From 14 November this year to 4 January next year Klaipėda will host the Book Art Festival, organised by the Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre (KCCC), with the Immanuel Kant Public Library of Klaipėda City Municipality (KCMPL) as partner. During the festival the KCCC Exhibition Hall will host an international book art exhibition focusing this year on illustration, while the Kalnupė branch of the KCMPL will show an exhibition by students of the Klaipėda Faculty of the Vilnius Academy of Arts. As every year, artists will run creative workshops for all age groups, and there will be book launches, guided tours, educational sessions and a book art forum. The residency programme, introduced as a novelty last year, has been expanded this year. Below is more about all of this.
KLAIPĖDA–MALMÖ: AN EXCHANGE OF ARTISTS
This year the exchange of artists with the Swedish city of Malmö and the partner organisation KKV Grafik continued. Selected artists from Klaipėda city and district had the chance to take up a residency in Malmö, where they created illustrations for a given poetry text – the two will later be published together in a joint publication – while the Swedish artists were able to come to us, to Klaipėda.
This time the programme involved the illustrators and graphic designers Ugnė Lidžiūtė and Agnė Matulionytė, while the artists Pamela Nilsdotter and Brita Nordhorm came to Klaipėda from Sweden. The poetry texts were written by Banga Elena Kniukštaitė, Petra Mölstad, Daniel Mårs, Bengt Adlers, Nijolė Kliukaitė and Gintaras Grajauskas.
WHY BOOK ART MATTERS
Book art has become something of a romance. Accustomed as we are today to automating our work, making it easier and simpler so as to get the most productive result in the shortest possible time, we can barely recall the days when monks, sparing no time, painstakingly traced letters in manuscripts in calligraphy, Egyptians rolled papyrus scrolls, and the Chinese carefully and slowly cut woodblocks.
The Book Art Festival invites us to slow down time and our own movements, and to turn our gaze towards detail and feel a texture that digital and generative design and artificial intelligence cannot offer. As Violeta Mackialo, curator of the Book Art Festival exhibition, writes: “We focus on the starting point of illustration – the human being, from whom the image that tells its own story is born”.
The aim of the Book Art Festival is to popularise book art, to sharpen viewers’ and readers’ attention to the details and artistic decisions of a book, and to nurture the importance of the book as a cultural value. In a world where reality is losing its power, the printed, “living” book is a way to rediscover a connection with the real.
THE BOOK ART EXHIBITION “LINK”
In the book art exhibition “Link” attention turns this year to the theme of book illustration, which raises questions (not necessarily helping to find answers) about what an illustration can be; where the line runs between illustration for children and illustration for adults; and whether, if an illustration depicts nothing in itself (?), it is still an illustration – and what its role is today, when the boundaries between artistic disciplines are imaginary and the means of visual expression and their combinations are boundless.
The exhibition presents book illustrations created using the techniques of painting, textile, printmaking, photography, film and experimental typography. This is illustration as a fairy tale for children and adults alike, as a testimony of its time, as conceptual photography, as cinematography, as a channel of communication, as a field and process of artistic research, as experiment, as historical narrative, as plot – and as whatever your imagination is able to encompass.
Organised by: Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre.