Manifold Books
Kraijenhoffstraat 34, 1018RL Amsterdam
please note: the entrance is located in the corridor between number 30 and 32

regular opening hours (during exhibitions only): Fridays and Saturdays from 1-5 pm, or make an appointment via e-mail or Instagram

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~scroll down for more information on our year programme and past exhibitions~

Telephone Telephone +31
09/10/’26, 6-8pm
with Melissa Gordon
and Riet Wijnen

language: English
to join, please RSVP
via info@manifoldbooks.nl
tickets available at the door: €5,-
 

Dear reader,

After the summer break, we continue with Telephone Telephone +31, a series of meetings on the future (of) artists' legacies organised by Manifold Books in collaboration with Darling Green and curator Alicja Melzacka. Three more meetings will be organised in October, November, and December. The programme addresses practical, creative, and ethical questions surrounding artists’ legacies from a range of perspectives, including those of curators, archivists, legal advisors, and artists themselves.

On 9 October, we welcome Melissa Gordon and Riet Wijnen—both working as artists, editors and organisers. Within their practice, they approach questions of archiving and legacy-making through the inclusion of other artists' works and documents in their own presentations; research into art histories, especially of abstraction; and self-publishing and feminist organising. A short talk by each artist, outlining their practice, will be followed by an open conversation with the public. Upon reservation, a concise and optional reader with related texts selected by our guests will be shared with subscribers to the event, providing additional context for our conversation. Selected publications by Melissa Gordon and Riet Wijnen will also be available to browse during the event.

Telephone Telephone is a regular meeting organised by the NYC-based curatorial office Darling Green to discuss the meaning, uses and methodology of the exhibition form. Part seminar, part reading group and part gathering of co-conspirators, Telephone Telephone is a self-organising experiment in dialogue and cooperative discovery.

Looking forward to seeing you,
Manifold Books


Melissa Gordon is a painter, printmaker and editor living in Brussels, whose work deals with investigation into the feminist histories of gesture, and the making of new painterly language. She studied at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. In her painting, she explores how visual stories emerge from spatial relationships within individual works, series of paintings and architectural settings. She combines techniques such as screen printing, text and collage with research into themes like the representation of women in power structures, the failure of democracies, and questions about gender, authorship and the history of painting. 

Riet Wijnen is an artist whose practice involves sculpture, photograms, working through texts, woodcuts and more recently, type design. She is interested in incomplete histories of abstraction, and what and who are already there in ways we might not yet know. To do this she looks to elders, hosting practitioners from the past and present within her work who have been active in the field of art during early modernism, or in science, philosophy, education and activism. Bringing them together through fictional conversations and sculptures to reconsider histories and better understand what comes next, Riet Wijnen centres perception, language and organisational structures. She teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.


more info on past and upcoming Telephone Telephone +31 meetings
plus the link to each event's reader
meeting 1
05/06/’26, 5:30-7:30pm
with Jeremy Johnston
and Yann Chateigné Tytelman

meeting 2
27/06/’26, 3:00-5:00pm
with Peter Lemmens, Nell Donkers
and Vivian van Saaze

meeting 3
19/07/’26, 3:00-5:00pm
with Philipp Gufler and
Andrew Walsh-Lister

meeting 4
09/10/’26, 6:00-8:00pm
with Melissa Gordon and
Riet Wijnen

meeting 5
25/11/’26, 6:00-8:00pm
with JJJJJerome Ellis and
Will Holder

meeting 6
TBA


meeting 1: Friday, 05/06/2026, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. 

Our guests Jeremy Johnston and Yann Chateigné Tytelman will approach the topic from a curatorial perspective, informed by their engagement with, amongst others, the legacies of Rosemary Mayer, Scott Burton and Peter Downsbrough. and after a brief presentation, the meeting will unfold as a conversation with the public. 

Jeremy Johnston is a founding member of Darling Green, a  collaborative studio that organizes art exhibitions and provides curatorial services for art collections. Darling Green’s versatile approach includes developing workshops, installation systems, and graphic identities that think about art exhibitions in experimental and innovative ways. Clients include Printed Matter, Philadelphia Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, Equitable, Le Bernardin, Performa, and American Folk Art Museum.

Yann Chateigné Tytelman is an author and curator. He has been curator at the KANAL-Centre Pompidou Brussels, artistic advisor at MORPHO Antwerp, head of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD – Geneva, and chief curator at CAPC museum of contemporary art in Bordeaux, among other positions. He lives and works in Brussels, where he co-founded celador, a space for “doing things with words.” His work explores issues of sleep, silence, and the politics of obscurity. He has organized projects on ecology—How to be Organic?, Country SALTS, Bennwil, 2022; Regenerative Futures, Fondation Thalie, Brussels, 2024—on alternative histories—Material Thinking: Gordon Matta-Clark, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, 2019; By repetition, you start noticing details in the landscape, Le Commun, Geneva, 2019; and on destruction—A Gittering Ruin Sucked Upwards, HISK, Brussels, 2022; Four Sisters, Jewish Museum, Brussels, 2023.

