We are pleased to announce after some postponements the launch of our workshop series Page of Possibilities, our project dedicated to children. Finally the restrictions allow us to meet and organize this series of workshops! Page of Possibilities introduces children (ages 4-12) in a playful manner to the practice of self-publishing. They will discover the colourful and creative world of artist books and learn how to make their own small publication. 

The workshop is bilingual (English and Dutch) and takes place every Sunday in our project space at the Boekhorststraat 128. Sessions are led an artist and art teacher with a broad experience in educative projects, combining children’s play with art and DIY graphic techniques to stimulate creative exchange and collaboration. Page of Possibilities was inspired by the pedagogics of Célestin Freinet, who started the l’École Moderne in France in 1947. In his modern schools the emphasis was on children-led education: a printing press was placed in the middle of the school and children shared their experiences and thoughts via self-made books and pamphlets. 

To reserve a spot for the workshop please write to info@page-not-found.nl.

And for more information about the workshop in Dutch visit the Cultuurschakel agenda.

The workshops take place every Sunday, starting 19 September 2021, 15:00-16:00. Free entrance.

For the first instalment of the cycle ‘Solitary Solidarity’, curated by Hamja Ahsan, Page Not Found presents a physical screening of the film Shy Radicals.

Shy Radicals is a portrait of Hamja Ahsan and the story behind his remarkable book and satirical manifesto, which calls for all shy, quiet, and introverted people to unify and overthrow Extrovert-Supremacy.

In his book Shy Radicals, Hamja Ahsan has not simply created an artwork, he has created a world that blurs the boundaries between creator and creation, between real life and the life of the imagination, between reality and an imagined fiction in which he is a leading character.

The documentary follows Hamja as he deals with the trauma and despair of his brother’s extradition case, whilst traveling the world inspiring and educating others through creativity and activism.

Signed to Ridley Scott’s Black Dog Films, director Tom Dream’s expertise lies in collaboration, working closely with artists to create truly original music videos and documentary films.

Style-nostalgia, nature, and psychology are recurring themes that feature strongly in Tom’s work, with a passion for capturing ongoing stories as they unfold, illuminating the people behind the music and unpicking human dynamics.

Tom has a background in music and psychology and currently lives in a 1970s location house in Margate.

Starts at 19:00. Reserve your free ticket here.

Why do artists write novels? What does the artist’s novel do to the visual arts? How should such a novel be experienced? In recent years, there has been a proliferation of visual artists who create novels as part of their wider art projects. They do so in order to address artistic issues by means of novelistic devices, favouring a sort of art predicated on process and subjectivity, introducing notions such as fiction, narrative, and imagination. In this sense, it is possible to speak of a new medium in the visual arts; yet, very little is known about it.

Join us for an evening of discussion, performance, and sharing across disciplines during the launch of David Maroto’s The Artist’s Novel: The Novel as a Medium in the Visual Arts (Mousse Publishing, 2020). This two-volume book is the first to explore in depth the subject of the artist’s novel. Part 1: A New Medium aims to critically elucidate the pressing questions posed by the emergence of a new artistic medium with a theoretical approach to a number of key case studies.

Part 2: The Fantasy of the Novel is a research project in the form of a novel, which examines the process of creation of an artist’s novel. The protagonist is in the position of a detective who tries to understand the conditions under which an artist decides to write, and how such a thing is possible within an artistic setting.

Accompanying David in the discussion, writer and curator Yann Chateigné Tytelman will examine the different ways contemporary artists have employed the artist’s novel, and its impact on the curatorial and institutional context in which it appears and with which it interacts.

Artist Cally Spooner, author of one the key case studies analysed in A New Medium, will carry out a reading performance from her new artist’s novel in progress, Dead Time – which will serve as a springboard to discuss notions of fiction and performativity in relation to the artist’s novel.

Writer and critic Chris Kraus will engage in conversation with David on the introduction of fictocritical writing practices in contemporary art, and the emergence of hybrid textual strategies where theory and practice, fiction and research, literature and the visual arts, merge.

Starts at 17:00. Reserve your free tickets for physical attendance or our livestream here.

We are pleased to invite you to window.open(), a day-long festival, held by students and alumni of the Master of Experimental Publishing (XPUB), Piet Zwart Institute at Page Not Found. 

A window is a framing device, an interface through which we can look inside, to spaces where small groups meet, and outside to the world beyond. Screens and windows delineate boundaries between public and private. We adjust, in order to be able to communicate within a temporary window of time, reframing our intentions and seeking opportunities to share some real-time realness.

window.open() at PNF will be an interface for the XPUB program to communicate with the public inside and outside of the physical space. We adjust, using windows in the street and in the browser in order to be able to communicate. Through this dialogical interface attitudes, perspectives, backgrounds and situations are explored together in a program consisting of presentations, workshops, publication launches, conversations and performances which take place both online and offline.

