Within the gaps

Zehra Begüm Kışla
26 Haz
8 dakikada okunur

Güncelleme tarihi: 29 Haz

Organized by Huo Rf, Vanilla, Grass, Almond brought together artists at Kendi Collection who rethink the artist's book through materiality, memory, and intervention. We spoke with participating artists Rahel Zoller and Rhonda Khalifeh about how the artist's book can be reimagined through the lenses of archive, speculation, preservation, and disappearance

Interview: Zehra Begüm Kışla

Vanilla, Grass, Almond, Exhibition view, 2026. Photo: Barış Özçetin

Tracing the material processes through which book objects take shape, the exhibition Vanilla, Grass, Almond, organized by Huo Rf and on view at Kendi Collection in Istanbul, brings together artists who approach the book not simply as a finished publication but as a mutable object shaped by material, sound, and intervention. In this conversation, artists Rahel Zoller and Rhonda Khalifeh reflect on their distinct approaches to bookmaking. Zoller’s practice unfolds through acts of collecting and recomposition, assembling discarded final pages into dense volumes that foreground the fragmentary survival of printed matter. Khalifeh, working across textiles and printmaking, draws on craft traditions and material archives to examine the transmission of knowledge, memory, and loss across geographies marked by rupture. While their methods diverge, both practices situate the artist’s book within a field of gaps—between preservation and disappearance, archive and speculation—where meaning emerges not from completeness, but from what remains partial, displaced, and open to interpretation.

In the exhibition Vanilla, Grass, Almond, Huo Rf reflects on what a book is made of—materially, conceptually, and affectively—and considers how the physicality of the book-object shapes its relationship with the reader or its owner.

You each contributed your own artist’s books, yet through very different approaches and modes of production. Could you share the title(s) of the works you presented in the exhibition, and reflect on how both your individual understanding of the “artist’s book” and your way of making it shaped your contribution to the show?

Rahel Zoller: For the exhibition Vanilla Almond Grass I chose Last Pages, a book composed entirely of final pages collected from discarded books and arranged numerically by page number. By highlighting what is usually overlooked, endings, appendices, indexes and advertisements, the work forms a textual menagerie of chance, in which fragments from different languages and contexts meet without hierarchy.

For the exhibition I created Last Pages of Last Pages, assembled from the torn-out final page of each of the 500 copies of the original edition and rebound into a single, 9-cm-thick volume, with the torn edges forming the foredge. My understanding of the artist’s book is informed by the physicality and the conceptual approach of books as objects and in this work my interest is also in the relational and aleatory possibilities of text. In Last Pages of Last Pages, object and process shape the work by materially transforming the pages into a new bookwork, treating it as an archive of endings.

Rhonda Khalifeh: I’m drawn towards the creation of artist's books as a mode of alternative archive building that privileges lesser known material narratives. I find there to be an inherent layering of processes that further activates the printed page, allowing each process to become a site for collective narratives to unfold. In this way an artist’s book doubles as a record of relational materials and experiences. The layering of processes and materials in an artist’s book can also function to offer multiple readings. For example, “Questions Concerning Craft: Aghabani” can be interpreted through the lens of geopolitical events, as a straight forward record of Syrian traditional craft in the city of Douma, or it can be a sensory experience that evokes a sort of haptic familiarity for those engaged in letterpress printmaking and bookmaking.

This exhibition thoroughly challenges notions of what makes a book a book, down to the core idea that once complete, a book is unyielding other than in its physical decomposition over time. The idea of intervening with the static, preconceived timeline of a book seemed especially pertinent when considering “Questions Concerning Craft: Aghabani,” where I use the language of regional craft to draw attention to war crimes committed by the Assad regime in Syria. While working on the edition it was necessary that I speak in code on the topic. However, only a few weeks after its completion, the Assad regime fell. My intervention speaks to this empowering and yet admittedly overwhelming moment where my previously implicit language could now be transitioned into the realm of the explicit.

Rahel Zoller, Last Pages of Last Pages. Photo: Barış Özçetin

Thank you, and since your approaches diverge quite distinctly, I’d like to address you individually.

Rahel, your practice does not intervene in the writing of the artist’s book so much as it operates through collecting, extracting, and reassembling existing pages and materials. Thinking through Ulises Carrión’s text The New Art of Making Books (1975), where he distinguishes between the “old art” and the “new art” of bookmaking, and insists that the latter must apprehend the book as a structure by identifying its elements and understanding their function. In Last Pages of Last Pages, it feels as though the focus shifts away from what is written on the pages toward how the book itself operates—as an object, an encounter, and an experience.

Would it be fair to say that your interest lies less in textual meaning and more in the affective, sensory, and spatial experience of confronting this dense mass of endings, in how the viewer relates to the volume as a physical presence, an archive of fragments, and a structure of accumulated time?R. Z.: What I like about Ulises Carrión’s text The New Art of Making Books is that he suggests you don’t need to read a book from beginning to end, rather, if you understand it as an artwork in itself, the moment you recognise its intention, you have already read it.