His writings have been published in Artforum, Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, Conceptual Fine Arts, Frieze, Mousse, and Spike. He is a faculty member in the Department of Curatorial Studies at KASK, Ghent, and teaches at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts in Copenhagen. He is also a PhD supervisor at KHiO, the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo. He recently published Blackout, his first work of narrative nonfiction (CEC, Geneva/Les Fugitives, London, 2023-25), and is currently working on an exhibition and a book about the disappearance of night.

meeting 2: Saturday, 27/06/2026, from 3:00 to 5:00 pm.

Our guests will be Antwerp-based artist Peter Lemmens, custodian of de Appel Archive Nell Donkers, and associate professor and heritage expert Vivian van Saaze, who will talk about infrastructures, classification systems, and different forms of distribution of artistic work. 

Peter Lemmens is an artist who looks at operational levels for their social, political, economical, and artistic capacities. On this intersection, he uses sound, video, and text to look at how to organize oneself responsibly. He contaminates the question of “What to produce?” with the question of “How to produce?” While working on distribution, narrativity, DIY, and marginal practices, his work demarcates not only what can be done differently but what can be done simultaneously. His work formulates an exit strategy. He likes to make boring works and sees diversions as a productive method. He likes to finish bios by quoting “Mine is not an autonomous imagination.” 

Since 2002 Nell Donkers has been the custodian of the Archive (library, archive and collection) of de Appel in Amsterdam. The archive represents the memory of de Appel and has become a vital place for meeting and sharing knowledge between researchers, artists and art lovers, wherein Donkers plays a connecting role. In different set-ups, Nell Donkers initiates and organizes presentations and events with, within and about the rich history of de Appel. She digitally safeguarded the data of de Appel, and made it public by reorganizing the digital framework en futureproofing the database. Nell Donkers invited Archival Consciousness to think along with the implementation of RFID (Radio Frequency Identity tags) which culminated in biblio-graph.org, further expanding the archive into the public realm. In addition, she initiated The Remote Archivist, which she co-edits with graphic designer Bardhi Haliti. TRA is a recurring snail mail publication in which contemporary artists and researchers working with themes like archiving, bookmaking, systemizing and storytelling are invited to dive deep into the archive and re-calibrate the legacy of de Appel into the now.

Vivian van Saaze holds a dual appointment as specialist modern and contemporary art at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (RCE)) and as associate professor Museum Studies and Conservation Theory at Maastricht University. She specializes in the study of museum practices of curating and conservation, focusing on the challenges arising from new artistic genres such as installation art, digital art, and performance art. She is currently engaged in the topic of artists ‘estates and legacies, and was co-organizer of the international conference On Leaving: Contemporary Artists’ Estates and Legacies, held in Maastricht between 19-21 March 2026. Vivian will reflect on past and present projects and policy in different countries (with a focus on Belgium and the UK), and will zoom into recent developments in the Netherlands regarding the care for artists’ legacies.


meeting 3: Sunday, 19/07/2026, from 3:00 to 5:00 pm.

Our guests will be Andrew Walsh-Lister, typographer, writer, and curator based between the UK and the US and a member of the Lily Greenham Advisory Group, and Philip Gufler, an artist based in Amsterdam and Munich and a founding member of the Paul Hoecker Research Group. They will talk about how their artistic and curatorial practices enter into a dialogue with other artists’ legacies.

Philipp Gufler explores queer visual worlds and challenges Western historiography, in which heterosexuality and a binary gender system are constructed as social norms. He works with a wide range of media, including screen printing on textiles or mirrors, artist books, performances, ceramics, and video installations. The artist references artists, writers, magazines and lost queer spaces, and has also actively engaged in reactivating artists’ legacies, such as Cosy Pièro and Paul Hoecker's. Philipp Gufler was an artist-in-residence at De Ateliers, and has been a member of the grassroots organisation Forum Queeres Archiv München since 2013. Philipp Gufler’s newest book ‘Traces of Paul’, co-edited by Stefan Gruhne, Nicholas Maniu and Christina Spachtholz from the Paul Hoecker Forschungsgruppe, will be available during the event.

