Artist-led Publications
and Reading
Platforms in India
Allan Parker
Published on 25.09.2024
A work by Anselm Kiefer from from his solo exhibition ‘Finnegans Wake’ at White Cube (London) June – August 2023.
Throughout his life, the German artist Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) produced a number of monolithic books often made of lead and other materials, which he includes in his gallery shows and installations. Although they often contained indistinct photographic images and fragmentary texts, they were primarily presented as symbolic objects, representing knowledge, history, and the possibility of narrative arcs. This does not represent publishing in the accepted sense (multiple copies distributed by a third party to shops and libraries or available to order online), but it does mark one end of a range of possibilities for the book as a physical object.
The limitations created by the publishing industry regarding the content and format of books, the size of print-runs, and production compromises can restrict the creative possibilities of the form in a way that has encouraged artists and designers to look for alternative options to bring their work to their intended audiences. Publications for sale in larger bookshops are required to have an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) which makes the book identifiable and traceable, assigns it a category which will direct shops as to which shelf it belongs on, and makes it possible to identify the distributor, find out whether the book is available, and where it can be ordered from.
Shops normally require printed spines (often with a specified minimum width) so titles can be identified on the shelves. Many bookstores prefer to order from larger distributors and suppliers as this simplifies the process of ordering and saves them the trouble of having to deal with multiple suppliers. Publishers commissioning large print runs benefit from economies of scale and, in the case of paperback fiction, for example, cheap production techniques.
Heidelberg SpeedmasterOffset-lithography presses such as the Heidelberg Speedmaster can print 20,000 sheets per hour, or 300 sheets per minute. There will normally be eight or sixteen pages on each side of the sheet. The time taken in setting up and registration—and the paper wasted in the process—has led to offset lithography print-runs usually having a threshold of 300-500 copies. This means that smaller publishers are often unable to benefit from the economies of scale that larger ones enjoy. Consequently, their titles often cost more to produce per copy and they usually don’t have the marketing budgets and associated personnel available to established publishing houses.
High costs, low margins, and distribution issues are common to all independent publishing ventures and have given rise to a wide range of production models—from cheaply produced zines using low-budget technologies, such as photocopiers and risographs, to various kinds of digital printers, including digital offset machines such as HP’s Indigo printer which can provide high-quality print in smaller quantities. Beyond a certain number of copies, offset lithography generally becomes the most economical option.
Independent publishing outlets are more likely to support irregular formats and experimental works produced by artists, designers, and photographers. These smaller outlets also provide opportunities for meeting, working, and discussions covering content, design possibilities, materials, and techniques—a process which is generally more formalized in larger commercial operations. Many publications thus start their journeys in informal surroundings, which can act as a testing ground for suitability of content and formats. For instance, zines may be among the few formats that can be produced more or less on a whim, although content still has to be developed, layouts planned, and artwork created. Zine culture often serves a political stance within the publishing industry, which can be subject to editorial barriers. By circumventing traditional publishing channels, zines provide a platform for marginalized voices and alternative perspectives, challenging the hierarchical structures of mainstream media. This DIY approach not only democratizes media production but also embodies resistance against commercialization and censorship, fostering a space for free expression and grassroots activism.
In the recent past, many independent publishers have emerged in India to address the need for alternatives to mass-producing, large-scale publishers. This essay highlights some of the ventures that occupy this space in various capacities and to different ends.
Co-published by Reliable Copy and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2022.
[R] High Entertainment, David Robbins, Published by Reliable Copy under the series, Wiggle Room, 2023.
Run by Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian, Reliable Copy is an independent publisher which specializes in books by, and about, artists and critics. They find works that align with their interests as artists, publishers, and editors, and work in close collaboration with them to produce each publication. At times, their publishing practice leads to curatorial interventions, as exemplified by the traveling exhibition ‘at the kitchen table’. Sarasija notes: “In its essence, Reliable Copy began as a way for us as artists to actively work in the space of independent publishing, working collaboratively with other artists to publish (in any format suitable to mass production and circulation) artworks, artist writing, and artist research. The model as such was meant to do two things: The first was for Nihaal and I as artists to work closely with other artists who we were excited or curious about, and in the process of bringing together a publication also get a chance to engage with their processes of work, research, and studio practices at large. The second was to test the theory of publishing in such a way within the Arts in India, building upon multiple other models that already have existed around the world for decades, so that the model could be seen as a precedent for other such publishing work in the subcontinent. Along the way, distribution and circulation became key concerns, and so a part of the motive was to set up systems for books we publish to get circulated globally, as well as using this system to bring books from other independent publishers around the world to South Asia, which has been in many ways a blind spot for international distributors.”
