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
Subscribe here
to our newsletter
location: MAP
Scroll down for more info on our exhibition programme
Public programme:
Telephone Telephone +31
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
and Nell Donkers
Meeting 3
19/07/’26, 3:00-5:00pm
with Philipp Gufler and
Andrew Walsh-Lister
language: English
to join, please RSVP by 04/06/’26
via info@manifoldbooks.nl
tickets available at the door: €0,-/€4,-/€8,-
Dear reader,
Please join us for Telephone Telephone +31, a series of five meetings on the future (of) artists’ legacies organised by Manifold Books in collaboration with Darling Green and curator Alicja Melzacka. 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.
Working this way is a labour of love—often performed by those close to the artist: their families, friends, and peers. It is a work whose boundaries are fuzzy: where is the line between private and public life, between an artwork and a document, between preserving and presentation, between reactivation and reinterpretation? What is worth preserving and how do we approach the elements that are part of the artistic practice but not necessarily the work, such as discourse, positioning, and friendship networks?
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.
To join, please RSVP to info@manifoldbooks.nl. Entry is based upon a ʻpay what you can’ system varying from €0,- to €4,- or €8,-. Please note that the conversations are held in English. Upon reservation, a concise and optional reader with related texts selected by our guests will be shared with subscribers to the event. These provide additional context for our conversation and further reference. A number of printed copies will be also available in the space.
See you soon,
Manifold Books
Public programme:
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 and custodian of de Appel Archive Nell Donkers, 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.
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.
The fourth and fifth Telephone Telephone +31 meetings will take place after the summer break and will be announced asap.
Exhibition programme:
Manifold Books #31
Carrying morning on their tongues
JJJJJerome Ellis
curated by Alicja Melzacka and Maartje Fliervoet
16/05/’26-11/07/’26
Manifold Books #30
Be My Ghost
Arefeh Riahi
06/03/’26-19/07/’26
Carrying morning on their tongues is an exhibition by JJJJJerome Ellis that presents four bodies of work. These works enact and channel the embodied experience of time on various scales; here, time is a river, an exposure, a musical note, or a breath.
A music album and artist’s book, The Clearing (2021), together with Aster of Ceremonies (2023), a book of hymns presented here alongside the audiobook, attune with great sensitivity to the relationship between the time of reading and the time of listening. Through JJJJJerome’s experiments with notation, transcription, and audio description, multiple visual and auditory layers converge and diverge. Alongside these works, a selection of photographs from the series Exposure (2024-) and the video 251218 (2024) introduce two distinct timelines, unfolding in an uneven rhythm around the asymmetrical architecture of Manifold Books.
ʻWhat is a clock? Is it an instrument? A body with hands and a face? A capitalist rosary?’ asks JJJJJerome in The Clearing. ʻWhat is a syllable? A bell held on a glottal hilltop? The indestructable? A gathering of sound (...) What is a bell? Why is it that the same bell that calls us to prayer and meditation called the enslaved to the field? Can black song heal these traumas arising from time and sound? How can we create gentler, more humane clocks?’
JJJJJerome’s work reverberates in the gap between personal memory and histories of colonisation and resistance—histories that were poorly and partially documented and that require another kind of historiography, or rather, another approach to the past: one that looks to human and non-human ancestors for guidance and dislodges time from its linear course, tied to productivity and extraction. ʻMy thesis is that blackness, dysfluency and music are forces that open time,’ offers JJJJJerome.
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. After the first and second episode have been installed in our staircase, the third episode will be launched in the afternoon of June 27, in tandem with the second Telephone Telephone +31 meeting.
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). So far, the programme includes exhibitions and projects by Rosemary Mayer, Steve Kado, Clem Edwards, Francisca Khamis Giacoman and Arefeh Riahi.
Thanks to SB34, Erfan Abdi, Lara Khaldi and Radio Alhara.
Carrying morning on their tongues, Be My Ghost and Telephone Telephone +31 have been made possible by:
Stroom Den Haag
Mondriaan Fonds
Pictoright Fonds
Cultuurfonds
AFK
Sadly, we are currently unable to process any unsolicited project
proposals.
~So far, Manifold Books has organized shows/projects with: 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)