Bound Art Book Fair

2021

Bound Art Book Fair returned to the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, from 23-24 October 2021, with an opening party on 22nd October at the Peer Hat.

In order to facilitate a safe and inclusive event for the whole community we held a slightly smaller fair this year, whilst still inviting the best and most exciting art and photography publishers from the UK and further afield, and offering a rich programme of free events and workshops. Table numbers were be slightly scaled back and our events located in a single dedicated space to allow for easy movement around the gallery and social distancing where necessary.

Our Public Programme focused on collectives, collectivity and mutual support, with talks, screenings and workshops from SCREW Gallery, The White Pube, MODUS, UVW Designers + Cultural Workers, Jade Montserrat, Desire Press + many more.

Opening hours:

Saturday 23 October: 10am-5pm

Sunday 24 October: 10am-4.30pm

Exhibitors

  • 01706 - UK
  • Baron Publications - UK
  • Bronze Age - UK
  • Carolina Sepulveda - UK
  • Ceremony Press - UK
  • Chutney Magazine - UK / Canada
  • Circus Magazine - UK
  • Common Threads Press - UK
  • Desire Press - UK
  • Emma Crabtree - UK
  • Fanfare - UK
  • FAW - Spain
  • Folium - UK
  • Foolscap Editions - UK
  • Handshake - Spain
  • Holly Eliza Temple - UK
  • James Unsworth - UK
  • Kawako Press - UK


  • Mark Pawson / Disinfotainment - UK
  • Occasional Papers - UK
  • Palomino - UK
  • PhotoBookCafe x The Photocopy Club - UK
  • Prototype Publishing - UK
  • Psychic Liberation - Germany
  • Rotten Magazine - UK
  • Salt n Pepper Press - UK
  • Spun Press - UK
  • Stephanie Francis-Shanahan - UK
  • Taxi Cab Industries - UK
  • The Lemming - UK
  • The Modernist - UK
  • Onomatopee - Netherlands
  • Screw Gallery - UK
  • Village - UK

Public Programme

Saturday

Saturday 11am-1pm

Modernist walking tour with Steve Marland

Free, booking is not required but is advised. Meet by the Primark end of the concrete wall in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester.

A two hour guided walk with The Modernist’s favourite moocher Steve Marland (modernmooch.com) for all lovers of concrete, glass and steel. This whirlwind tour of Manchester's top hotel, campuses, churches and public art will begin at the Brutalist wall in Piccadilly. After exploring the interior and exterior of the Plaza, you’ll proceed onwards to the former UMIST campus and the University buildings along Oxford Road, finishing at the Whitworth Gallery and Bound Art Book Fair.

Steve Marland is a photographer, walker and talker with a particular interest in the architecture of the 20th Century.

the-modernist.org / @themodernist

Saturday 12-1pm

Transforming Cultural Work: A workshop with UVW Designers + Cultural Workers

Gallery Four, The Whitworth

Work in the cultural sector is fragmented, precarious, and poorly regulated. While certain cultural work is well unionised, huge sections of the workforce remain unrepresented and prevented from organising by employment practices that keep workers atomised and on short-term freelance contracts, promoting individualisation, competitiveness, and fear. Existing collective agreements cannot keep up with the constant creation of new job types and contracts, which offer little security and deny workers their basic rights. Cultural workers are overworked, burnt out and underpaid, making organising all the more challenging, yet all the more essential if we are to demand a just recovery of the sector.

This workshop will offer a fun, creative way of understanding cultural work, using interactive activities to ask: What are the power dynamics? Who is exploiting who? What needs to change and how? What are the opportunities for organising? Activities are suitable for all ages and you don’t need to have any experience of union organising to take part.

You will also have the chance to find out about UVW Designers + Cultural Workers and their efforts to organise across the cultural sector. Information on workers' rights will be available to take away for free, with advice for both employees and freelancers.

Designers + Cultural Workers (UVW-DCW) is a sector group in United Voices of the World, a grassroots trade union which supports and empowers precarious, low-paid and predominantly migrant workers in the UK. We're a non-hierarchical group organising atomised and precarious workers across the creative industries. Our definition of cultural work is intentionally broad: our members include graphic, fashion and product designers, front of house and gallery staff, casual tutors and facilitators, administrators, cleaners, and anyone who identifies as a cultural worker. Any type of creative worker in any sector is encouraged to join.