Two of their latest project series are ‘(Fine) Arts Dissertations Series’ and ‘Wiggle Room’. The ‘(Fine) Arts Dissertations Series’ projects various artists’ dissertations submitted as part of their Master’s study at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda. Under the series, Pushpamala N and Praneet Soi’s dissertations have been published, and dissertations by Kiran Subbaiah and Nilima Sheikh have recently been launched. The reprint of these dissertations is complemented by an in-depth interview with the artist conducted by the series’ editors. The interview provides context regarding the time and circumstances in which the dissertations were originally written, the process of developing them, the artist’s intent at the time, as well as tracing the trajectory of the artist’s practice and their engagement with writing, research, art history, and theory since then. ‘Wiggle Room’, on the other hand, looks at theoretical explorations by artists. Their first publication under this series is ‘High Entertainment’ by David Robbins. Reliable Copy distributes their publications through established independent and institutional outlets such as Champaca Bookstore (Bangalore), Dogears Bookstore (Goa), Printed Matter (New York), Inga (USA), Yellow Back Books (Cardiff, Wales), Good Press (Glasgow, Scotland), Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE), The Book Society (South Korea), and The Mosaic Rooms Bookshop (London, UK). The arrangements regarding process and distribution vary depending on where the distributor/bookshop is located, shipping costs, and exchange arrangements. Now, their books are available through distributor networks such as Public Knowledge Books and Les presses du réel.
The Press Works store, recently launched by Reliable Copy, is an online retailer and distributor in India of artists’ books, journals, catalogs, multiples, and expanded publishing, and plans to work towards building partnerships with independent publishers from across the globe to bring their books to India (and soon hopefully other parts of Asia as well), with a publisher-centric approach to distribution.
The exhibition
‘Kaghazi Pairahan’: Publishing and
Resistance in South Asia, Curated by
Akshay Mahajan & Devadeep Gupta, produced by Editions JOJO, Arthshila Ahmedabad, March, 2024.
Based in Mumbai, Editions JOJO is another publishing imprint/bookshop/library and platform for visual culture. Founder Kaamna Patel explains that Editions JOJO was “established as a publishing imprint in 2019, but in 2020, it took on the management of a library of photobooks, Bind Library.” Bind was created in 2015 by five photographers—Philippe Calia, Andrea Fernandes, Asmita Parelkar, Nishant Shukla, and Sunil Thakkar. The library was dedicated to the dissemination of the photobooks assembled by the collective throughout South Asia. The mission was to make photography books more accessible in the region and to foster a creative discourse and practice. For five years, it held numerous pop-up libraries, photobook exhibitions, and events in various festivals across India and Nepal. When they finally handed over their collection to Editions JOJO, the library contained close to 250 photobooks.
Shahidul Alam and Bill Shipsey at the exhibition ‘Kaghazi Pairahan’: Publishing and Resistance in South Asia, Curated by Akshay Mahajan & Devadeep Gupta, Produced by Editions JOJO and Doubledummy Studios, Arles, July 2023.
This collection became the basis of the reading room at Editions JOJO. They also organize events whereby the library, or a part of it, travels to other venues (such as Kānike Studio in Bangalore) to find new readers. Kaamna has plans for Editions JOJO to begin publishing books by other artists and photographers. In 2023, they successfully launched their inaugural collective book project titled ‘Good Morning’. This publication serves as a compilation of good morning messages originally crafted and exchanged on WhatsApp. Its primary goal is to cultivate a counterculture on the platform, challenging the prevalence of political propaganda and the spread of hateful content through the visual language inherent in the everyday "Good Morning" messages frequently shared on WhatsApp.
As an arts organization, Editions JOJO hosts a range of talks and presentations as well as having a reading room at their venue. “We believe that the photobook ecosystem cannot stand alone and so we actively work on expanding the conversations and opportunities around the medium via podcasts, exhibitions, workshops, and other opportunities for collaboration. We aim to promote interdisciplinary collaborations as a way to innovate within the photobook.” One of the recent projects by Editions JOJO is a podcast that engages with photographers, critics, publishers, educators, and other professionals around the ways in which photography shapes the world around us, especially in South Asia. Titled ‘Glass Eye: A Podcast on Visual Culture from South Asia', it is hosted by Adira Thekkuveettil, Akshay Mahajan, and Kaamna Patel. ‘Kaghazi Pairahan’, an exhibition presented by Editions JOJO and curated by Akshay Mahajan and Devadeep Gupta is a creation of reading room as an exhibition space to reflect on the concerns regarding dissent and resistance through photography and print. Thus, Editions JOJO continues to venture into spaces other than publishing to explore the themes emerging from their larger explorations of photography as practice in connection with the contemporary political contexts they exist in.
Independent spaces such as Reliable Copy and Editions JOJO make it part of their mission to obtain titles from abroad that are not easily available elsewhere in the country. This implies an understanding of their potential readership, who in turn will come to understand the type of content they can expect to find at these locations. Sarasija points out that “a range of cultural voices need a space in which to exist—I see this as a necessity in the current global scenario. Small independent publishers are at a disadvantage when it comes to the strategic distribution available to the big players like Sternberg, MIT, and Mousse.”
An important aspect of these independent publishing initiatives is the establishment of venues where publications can be seen and handled and where communities of like-minded practitioners can develop around them. Books contain a lot of information about their own construction—the type of paper, binding, typography, dustjackets, and covers; much of the “look and feel” of printed materials can be lost in online presentations.
Jolly Bird, Limited edition book, Kānike Studio, 2019.
