27 October 7 – 10 pm: PrintRoom’s Pick from the NY Art Book Fair 2017

PrintRoom was in NY for the annual art book fair organised by Printed Matter. We celebrate this year’s harvest with fair exhibitors and a selection of the books we brought back for you. 
Presentations by:
– Tania Prill: Under the Radar: Underground Zines and  Self-Publications 1965 – 1975,
– Bik Van der Pol : WERE IT AS IF & School of Missing Studies
– Werkplaats Typografie (WT)
members:  —  Line Gry-Hørup, Luca Napoli, Malin Gewinner
– a presentation of the new finds from the Fair, introduced by PrintRoom
 Under the Radar: Underground Zines and Self-Publications 1965 – 1975, 
Tania Prill, Swiss graphic designer and co-editor of the book Under the Radar: Underground Zines and Self-Publications will introduce the audience into the world of hectographs, mimeographs, and offset printing of the mid-1960s when small, low-cost print runs with their unique aesthetic were developed: using wild mock-ups, “messianic amateurs” combined typescript aesthetics, handwriting, scribbled drawings, assemblages of collaged visuals, porn photos, snapshots, and comic strips. This book is the first to present the underground and self-published works that came out of West Germany in such depth, while also showing the international context in which they emerged: not as an anecdotal history but as an attempt to tap into the aesthetic cosmos of a Do-It-Yourself rebellion, one that also challenges us to take a new look at the current boom in “independent publishing”, the risograph aesthetic, and so on. Published by Spector Books

WERE IT AS IF
The book follows their exhibition WERE IT AS IF at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and includes different views enlisting the power, and value over time, of fragments and traces as springs of provocation. What does it mean to form a “collection of traces” of a contemporary art institute? Can staging a history through exhibition fragments be seen as an act of resistance pitting against the constant task of accumulation?
School of Missing Studies
The School of Missing Studies started in 2003 as an initiative of artists and architects who recognized “the missing” as a matter of urgency. Investigating what culture(s) laid the foundations for the loss we are experiencing from modernization and how this loss can talk back to us as a potential site of learning. Published by Sternberg Press and Sandberg Institute


Fruits of Fraud
by Werkplaats Typografie (WT) members:  —  Line Gry-Hørup, Luca Napoli, Malin Gewinner
Approaches to what? It’s time to reflect and question things. Particularly the common goods. Those certain ones, which make the personal cravings of materiality reach the abstract and inner landscape of values. What is it about these t-shirts, records, benches, fish tanks, lamps, wine books, bike rain covers, natural pigments, agendas, playing cards and therapy bowls of ours? Is it reflections of market movements, guilty pleasures, memorabilia? Werkplaats Typografie will present an inventory of items, exhausted and for sale.
Books by: 
Soberscove Press, Inventory Press, Library of the Printed Web, antoine lefebvre editions, &editions, Spector Books, Franklin Furnace, Pioneer Books, Issue Press, Diagonal Press, Sergej Vutuc, Endless Editions, Printed Matter, Lugemik, Ugly Duckling Presse, Primary Information, Ediciones Popolet, Onomatopee, Fukt Magazine, DIABP, Edition Fink, Misaki Kawai, Mark Pawson, RE/Search / Search and Destroy, Roma Publications, Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E, Knust / Extrapool, Temporary Services / Half Letter Press, Guerilla Girls,  Stefan Marx, Nieves, Innen Zines, Research and Destroy New York City, Gato Negro, A.R.T. Press, Paper Monuments, New Documents, Fillip, Girls Like Us, Gloria Glitzer, supersupersuper, among others.

14 October 2017, 2.30 – 6 pm: Remember, Resist and Remake Reading Group by Rianna Jade Parker and Hudda Kaireh

Join Rianna Jade Parker and Hudda Khaireh for an informal reading group covering seminal text ‘Rethinking Aesthetics’ by Sylvia Wynter with consideration to migration routes into Western cities and navigating social spaces as documented and undocumented citizens.  

In collaboration with Printroom, the research and discoveries that arise from this session will be used to produce printed matter (pamphlets and posters) in the political​ style of protest art for ​free ​distribution to the public​.