@uvw_dcw

Saturday 2-3pm

Jade Montserrat: A Reimagining of Relations

Book launch, roundtable and participatory performance

Gallery Four, The Whitworth

We are delighted to launch Jade Montserrat’s new publication, A Reimagining of Relations, produced as part of her Future Collect commission with iniva and Manchester Art Gallery. This visually rich artist publication, designed by Rose Nordin, makes material the dialogue and ideas that have shaped Montserrat’s process over the past two years. A key point of departure for Montserrat was the first work acquired by Manchester Art Gallery, James Northcote’s 1826 portrait of African American actor Ira Aldridge posing in character as Othello. A Reimagining of Relations asks us to consider the story behind the man in the painting alongside questions of institutional care for people, objects and performances, within the context of a broader history of Black communities in the north of England.

Thinking around the publication was launched with an event by Montserrat and curator Nikita Gill in November 2020 at HYPERTEXT. We are thrilled to celebrate the release of the book a year later with a performance element and discussion exploring the progress of the project over the past 12 months, the unique design of the publication, and the various activations potentialised by the material it contains.

Saturday 3-4pm

Launch of En-Suites Available with author Sarah Horn

Occasional Papers’ table

En-Suites Available is the first poetic survey of hotels facing the sea in Blackpool. Often overlooked, the frontages offer rare insights into coastal architecture, vernacular typography, and the sociology of travel. Now that mass global tourism has been recognised as ecologically reckless, En-Suites Available encourages us to reconnect with the not-so-distant time when Blackpool captured the aura of long-distance escapism.

Signed copies of the book and Blackpool rock will be available during the launch.

@sarahhorn92 / @occasionalpapers

Saturday 6-9pm

Off-site Book Launch and Party:

Desire Press presents Wreaths

Village Manchester, 131 Oldham Street, Manchester M4 1LN

Wreaths is a visual diary of images from Ben Barbetta Thompson's time spent in European cities over the last five years, published by Desire Press. The book explores the idea of ceremony, offerings and human interaction within public spaces. A 100 page, 130x180mm, pocket hardcover book--a portable ornament.

Desire Press will be launching its new title at Village's brand new space in the Northern Quarter - destined to be Manchester’s leading arts and photography bookshop and a meeting place for creatives and book lovers from across the North West.

@desire.press / @villagebooks.co

Sunday

Sunday 8-9.30am

Out of Hours: James Unsworth queers The Whitworth

Various galleries, The Whitworth

James Unsworth is a Manchester-based queer artist who makes work about fat, queer bodies. He researches the print history of girth and mirth organisations and early bear culture to use as source material, either as compositions for drawings or raw materials for collage. As well as using archive materials he makes his own images of contemporary models, giving visibility to fat, queer bodies. In exploring queer, print and art history and the connections that exist between the past and present ideas around beauty, sex, masculinity, desire and gender, he aims to introduce audiences to aspects of queer culture they may not have been exposed to.

GET INVOLVED:

For this year's fair James is inviting participants for an out-of-hours photo shoot in the Whitworth galleries, highlighting the beauty of fatness, and celebrating bodies that are often excluded from mainstream media, advertising and art worlds. Models will be asked to respond to the architecture of the building and selected artworks. The images from these photoshoots will be used as the starting point for a series of collages that will be compiled and published later this year. If you are interested in being involved or have any questions please contact James on james.unsworth@network.rca.ac.uk or @james.unsworth on Instagram.


Sunday 12-4.30pm

SCREW GALLERY screening programme of artists moving image

Grand Hall, The Whitworth

SCREW GALLERY curates a programme of AV works for the Whitworth’s Grand Hall, selected from their own community of artists plus sourced via open call.

SCREW is a new not-for-profit gallery bringing international contemporary art to Leeds, UK. Through regular open calls, it provides opportunities for proposals from emerging artists and curators to take shape in its artist-run project space . SCREW aims to provide an open and welcoming environment for contemporary art discourse. The collective behind SCREW will be selling publications and artist editions from their studio holders and featured artists over the Bound weekend.

