The CAC Reading Room has expanded its collection to include a selection of new publications, now available for visitors to explore:
KATAŽYNA JANKOVSKA. OFF-GRID
This publication was produced during the 2025 Alex Adriaansens Residency in collaboration with V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media.
In Off-Grid, curator, writer and researcher Katažyna Jankovska explores alternative, often overlooked infrastructures and social practices in a world that depends heavily on fragile, globally interconnected systems. At the centre of the research is the question of how collective action and institutional models are transformed when everyday infrastructure is destabilised or collapses altogether.
‘What happens when the systems we rely on every day suddenly stop working? Off-Grid explores counter-infrastructures, DIY practices and modes of collective action. The publication brings together stories of protest networks in Belarus, internet cables stretched between apartment blocks in Romania, repurposed power plants, exhibitions organised in forests and farms, cultural spaces reorganised during the war in Ukraine, and artists’ ambitious attempts to build a toaster from scratch. Through these examples, it asks what autonomy can mean in a world built on fragile, interconnected systems – and how much room for manoeuvre remains within them.’
– Katažyna Jankovska
THE NON GRATA CATALOGUE COLLECTION
These catalogues by the international performance art group NON GRATA were donated to the Reading Room by painter, performance and video artist Evaldas Jansas. They offer an opportunity to encounter the collective’s extravagant, experimental and radically provocative creative practice, as well as its documentation.
NON GRATA is an international performance art group from Estonia, founded in 1998 and known for its constantly shifting membership. The collective operates beyond traditional art-world and institutional boundaries, describing its practice as ‘liberation’ or ‘a cure from incest’ for those whose creative discourse begins where the conventional art world ends. The group considers the aesthetics of primitivism, impersonal authorship and uncompromising experimentation to be among its key creative principles.
The catalogues introduce the group’s philosophy, which questions the meaning of contemporary art and its relationship to established norms. As stated in the group’s programmatic text ‘Art of the Invisibles’: ‘Already from the point of view of death of conventionalisation of art, NON GRATA has embodied the horrible and unwanted disembodiment of human person, from which the meaninglessness of nowadays art is pouring out.’
These and other publications are available at the CAC Reading Room, which is open during the summer on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 11 a.m.–7 p.m.