​Supporting this session we will be using ethnographic examples from the squatters movement in the UK and NL.
In collaboration with Showroom MAMA
Email us if you’d like to join the reading group

8 October 2017, RAINWATER AUTUMN ALE // 8 years of the ‘Buitenbrouwerij’ // NETbook

Together with beer lovers & / specialists & / gardeners & / artists & / designers we’ll celebrate the 8th anniversary of Henriette de Waal’s ‘Buitenbrouwerij’; the mobile beer-brew installation that will be installed at SNV for this day of collective re-skilling, knowledge-sharing and story telling.
We’ll also use this day to prepare the next edition of NETbooks*, a Riso-printed publication and self reliance project by PrintRoom.

All participants are invited to bring fresh rainwater and autumn leaves, which we will use as the basis for the Rainwater Autumn Ale that we’ll brew on this day. While learning all about the brewing process, we’ll share and collect experiences, stories and ideas as well as images, recipes, conversations for the publication.

Henriette Waal will take care for a selection of beers to taste. When you’re a beer brewer yourself, please let us know and bring some of your creations to share with us.

While the yeast is doing it’s work, PrintRoom and Henriette will compile an issue of NETbook out of the shared experiences, stories and knowledge.
We’ll launch our RAINWATER AUTUMN ALE NETbook when the beer is ready, date to be announced!

Henriëtte Waal is a designer who ‘fell into’ beer brewing while researching ways to purify water. By now she’s an expert, while she keeps the experimental approach: brewing with a focus on the social, ethical, and cultural function of beer. With her beers Henriëtte Waal can capture the imagination of a wider audience, which isn’t always easy in the art scene. She sees beer brewing as a means to taste our surrounding, connecting with it in new ways.
To mention some of the ingredients she’s used before: seawater, cucumber, potatoes, wild plants, snow, …

 

29.09.2017 PrintRoom @ Stedelijk Book Club, Amsterdam

PrintRoom joins the Stedelijk Book Club event! OFF Print Library invited 6 bookshops as part of the programme.
Printed Matter, Inc. (US), PrintRoom (NL), San Serriffe (NL), Section 7 Books (FR) and ORAIBI + BECKBOOKS (CH).

‘And more than anything, within the publishing world, the «bookshop », embodies such a fragile yet authentic resistance to the technological imperium. Outdated business, accumulating pleasantly human «finitude » defects (limited space, limited quantity, limited opening hours….), it incarnates a contemporary version of the former salon: a space for experimenting new values and new practices.’

PrintRoom’s table at the Stedelijk Book Club: Becoming invisible – Ian Whittlesea – The Everyday Press

 

21 – 24 September: PrintRoom @ the NY Art Book Fair 2017

The hottest and most vibrant days of independent publishing are here again: The NY Art Book Fair organised by Printed Matter. We’re there to meet the publishers we love and admire, discover new publishing projects, join the program of talks, conversations and readings and we’ll bring back a broad selection from the fair to present at PrintRoom at the end of October.

 

24 – 30 July 2017: Holiday in the Archive – PrintRoom @ Centre des livres d’artistes

Holiday in the Archive

A chance encounter with a folder on coincidence – “Toeval” in the Centre des livres d’artistes (Cdla) – inspired a foraging system that enabled our exploration of the archive. Inventing categories of words with the second letter punctuated with an O created a metaphorical peephole through which to view the the contents of the boxes.

We have extracted selected items from the condensed collection of publications, conversations and exchanges between artists in the archive and redistributed them to people we think will find the collection of interest. Sending the archive on holiday.

Karin de Jong, Eleanor Vonne Brown, Asnate Bočkis, Yin Yin Wong, Antoine Lefebvre, Kate Briggs, Arnaud Desjardin.

Holiday in the Archive is a project by PrintRoom with thanks to Didier Mathieu at Cdla.

 

14 – 16 July 2017: PrintRoom joins Miss Read, The Berlin Art Book Festival

PrintRoom joins Miss Read

We’ll bring a selection of books by artists, publishers and designers who joined our programme in the past years and we’ll return with a selection of books from the fair for our shop. We’re looking forward to seeing you there – or come and see the new books soon!

PrintRoom will be closed these days

3 July 2017: Archival Erasures and Artistic Activism

Archives and Disobedience

5 – 8 pm at PrintRoom!

(Book)presentations and discussion, with:
Tanel Rander, Tina Bastajian and Ehsan Fardjadniya, Hodan Warsame and Tirza Balk and YOU.
The discussion is moderated by Margaret Tali, one of the editors

Join us for a discussion and presentation of the book “Archives and Disobedience: Changing tactics of visual culture in Eastern Europe” (2016), an edited collection of essays by artists and theorists. The book deals with the use of visual art and images in activism.
The discussion will focus on colonial erasures in different Eastern European contexts – Armenia, Poland, Estonia – and in the Netherlands. How do past erasures affect us in the present? And how have artists and activist dealt with them in their work? Can we learn from each other’s struggles? Presentations by Tanel Rander, Tina Bastajian and Ehsan Fardjadniya, Hodan Warsame and Tirza Balk.

