Curated bookshelves have been a distinctive and long-standing tradition of the CAC Reading Room. Guests are invited to create a reading list, which becomes a permanent resource for the readers. The tradition began in 2009 with two curated bookshelves to mark the opening of the Reading Room – one compiled by the bookshop and the gallery castillio/corrales and the other by poet and art historian Alfonsas Andriuškevičius. Over the years, Chris Kraus and Hedi El Kholti, Linda van Deursen, and Quinn Latimer have also contributed to this tradition, with the most recent addition made by Gailė Pranckūnaitė in 2020. This year, with the re-opening of the building, it felt right to revive this tradition and loosely connect it to the Baltic Triennial by inviting its designer Julie Peeters. Julie is no stranger to the Reading Room; in 2019 the second issue of BILL magazine was launched here.
Prior to the announcement of the shelf Julie wrote:
‘There I was, flipping through BILL1, BILL2, BILL3, BILL4, and BILL5, trying to make sense of pages I had looked at so many times before, when suddenly I caught myself staring at EYES—not just any e y e s, but the kind that are made up by Inge Grognard. Just as I was about to move on, I found this floppy piece of fabric with a newspaper inside. BILL newspaper had been used as a makeshift bookmark for my own thoughts in the summer of 2021. Meanwhile, over in RE-magazine, Jop Van Bennekom was doing his best to convince readers that the way to digest a magazine is by dissecting its underlying structure until, as a reader, you become part of it. Then, out of nowhere, I saw Cut a Door in the Wolf by Jason Dodge and walked on dried flowers through Japanese-bound pages with photos by Adrianna Glaviano. Magazines by Claude Closky sat nearby, looking suspiciously self-aware, like it knew it was the glossy prop it was. Who is Curtis Cuffie? His work was all around Manhattan’s Lower East Side, but seldom for longer than a day, so the page seemed the perfect place to host him. Meanwhile, AC: Isa Genzken/Wolfgang Tillmans was like a tornado of concrete and glamour, which only they could produce. Then I stumbled upon Isa Genzken Mach dich hübsch, which is basically German for “get pretty”, which I thought was quite a bold demand. I reached Mechanisms by Anthony Huberman, where everything has a process, and my mind got transported to San Francisco and a bookshop, where I was handed a piece of film reel by Bruce Connor. Lastly, I found myself in The Well by Nigel Shafran, deep diving into Nigel’s archive and talking with Linda van Deursen’s exquisite eye.’
JULIE PEETERS is a designer and editor based in Brussels. She is the founder and editor in chief of BILL, an annual magazine of photographic stories and a publishing project focusing on the printed image. She has collaborated with institutions such as Grazer Kunstverein, MUDAM, Kunstverein München, CCA Wattis and Tai Kwun Contemporary. In 2021, she presented her first solo exhibition, Daybed, at MACRO in Rome. Peeters has collaborated on publications with Linder Sterling, Silke Otto Knapp, Thomas Demand, Sophie Nys, Laure Prouvost, Karel Martens, and Isa Genzken. In 2015 she was awarded the Golden Letter Prize. Peeters has taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and currently teaches at KASK School of Arts in Ghent.
The new curated bookshelf is now available at the CAC Reading Room (Aušros Vartų St. 5 / Pasažo Ln., Vilnius) during working hours: Monday to Friday from 11:00 to 19:00, with a lunch break from 13:00 to 14:00.
Photographer of the title image: Severina Venckutė