In The Wake of Blind Navigation. Boekie Woekie - Books by Artists Exhibition Opening

Please join us on Tuesday, September 30 from 6 pm- 8pm to celebrate the opening of our Fall exhibition: In The Wake of Blind Navigation. Boekie Woekie –  Books by Artists, curated by Maike Aden.

About the exhibition

Boekie Woekie is an artists’-run bookshop and gallery in Amsterdam that was founded in 1986 by a group of six artist. Soon Henriëtte van Egten (Dutch), Rúna Thorkelsdóttir (Icelandic) and Jan Voss (German) remained from this group and shaped this enterprise for artists’ publications that conventional bookshops find difficult to promote and sell. Alongside their own artistic careers, the three dedicate their work to this collective sculpture in progress as they call it. At its heart is what art is all about: a free, poetic and anarchic spirit and a sense of a keen, sensitive humour. For almost 40 years now, these attitudes in conjunction with a wealth of experience and knowledge have nourished the risky and fascinating undertaking with its generous and welcoming atmosphere of exchange between people of all backgrounds, artists, experts or passers-by. To make that possible, everything is managed in self-responsibility, from the financial side and the bureaucratic administration, to the website and the sales in the shop, online, at fairs, and even in temporary branches abroad.

The exhibition focuses on the Boekie Woekie’s activities and the many threads it weaves around the world since its beginning. Without losing sight of its unclassifiable nature, it aims to illustrate the challenges and potentials of its two main principles: firstly, its uncompromising independence which is based on complete self-financing, and secondly, its commitment to self-published and small press titles by artists, regardless of their fame. These factors make the bookshop gallery unique, probably worldwide. They open up breathing holes within the late capitalist art world for life to return to art and vice versa, as Jan Voss, one of three Boekie Woekiers puts it.

In The Wake of Blind Navigation. Boekie Woekie – Books by Artists includes works by all six founding artists: Henriëtte van Egten, Pétur Magnússon, Rúna Thorkelsdóttir, Kees Visser, Jan Voss, and Saskia de Vriendt, as well as photographs by Philippe McIntyre.

The exhibition and its accompanying catalog have received support through grants from the The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the New York City Council. Additional support was provided by grants from the Netherland-America Foundation; Museum House of the Book, The Hague; the KB, National Library of the Netherlands; and the Mondriaan Fonds. We are deeply grateful to Dr. Robert Ruben, Robbin Ami Silverberg, and Deirdre Lawrence for their individual contributions.

The exhibition catalog has been co-published by Roma Publications and Center for Book Arts.