Handmade Books Exhibition at Helsinki Central Library Oodi brings together artist books and experimental publications that understand the book as a bodily, shared action rather than just an object to read. The exhibition focuses on small editions instead of unique works and highlights diverse techniques and approaches, often playful and low-cost ways of making and publishing books where materials and methods are part of the meaning. These books invite touch, movement, rearrangement, and time. Leporellos, loose pages, boxes, punched holes, and open bindings turn reading into navigation, making the book a space and reading a physical act. Embodiment is not only a theme but a condition of how these works are made and experienced.

Across the exhibition, books function as sites of conceptual exploration, dialogue, memory, and anarchistic approaches. They explore personal and collective histories such as family, homecoming, everyday rituals, inherited gestures, and found objects alongside broader concerns like community, activism and care. Simple, recycled, and found materials carry political weight without proclamation. Slowness, craft, and analog processes resist the efficiency and automation of digital platforms. Together, these books ask what is worth keeping, sharing, and passing on, and show how publishing can be a communal, intentional, and embodied practice.

The books were selected from an international open call that received nearly 600 submissions, with 43 works chosen for the exhibition from Finland to Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Canada, and across Europe, showcasing the vibrant and global practice of contemporary handmade publishing. After the exhibition, the selected works will be donated to the public collection of the Rikhardinkatu Library Artist’s Book Collection.

The exhibition is curated by Natalia Kopkina and Hikari Nishida, Helsinki-based artists and publishers whose practices span artist-run publishing, collective projects, and experimental approaches to books as visual and social forms.

✦ Opening ✦
Tuesday 31.3.2026
19:00–21:00