Andrew Walsh-Lister is an artist, writer, typographer and curator currently based between the UK and US, where he is a Senior Critic at Yale School of Art. He has held number of academic positions internationally, and has presented work at Kunsthalle Wien, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, MoMA PS1, Kunsthal Mechelen, Badischer Kunstverein, HfG Karlsruhe, Estonian Academy of Arts, rile* books, Tenderbooks, B09K, Ulterior Gallery, Mahler & LeWitt Studios London, Brno International Biennial of Graphic Design, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and ICA London, among others. He also co-edits the irregular journal / multifarious publishing imprint Bricks from the Kiln. As part of his ongoing PhD research on encircling Lily Greenham, for the last five years he has been cataloguing the Lily Greenham Archive, held at Goldsmiths, University of London. And in 2024 he co-curated Lily Greenham: An Art of Living at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, a large-scale retrospective exhibition that brought together Greenham’s work across ‘lingual music’, ‘neo-semantics’, optokinetics, electroacoustics, ‘homecomputer graphics’ and sound poetry.

Telephone Telephone +31 has been made possible by:
Pictoright Fonds
Cultuurfonds
AFK

About our current year programme Of Ghosts and Flowers
Of Ghosts and Flowers proposes a transition from our 2024 programme The Sphinx's Riddle around grief and transformation to an exhibition and event series about non-linear time experiences in 2025 and 2026. The urgency for this arose from the content of this programme, and how the system of linear time imposed on us disintegrates in the face of death, grief and profound mental and physical transformative processes. In addition, it feels urgent to formulate alternative forms of dealing with time because our system of linear time is linked to our growth-oriented economic system; the biggest driver of climate change. The embodied sensations we will look into include non-human perspectives as well as human ones. Of Ghosts and Flowers departs from the work of Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014). More information on upcoming shows and activities will follow soon.

From March 6 to July 19, 2026 the sound piece Be My Ghost by Arefeh Riahi was installed in our staircase. Please find the soundfiles here:
episode 1, episode 2, episode 3

In Be My Ghost Arefeh Riahi takes the listener on a metaphorical phantom ride. The sound piece consists of three letters written and read by the artist in which she takes Manifold Books’ founder Maartje Fliervoet on a fictive walk through Tehran, her hometown. Departing from her long term engagement with hauntology and undecidability, the work explores the relation between the migrant and the so-called host, complicated by the factor of time.

Be My Ghost, a publication of the transcript of the sound files has been published in collaboration with Good Neighbour. Book design by Dongyoung Lee. Printed and bound by no kiss, Amsterdam. Available at Manifold Books and Good Neighbour. Price €15,-

Post production sound recordings Be My Ghost by Erfan Abdi.
Special thanks to Radio Alhara and Lara Khaldi.

Be My Ghost has been made possible by:
Stroom Den Haag
Mondriaan Fonds
AFK

Sadly, we are currently unable to process any unsolicited project proposals.

~So far, Manifold Books has organised shows/projects with: Arefeh Riahi, JJJJJerome Ellis, Francisca Khamis Giacoman, Steve Kado, Clem Edwards, Rosemary Mayer, Natalia Papaeva, Philipp Gufler/the Paul Hoecker Research Group, Dagmar Bosma, Katja Mater, Daniel Godínez-Nivón, Ana Navas, Marianna Maruyama, Nicoline van Harskamp, Selma Selman, Dan Zhu, Ada M. Patterson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Isabelle Sully and Matt Hinkley (Unbidden Tongues), Hadassah Emmerich, Eileen Quinlan, Melissa Gordon, To See the Inability to See, Ada Van Hoorebeke, Kato Six, Riet Wijnen, Patricia Esquivias, Aglaia Konrad, Özlem Altın, Gwenneth Boelens, Barbara Neves Alves, Baha Görkem Yalım, Martín La Roche Contreras, Dongyoung Lee, Maartje Fliervoet

Each of these artists have made unique book interventions, see a selection of photos

About Manifold Books
Founded in 2015 by Maartje Fliervoet in her Amsterdam studio space, Manifold Books’ activities may be best described as a spatial investigation exploring connections between art and books. With each exhibition a few titles are added to its book collection (all including artists’ interventions). Manifold Books has received funding from: the Mondriaan Fund (2019, 2023-2026); AFK (2020, 2021, 2022, 2025 and 2026); het Cultuurfonds (2021-22, 2024 and 2025), Stichting Symbio (2025), the Netherland-America Foundation (2025). This year, its programme will be supported by the AFK, het Cultuurfonds, Pictoright Fonds, Stroom Den Haag and the Mondriaan Fund. 


Manifold Books is a foundation with an independent board consisting of:
Arnisa Zeqo (chair)
Stephanie Noach (secretary)
Paul Domela (treasurer)