There are other iterations of artist-led initiatives around photography, books, and publishing that don’t strictly identify themselves as publishers and work in multiple directions. Kānike Studio, founded by Indu Antony and Vivek Muthuramalingam, came into existence to make space for themselves to work closely with their hands and with each other. They set up a black-and-white darkroom with partners Krishanu Chatterjee and Aparna Nori (who later left the group to migrate to Singapore). Occasionally, they offer photography and darkroom workshops and run a residency that help sustain the space. During the Covid-19 lockdown, they produced a handmade book titled ‘Jolly Bird’ in an edition of 50 copies, with each spread contributed by an associate member. The book, which sold out in very short order, came out of a difficult year, during which the collective came together and found a home in each other’s company and practice. Their interest in publishing has taken other forms ranging from organizing a zine festival in 2022 to setting up a library at the Kānike Studio.
Reading rooms by Offset ProjectsOffset Projects by Anshika Varma also came into being in 2019 in New Delhi as “a means of thinking about formats around engagements in visual language and book-making.” This project was a spin-off from an existing project by Anshika called ‘The Offset Pitara’ (2018), a curated library of books from Varma’s own collection. Pitara, meaning a trunk, was an actual traveling trunk full of books that traveled across the country to give the public access to this collection. The Offset Projects title ‘Guftgu’ was first published in 2021—a deconstructed multilingual book that presents the works of ten lens-based practitioners bringing to the fore the diverse voices from the region. This publication, priced at INR 3000, in its first edition was distributed free to educational institutions. As Anshika puts it, this was to bring conversations around minority rights, gender, nationhood, and caste structures into the classroom through the works represented in the publication. A second iteration was later published in 2022 and now the 3rd edition is going to be printed in 2024.
Cover page, Second iteration of Guftgu, Published by Offset Projects, 2021.
The creation of the Offset Projects Bookshop in 2021 has made available a diverse collection of photobooks from the South Asia region (India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) created by a range of makers, from young practitioners to experienced artists, bookmakers, and authors. The presentation of these titles at bookfairs around the world as part of Offset Projects’ offerings is “extremely conducive to expanding a global understanding of the experiments in South Asia” while “at the same time bringing independent titles to the bookshop from different parts of the world.”
Offset Projects works to create channels of engagement in photography and book-making through artist talks, workshops, residencies, curated reading rooms, and collaborative exercises in publishing. Their mission is to make a space for collective engagement, meaningful critique, and reflective inquiry. The Offset Bookshop is still one of very few bookshops in the region dedicated entirely to photographic books and their production.
My own interest in the initiatives mentioned here stems from an engagement with printing and publishing and exploring artist’s book formats. I set up the Pure Land imprint as a platform for the design and production of exhibitions, books, and other printed materials, both as commissions and as collaborations. This has led to projects with some of the spaces mentioned above, as well as with students in universities and institutes.
The Fragment Corpora (Folio version), Published by Pure Land Design in collaboration with Atelier Prati, 2023.
Printmaking technologies are all close cousins of the book production process. Atelier Prati is a print studio and residency space in Bangalore started by Jayasimha Chandrashekar and S Basavachar, who have been assisted by many other colleagues and helpers.[1] While normally committed to producing litho- and screen-printed editions for artists and other printmakers, this is the first instance when they collaborated on a book project, a limited-edition publication with Pure Land titled ‘The Fragment Corpora’. The book was created during July 2023, and is a mix of screen prints, lithographs, chine-collé, and photographic techniques. Such handprinted books are expensive to mass produce but they can be distributed through bookstores sympathetic to the often irregular formats of books made by artists. ‘The Fragment Corpora’, as a limited edition, is in part a portfolio piece for the studio, but it also has a home in reading rooms, libraries, and galleries (including at Atelier Prati and Editions JOJO in India). An extended offset version is currently in production.
Short-lived independent productions are perhaps sometimes seen by the machinery of commerce and education as uneconomical and unproductive—not offering sufficient financial returns for the time expended. However, the products of individual and collective imaginations are a significant part of cultural production that trace a trajectory of objects outside the market space. Many well-known titles owe their existence to informal origins which can provide opportunities for the development of ideas without the pressures of prescribed goals and defined outcomes determining the direction of research.
As such, independent organizations have an important role to play as incubators of thought and experimentation in design and production; while their publications often find their way into the mainstream, they also provide an opportunity for the book to be seen as a limited-edition artwork or as a single object. There are few public and semi-public spaces which do not embody an agenda or an imperative to consume or to behave in a certain way. In contrast, these independent venues can host a plurality of views and positions, addressing the need for places where thoughts are free to roam, and a variety of impressions can be considered and explored without restraint.
[1] At the time of publishing this essay, Atelier Prati has come to an end as a collaboration. Atelier Prati has taken a new identity of B142.
Allan Parker is an artist, educator, and designer based in London and Bangalore. He is one of the founders of the Footnote Centre for Image and Text in Belgrade, Serbia and designs printed materials and exhibitions under the Pure Land moniker. He is a visiting lecturer at Camberwell School of Art and has been a visitor at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology since 2004.