates by presenting a map, and interviews with DIABP (Dutch Independent Art Book Publishers), Limestone Books and Zinecamp. During this talk we will present the beginnings and structure behind the artist collective Not Just a Collective, our unconventional bookfair-without-tables Not Just a Fair and the outcomes and future of the latest edition of the fair focussed on feminist (self)publishing practices.
About Not Just a Collective
Not Just a Collective is a collaboration among international artists, researchers and makers from Italy, China, Argentina, South Korea, Türkiye and The Netherlands who live(d)/work(ed)/stud(ied) in Arnhem (NL). Our team members are Lu Lin, Alessandra Varisco, Santiago Candelo, Jiahui Feng, Heike Renée de Wit, Femke Kersten, Han Gyeol Kim, Doğa Gönüllü and Euna Lee. Each of us work as independent practitioners, and by joining together as a collective in the field of self-publishing we aim to create an inclusive platform for cultural activities and cross-disciplinary interactions to contribute to the cultural diversity in Arnhem, and beyond.
15.00 Here’s where I fold the days into themselves: a poetry reading
Iona Roisin Performance
About Iona Roisin
Iona Roisin is a British artist and poet based in Helsinki. Working across moving image and text, their practice is interested in ways of making and the insufficiency of language. However, their poetry is more intuitive and Iona often writes about dailiness, love and memory. They have published around a little and are currently trying to make a pamphlet.
Iona is a co-founder of Trans Library Helsinki and is a member of the Trans publishing collective Almanac Press.
15.30 Mr Birthday Cake; I tricked myself into writing a comic.
Leomi Sadler Talk, performance
I will talk about a kind of dumb but interesting way I managed to collage together a comic book when I didn't have any decent ideas. And then I will try using this technique to make a new comic, live, before your eyes! Pray for me.
About Leomi Sadler
Leomi is a member of the Famicon artist group alongside Stef Sadler, GHXYK2 and Kitty Clark, with uncle Jon Chandler. A cult figure in the alternative comics scene for over a decade, with her brother Stef, she runs the critically acclaimed publisher Famicon Express and is co-editor of the Mould Map anthology series alongside Hugh Frost of Landfill Editions.
With a core practice of drawing, comics and collaboration, her artistic tendrils continue to extend into the worlds of fashion and contemporary art. She has exhibited her works internationally, most recently appearing in La BD à tous les étages at the Centre Pompidou.
16.00 Not Going It Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating
Paul O’Neill Book Launch
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 favour 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.
About Paul O’Neill
Paul O’Neill is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS, a curatorial agency with a dedicated library, event space and reading room in Helsinki. Previously he was Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, international tutor on the de Appel Curatorial Programme, Amsterdam. He is notably the author of The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (2016), and the co-editor of Curating Subjects (2007), Curating and the Educational Turn (2010), Curating Research (2015), The Curatorial Conundrum (2016); How Institutions Think (2017); and Curating After the Global (2019). Forthcoming books include Not Going it Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating (2024); Curious (2024), a in nd a collective of his curatorial essays called CURED.
(sun) 13.30 Mist
Nygel Panasco Performative reading
The regulators are after this mother and her child. They are after this angel and her friends, they are after that peaceful woman in the woods. They are after the weak and the frightened. They are after everyone that defies the laws of life and death.
Nygel Panasco will present her title “Down Memory Lane” (published by Colorama Print) as a live performance between a reading, singing and screening installation.
About Mireille Nyangono Ebene
Mireille Nyangono Ebene (*1995) professionally known as Nygel Panasco is an illustrator, comic artist, musician and performer. After studying illustration in Strasbourg she started working on small projects as much in music as in illustration. Although navigating between several genres, her graphic work currently gathers around a post-apocalyptic, religion-influenced science-fiction universe. She has done several contributions for various magazines and publications and in 2022 her first graphic novel Down Memory Lane was published by Colorama Print.
14.00 Bookshop as a community-centric practice
Limestone Books Talk
A presentation of Limestone Books, based in Maastricht, The Netherlands, by Jhen Chen, co-founder of Stichting Limestone Books.
About Limestone Books
Limestone Books sells art books, with a particular focus on non-Western perspectives and underrepresented voices. They envision themselves as a bookshop, but not in the traditional profit-driven sense. Instead, they view the economic perspective as a focal point where they can foster radical experimentation within the art publishing sphere.
Limestone Books collaborates with international artists, designers, cultural workers, and local communities. They organize events that span from weekly reading groups and artist talks to longer projects such as Artist Takeovers of the Bookshop. They view it as an experimental space where anything can unfold. Through daily engagement with people and communities, the space serves as a bridge between art/design and the public.