OPEN CALL:

SCREW seek submissions of video or sound work up to fifteen minutes’ duration. Email a link to your work, including a password if it’s private, and say a little bit about yourself and your practice. This can be whatever you want to say, just remember that after about five hundred words they’ll probably lose concentration. Send videos or wetransfer links to screwgallery@gmail.com with the title ‘SCREWbound’ by the 20th October 2021.

SCREW.gallery / @screwgallery

Sunday 12-1pm

MODUS: ANNOTATED

Gallery Four, The Whitworth

modus:
A mode or procedure
A way of doing something


Contemporary fashion culture is seeing creative practitioners actively seeking to challenge traditional practices and question the very definition of their discipline. While the mainstream fashion industry continues to uphold commercial boundaries, there are emergent practices that propose alternate value systems and thus different ways of thinking, doing and being fashion. These are expanded fashion practices – experimental methods, curiosity and criticality that have the ability to interrogate the social, cultural, political and environmental impacts of fashion and point to a future that transcends the current capitalist paradigm. MODUS is an international network and platform that connects and represents this community of expanded fashion practice through publications, events and workshops. Through these outputs, MODUS facilitates conversations between practitioners working in the expanded field and writers/theorists from a range of disciplines including sociology, cultural and critical theory, politics and economics in order to encourage overlaps between theory and practice in fashion. The central thread is a glossary of verbs - a growing lexicon of habits, methods, techniques, repetitions and actions - that together, begin to sketch out a shared language for expanded fashion practice.

We are delighted to present MODUS: ANNOTATED for Bound Art Book Fair. Led by Ruby and Caroline, this workshop invites you to highlight, collage, re-write, cut up, draw and reconfigure the MODUS publication, weaving your own ideas and practices through the glossary and essays inside. Together, participants will create a new series of publications, setting out blueprints and ideas for an expanding fashion practice.

MODUS was founded by Ruby Hoette and Caroline Stevenson in collaboration with Roland Brauchli in 2018 and works in partnership with Onomatopee Projects and Floriane Misslin as research assistant.

modus.onomatopee.net / @modus.project

Sunday 2-3pm

The White Pube: Ideas For A New Art World

Zarina Muhammad in conversation

Gallery Four, The Whitworth

In association with Rough Trade Books, this event celebrates the release of 'ideas for a new art world' (2021) by The White Pube. TWP's Zarina Muhammad will be in conversation with Bound Art Book Fair's Lillian Wilkie.

TWP write: 'The art world is a bit broken. So many problems, such little time. Between January-April 2021, we plastered the distilled thoughts of years of writing on billboards and posters across the UK. We wanted to plop these aphorisms out there, as simple, feasible solutions; almost to prove how easy it can be if change is sincerely sought.

The ideas are not radical, and they’re not new. They’re just six Very Good Ideas that we think you should listen to. In this pamphlet, we’ve listed the six ideas and taken the time to explain why we think they are, in fact, Very Good Ideas. There could have been hundreds. Maybe there should have been. But these were the initial ideas for a new art world we went with. We hope they’ll make you think about more Very Good Ideas too.'

@thewhitepube / thewhitepube.co.uk / roughtradebooks.com

All weekend

A celebration of Lizard Point ‘99 in object and sound

Gallery Four, The Whitworth

A road trip to the heart of pre-millennial, communal fervour, Lizard Point ’99 (Bronze Age, 2021) is a textual and photographic exploration of a young man’s last few days of being wild. By a chance inter-generational encounter, Jerry O’Driscoll’s documentary photography of the Total Solar Eclipse event in August 1999 has been unearthed and re-assembled by artist Luke Overin - amounting to a glorious, monochromatic ode to illegal raves, fuggy campervans, and a very English kind of communal identity.

To celebrate the launch of the book, Overin has curated a cabinet of strange artefacts and objects, produced by past and contemporary British artists including Hannah Lees and James Jessiman. The works included in this exhibit have an affinity or crossover with particular themes of Lizard Point ‘99, creating connections and provoking conversations between object and printed matter. Alongside the objects will be a listening station for visitors to experience Overin’s ambient Peninsula, a cassette-only release on new label Fanfare that weaves old and new British experimental electronica, field recordings and archive audio accounts of the 1999 eclipse to create a loose and fictional journey across the regions of Great Britain at the end of the millennium.

@luke.overin / bronze-age.co / fanfare.world