Book Art Festival 2022
09 16–11 06
The Klaipėda Book Art Festival opens at the Exhibition Hall of the Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre (KCCC) (Didžioji Vandens g. 2, Klaipėda) on Friday 16 September 2022 at 17.30.
Held in Klaipėda for the first time, the book art festival invites you to get to know the material side of the book. The festival’s motto — “Let’s open the book together” — encourages a closer look at a book’s artistic design, its structure and its illustrations; at the artist’s work within it, the illustrations they created and the book’s design: the layout, the typefaces and the other decorative elements of a book.
The Book Art Festival has three parts — two exhibitions and an intensive programme of educational sessions. The exhibition space, created by the architecture studio Moa, will let you travel through the exhibition as though through the pages of a book. The festival’s educational sessions offer a chance to get to know the artists’ work and to learn from them the secrets of book-making that only the makers themselves know best. Come to look, to take part, and to create a book or an illustration of your own.
Exhibition of the Book Art Competition laureates
Each year the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania organises the Book Art Competition, whose aim is to foster book art and book culture in Lithuania. A jury of professionals — book designers, printing and typography specialists, art historians, bookbinders and others who work with books — selects the books published in the previous calendar year that have been designed most professionally by Lithuanian book artists. The aim of the competition is to encourage book artists, illustrators, publishing and printing professionals and the wider public to pay more attention to the book as a whole — to the harmony between its content and the material, visual form that embodies it. The exhibition presents books published in 2020 and 2021 that were recognised and awarded in the following categories: fiction and essays; children’s books; academic and specialist books and textbooks; art publications; artistic and documentary photography publications; bibliophile and experimental publications.
The architecture group Moa has made sure that visitors’ aesthetic and intellectual encounter with the laureates of the national Book Art Competition is pleasant and comfortable — visitors can leaf through the books and see in them what the professionals in this field noticed.
Exhibition of book illustrations
This exhibition sets out to introduce the work of the illustrator. It presents works by artists working in the field of book illustration. Books for children are illustrated most often — this is probably the most popular area for a book artist. Poetry is illustrated less frequently, and occasionally a novel. Children’s books display a great variety of styles: books for the youngest readers are made with simple, clear forms, while illustrations for teenage books draw on all kinds of artistic innovation — 3D glasses, striking characters, gripping stories, a distinctive style and format. A genre still fairly new in Lithuania — the comic — is gradually taking hold. The exhibition shows works in this genre by several artists and lets you judge how unpredictable the language of art can be, how artists search for different forms of expression and persuasion, and how varied and enchanting the language or mood of illustration is.
Some of the illustrations on display are brand new, while others already adorn published books, so we invite you to leaf through the printed books as well — they are the final aim of the work. Compare, admire and learn from the variety of art; get to know contemporary Lithuanian book illustration and the people who make it.
Educational programme
The workshops and educational sessions of the Book Art Festival programme, for children and adults alike, will be led by the artists taking part in the book illustration exhibition. The first session — “My Historical Portrait” (led by Ieva Babilaitė-Ibelhauptienė) — takes place as early as Sunday 17 September at 14.00 at the KCCC Exhibition Hall. Participants will learn to observe, see, discover, name and visualise their own portrait, following I. Babilaitė-Ibelhauptienė’s illustrations for L. Mickutė’s book “A Tale of the Last Prince of Lithuania”. Participants will create their own 16th-century portrait out of coloured paper. Further sessions and workshops are announced on the KCCC website and Facebook page. Taking part in these workshops and sessions is free of charge, but places are limited, so registration is required.
Pupils in grades 1–12 are also welcome at the Exhibition Hall. A guided tour of the exhibition and a practical creative session await them. For Klaipėda city schoolchildren the session is free of charge.
The exhibition runs until 9 October 2022.
Opening hours of the KCCC Exhibition Hall (Didžioji Vandens g. 2, Klaipėda): Wednesday–Sunday 11.00–19.00 (closed on public holidays).
The event will be photographed and/or filmed. Please note that participants may appear in photographs and video recordings of the event, which may be published in various media.
Book Art Festival 2023
From 20 October to 12 November Klaipėda hosts the Book Art Festival organised by the Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre (KCCC). Running for the second year in a row, the festival invites both the general public and future and current graphic design professionals, along with other specialists working with book design and content. This year the programme is expanded with lectures and creative workshops for designers and illustrators, as well as a networking event. The Book Art Festival encourages a close look at the artistic design of the book, an exploration of books as artworks in their own right, a creative way to spend your free time and a chance to improve your skills in this field.
WHAT EVENTS ARE COMING?
The festival programme comprises two book art exhibitions, lectures on graphic design with speakers from abroad, and a range of talks thematically connected with books — the use of artificial intelligence will be examined too. Book launches, creative workshops for families and professionals, and networking events are also planned during the festival.
THE BOOK IN THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The Book Art Festival seeks to grasp and highlight an understanding of the book as a core value, and to draw attention to the fact that a book is valuable not only for its content but also for its aesthetic form. This is most likely one of the essential reasons why, even at the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence, physical books will not be forgotten or wholly replaced by e-books or audiobooks — people value the material form of a book, its design, its elements, its originality. The festival events therefore aim to deepen an understanding of the artistic design of the book and invite a closer look at its structure: at the artist’s work within it, the illustrations they created and the book’s design — the layout, the typefaces and the other elements of book art.
THE KLAIPĖDA CONTEXT MATTERS
Book art also matters in the context of the port city, because artists and designers live and work here, and at the Klaipėda Faculty of the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VDA KF) a new generation of makers is growing up — future graphic designers and illustrators. Their talents can be seen each June at the traditional exhibition of VDA KF bachelor’s and master’s graduation works at the KCCC Exhibition Hall. One of the festival’s aims is to generate value for the artists and designers working here by giving them knowledge, inspiring them towards joint projects and encouraging local makers to collaborate. To achieve this, the Book Art Festival invites speakers, lecturers and practitioners who share their experience and expertise.
The Book Art Festival is organised by the Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre.
The project is funded by Klaipėda City Municipality and the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
Opening hours of the KCCC Exhibition Hall (Didžioji Vandens g. 2, Klaipėda): Wednesday–Sunday 11.00–19.00 (closed on public holidays). The events will be photographed and filmed. Please note that participants may appear in photographs and video recordings of the events published in various media.
KCCC information
Book Art Festival 2024
For a whole month, from 11 October to 10 November, the port city hosts the third Book Art Festival, organised by the Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre (KCCC). As every year, it brings book art exhibitions, creative workshops for amateurs and professionals, lectures, book launches, the collaborative projects with students that are becoming a tradition, and the novelties introduced each year. This year that novelty is an artist residency programme on both sides of the Baltic.
Book Art Festival 2025
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.