About Chen Jhen
Chen Jhen, born in 1987, is a graphic designer based in both Taiwan and the Netherlands. She earned her master’s degree from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2016. As a co-founder of Stichting Limestone Books, she organizes talks, workshops, and exhibitions focused on art publishing, design, and writing.
15.00 Rab-Rab Press in Retrospect
Sezgin Boynik Talk
In joint programme with Drifts Festival
In his talk, Sezgin Boynik will talk about the first ten years of activities of Rab-Rab Press, focusing on the theoretical and conceptual traits of its diverse publishing practice. He will discuss how Rab-Rab chooses its subjects varying from structural filmmaking to free jazz, and from zaum to revolutionary subjectivity. He will discuss this practice as related to the ethics of independent publishing outside of institutional reasoning.
About Sezgin Boynik
Sezgin Boynik is a writer, editor and publisher based in Helsinki. He founded Rab-Rab Press, an independent publishing platform in Helsinki that combines experimental art and leftist politics with scholarly rigour and a punk attitude. He also co-founded Pykë-Presje in Prizren, Kosovo, an independent space using archives to oppose the nation-state narratives. Boynik is also involved in the editorial work of OEI, a Stockholm based magazine dedicated to expanded poetry. Among Boynik's recent publications are critical editions of Karel Teige's writings on the art market, the Russian Formalists' studies of Lenin's language, the politics of conceptual art, the historical materialist study of visual poetry in Yugoslavia, and the objective form of contemporary art, among others. Boynik also exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, The Showroom in London, the 14th edition of Manifesta Biennale in Prishtina, the 3rd edition of Autostrada Biennial in Prizren, Kalasataman Seripaja Gallery in Helsinki, Agit in Berlin, and SALT in Istanbul (forthcoming).
15.30 Leaning In, Hearing Out: Conversations on Photographic Art
Association of Photographic Artists & Utu Press Book Launch
Leaning In, Hearing Out gathers together a plethora of perspectives from 14 practitioners – artists, curators, mediators – in order to better understand the past, present and future of the Finnish photographic art field. Part of the Association of Photographic Artists' collaborative project with seven arts organisations in Finland, this book addresses the changes, challenges and resources in the field through a series of six interviews made between 2023 and 2024.
As part of the book’s soft launch at Under the Leaf, the Association of Photographic Artists and Utu Press will present insights into the making of the book, as well as their hopes for its impact in future field-related and broader visual culture discourses.
About Association of Photographic Artists
The Association of Photographic Artists promotes the status and appreciation of Finnish photographic art and artists. The Association manages the Photographic Gallery Hippolyte and Hippolyte Korjaamo in Helsinki.
About UTU Press
Utu Press is a Helsinki-based, artist-run publishing platform specializing in photographic art and small publications. It was established by Toivo Heinimäki in 2020. Over its four years of operation, Utu Press has published twenty books and zines. Its catalogue primarily features photographic art, experimental documentary narratives, and text publications related to photographic art.
PUBLISHERS
51 Personae
A Shade Colder
among the layers
Art School Maa students
Bokeh Editions
Bored Wolves
Catalog
Cherry Pit Team
Chiara Alissa Estivariz López y Genietta Varsi
Chih-Tung Lin & Valentina Černiauskaitė
Cloudship Press
cover crop
Ei Mainoksia, Kiitos!
Emma Larkovuo
Essi Pellikka
Eve Hamari
Fair Enough Book Fair
Fantasy Football Magazine
Femicomix
FEW Magazine
Have a Good Dog Press
Henrik Duncker
Humahdus
Hippolyte Bookshop
Jamie Smyth
Jessie Churchill
Katya Lesiv & Tanja Koljonen
Khaos Publishing
KiitosKone
Kivelä, Lamminmäki, Nevanperä
Knock! Knock! Books
L’Amazone
Lesbianas Concentradas
Maja Björk
Multipöly
NO NIIN
Odedbooks
OT
Other Editions
Outi Forsten & Ida Stenros
Paura
Pessima
Pläsnt Dschörnie
Pp.
PUBLICS
Rooftop Press
Sound Chronicle
Teatterin Uusi Alkukirjasto
Three Fifty
Trojan Horse
Tuuli Kudjoi
Tutkijaliitto
Tymon Teo Borzecki
UniArts Printmaking
Utu Press
ViCCA
vinayak
Visual Communication Design students (MA) of Aalto
Yujie Zhou
The event is made possible by the support of the Kone Foundation and Helsinki City.