The discussion is followed by a dinner.

You’re invited!!

The program is held in English.

Tina Bastajian will speak about the transits between the hidden, overlooked and exposed as the recurrent themes of her work. Rather than simply problematizing erasure, she is interested in the layers of absence and presence, ways of mining, undermining and overwriting them. She will introduce a work in progress, which is based on her essay in the book about Filmadaran, Armenian National Cinematheque in Yerevan. In her presentation she discusses the process of re-imagining her textual essay to a film essay.

Ehsan Fardjadnyia will talk about and show video documentations of the intervention “Polacy! Refugees and Citizens” that he organized in 2016 in the Warsaw Uprising Museum and at the Frontext Headquarters of the EU border control. He will discuss the construction and erasure of particular narrative in the Warsaw Uprising Museum, what the collective intervention aimed to achieve, how it was perceived and reflect on some of its continuing aftermaths.

Tanel Rander will present his artistic research on East Europe, subjectivity and decolonial option, with a focus on the ideology of transformation from post-socialist era to the present day. This ideology comprises of the concept of otherness and the mechanisms that apply it on history, memory, knowledge and subjectivity. “The guillotine effect” is an idea that Rander uses to describe the mechanisms of erasure in the production of contemporaneity in the post-socialist public space and public art – for example, the fall of socialist art and the rehabilitation of dissident avant-garde in Eastern Europe.

Hodan Warsawa and Tirza Balk will discuss their intervention “Decolonizing the museum” realized at the Tropenmuseum last year:

“Decolonize The Museum is an effort to confront the colonial ideas and practices present in ethnographic museums up until this day. We have worked throughout 2015 to stage a joint intervention in the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures. This intervention critiques the language, imagery and accessibility of its current exhibitions. Our intent is firstly to expose the violence perpetuated by ethnographic museums by critiquing its Eurocentrism, white supremacy, its assumed neutrality and its excuses of “only having so much time/space”. We base this critique on the museum experience of ourselves and our friends whose heritage is studied and analysed, but who, ourselves, are seldom the target group of ethnographic museums. Simultaneously, we push a conversation about how – if at all – the ethnographic museum can contribute to reinstating the agency and histories of colonized peoples, life and territories. Last but not least, Decolonize The Museum is about educating and challenging the organization so that neo-liberal conceptions of ‘diversity’ do not become the limit of change for these institutions.”

27 May 2017, 5 -7 pm: Archive Poetry

Book presentations and a peek into the archives of the artists

Ruth van Beek: The Cast
Batia Suter: Parallel Encyclopedia #2

Ruth van Beek and Batia Suter both generate a personal image library and, by using different strategies, edit and re-create its content into parallel living realities.

The Cast
The Cast draws from the artist’s growing archive of found photographic source material taken from vintage books and magazines. Activated through contextual and physical refiguration, her work transforms these clippings from silent paper objects to vivid biomorphic actors.

Parallel Encyclopedia #2
Batia Suter’s work intuitively situates found images in new contexts to provoke surprising reactions and significative possibilities. This volume follows on from the first ‘Parallel Encyclopedia’, published in 2007. Underlying themes of Suter’s practice are the “iconification” and “immunogenicity” of old images, and the circumstances by which they become charged with new associative values. With an attuned sensitivity to hidden harmonies and expressive accidents, Suter thus generates hypnagogic spaces where pictures can communicate by their own logic, in a force field of imaginative metamorphosis.

 

 

24 May 2017: Book Lunch # 3

Book Lunch # 3
With El Corruptor from Colombia and Ruja Press from Rotterdam/London
Wednesday 24 May, from 12.00 to 13.15

Bring your own lunch, we povide you with tea and coffee. Places are limited, so please send us an email if you would like to join.

El Corruptor is a Colombian project, based in Bogota, dedicated to the production and promotion of queer and gay artistic expressions. El Corruptor curates gay art exhibitions and they produce limited edition publications and screen print works.

The Rotterdam based editorial RUJA Press was founded in London by artist/architect Ruohong Wu and artistJose Ja Ja Ja. RUJA PRESS aims to construct open dialogues with alternative languages of art, focussing on experimental digital drawing, abstract comics, visual arts and exhibitions.