Program Schedule:

12:00-17:00 XPUB Bookshop (offline)

12:00-14:00 HAM DISTRO (online)

As a launch activity for the Collectiveioning publication, the XPUB class of 2019-2020 invites the public to join them to inhabit the cells of an collaborative online spreadsheet. 

14:00-15:00 OUIJA SEANCE (online, every 20 minutes)

Together we spell out our hopes, fears, suspicions, desires and more through an ever-changing multi-user whiteboard.

15:00-16:00 BLANK PAGE SYNDROME (offline)

Join offline for a curated read and conversation around Saturn, where we’ll attempt together to re-actualize the image of this age-old villain, by digging into its oldest mythologies. 

16:00-17:00 LINGO BINGO (offline)

Feeling lucky? Shoot your shot during our XPUB1 Bingo! We will roll the drum for you, and with every word you stripe off your card, you are getting closer to winning one of our hot and very exclusive prices from our previous issues!

16:00-17:00 Civil Entertainment Sirens® (offline)

Civil Entertainment Sirens® consists of a series of polyphonic textures performed from a Web oscillator instrument currently under development. This audiovisual performance is willing to explore different combinations of sound frequencies for your own entertainment. 

Reserve your free ticket here.

During this almost-ritual event, the MA Artistic Research, Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague, will launch the 2021 issue of Keywords, a publication collectively written and edited by its first year students during their reading days. This evening will also be the occasion for graduates of the programme to read excerpts of their theses.

Keywords is an annual publication written, edited and designed by students of the MA Artistic Research of The Royal Academy, The Hague. This year the focus is: Waywardness and Artistic Research: Speculation, Skepticism, Difference.

As physical seating for this event is limited, Page Not Found is happy to make available a livestream of the evening for those who don’t want to miss it.

Starts at 19:00. Reserve your free ticket to the livestream here.

Page Not Found presents the third chapter of the Open Letters project, which invites The Hague artists to occupy the large storefront of Page Not Found with messages of urgency and vulnerability. Following an open call, the selected works are ‘published’ in a series of window displays using vinyl lettering. The series gives artists room to publicly reflect on current times, with works given to an audience of passersby of the lively Boekhorststraat.

In the first months of the pandemic Georgie Brinkman (as part of duo ZOOX) was due to stage a newly commissioned performance work in a rural area of the UK through More Than Ponies. Inevitably, this had to be reconfigured from a site-specific, community choir performance to a digital form: a solo performer via Facebook live. This iteration of the work contemplates what happens to its meaning when it is disconnected from its original site. How can these words resonate with the larger, global notions of loss, vulnerability and change we are currently experiencing?

‘Brekekekéx koáx koáx!’ is a song that acts as a futile, ritualistic attempt to resurrect an extinct (in the British wild) species. The last known colony of the Common Tree Frog (Hyla Arborea) in the British wild lived in Hilltop Pond, Dorset. In 1988 the last male was found far away from the pond calling a lonely ‘Brekekekéx koáx koáx!’ for a non-existent female. Using astrological predictions for 1988 as an attempt to retroactively foresee the extinction, this new, ritual song rewrites the lyrics of the oldest surviving secular love song in the English language, ‘Bryd one Brere’. The piece borrows its name from the Ancient Greek comedy ‘The Frogs’. During a choral interlude, the onomatopoeic cry of ‘Brekekekéx koáx koáx!’ marks the only time that the titular frogs are heard. They exist only to annoy the protagonist, who tries his best to eliminate their sound. He eventually manages to silence them with a monstrous fart.

Georgie Brinkman is an artist and researcher whose work treads a precarious ground between science-fiction and science-fact (and the muddy sludge in between), to ask what it means to be human in the age of extinction. By casting other-than-humans as leading protagonists in her films, writing and installations she seeks to pull apart the anthropocentric perception of a division between nature and culture. Georgie recently graduated from MA Artistic Research at The Royal Academy, The Hague. Alongside her practice she founded an artist residency, The New Flesh, to support early career artists who work at the intersection of costume and moving image.

Image caption:

Illustration of a singing frog, drawn from ‘Rupert and The Frog Song’ (1984), written by Paul McCartney. Here, Rupert the Bear witnesses a frog chorus. that occurs only once every few hundred years.

“Brekekekéx koáx koáx!” is on view from August 9, 2021 through September 9, 2021. The exhibition is visible any time from the street.