I enjoy working with text in my practice. An early piece, The Inner Monologue of the Book, was written from the perspective of the book itself. It is self-aware and reflects on its own materiality (paper, thread, process) and purpose as a relational object. Again, it is a book that doesn’t need to be read from front to back, because the text is just one part of the conceptual whole.

In Last Pages of Last Pages, the onlooker is invited to wonder what these last pages signify and what might be printed on them, or whether they are simply blank. The book is protected by a clear slipcase and is therefore impossible for the viewer to touch. It is up to the viewer to create the ending.

Overall, in all my works I am interested in how the content can be reflected through shape, materiality, and process.

Rhonda Khalifeh, Questions Concerning Craft: Aghabani. Photo: Barış Özçetin

Rhonda, your practice engages deeply with the layered structure of the book as an object–with materials, processes, and the traditions of making that bind it together. In Questions Concerning Craft: Aghabani, you bring into dialogue the history and knowledge of letterpress and regional craft traditions with the specific context of Douma, a city that has endured years of siege and violence, and you translate these lineages into a form of alternative archive-building through your own bookmaking practice.

Before moving into the question of transmission, could you share a bit more about the Aghabani project and its material choices, the forms of craftsmanship you draw from, how the work took shape as a bookwork, and how you gather and engage with the know-how of that geography?

R. K.: Aghabani is a style of embroidered Syrian textile commonly associated with tablecloths and other home linens. It’s not an exaggeration to say that some form of Aghabani is present in virtually every Damascene household. The fabric is ubiquitous to the point that it’s not uncommon for young girls to possess knowledge of the colloquial lore surrounding the fabric: Traditionally a damascene bride received a set of Aghabani linens as part of her wedding dowry, while in the city of Douma a bride traditionally received an Aghabani embroidery machine as part of her wedding dowry.

Going back at least three generations, Aghabani fabric has been created in collaboration between print shops in Damascus and female embroiderers in Douma. Embroidery pattern guides are first block printed or screen printed in Damascus using a temporary blue ink before the fabric is brought to Douma. In Douma, the embroiderer makes the final design decisions regarding the color palette and thread density before stitching the design using a specialized, hand-operated embroidery machine. Historically speaking, Aghabani embroidery motifs are somewhat ambiguous compared to the ultra specific symbology behind traditional Syrian cross-stitch embroidery patterns. A great deal of creative interpretation is left to the embroiderer and yet there is very little recorded information on the process from the first-hand perspective of the embroiderers.

In the spring of 2023, several well worn Aghabani tablecloths and their respective fabric napkin sets came into my possession. Looking at the different fabric napkins together, each with its own distinct embroidery pattern, underscored the humanness and individuality of each embroiderer. By 2023 most of the world had forgotten Douma and I felt urgently compelled to work with the visual language present in these napkins. I became interested in the way the physicality of printmaking could act as a connecting force between my subjective record of this material and the original collaborative process of making it.

I’m interested in the moments of translation that occur in this process. When traditions, techniques, and forms of knowledge move across contexts, geographies, and lived histories, what kinds of gaps, ruptures, or silences can emerge? And how do you think about transmission in this sense, particularly in relation to memory, loss, and care, as you carry these materials and knowledge into your own artistic language?

R. K.: I photographed the napkins and converted them into digital bitmap drawings that would translate well into letterpress printing plates. Depending on the specific napkin I was working with, this process often degraded the quality of the embroidered image. Using the distorted embroidery motifs was not a decision I took lightly, especially when considering how little craft knowledge is being transmitted today. When experimenting with alternative material archives, I’m also questioning the parameters we use to determine what is or isn’t worthy of preservation and what constitutes as a complete narrative. A sort of speculative fiction can arise from these gaps in narrative—we see that quite often in contemporary futurist movements.

When the archeological site Dura-Europos was excavated by France and Yale University in the 1920s and 30s, they claimed ownership of hundreds of ancient textile fragments and left only what they considered unremarkable behind in Syria. These discarded fragments were never included in the documentation of the site. Using deconstructed images of textiles also serves as a protest to the exclusion of these textiles from archeological records and the hierarchy of value that was superimposed onto them.

Following your response, Rahel, I would like to ask one more question. Alongside your materially focused approach to artist’s bookmaking, chance and randomness also seem to play an important role in your practice. This aspect is highlighted in a review of the project, which suggests that your collection of fragments—described as partial remnants of larger lost works—functions almost like a reliquary, preserving pieces of vanished cultural bodies for curious readers.

What do you think about the reviewer’s argument that the project turns discarded final pages into a poetic archive of fragments, revealing how books and cultural memory survive only partially and by chance? Do you think this interpretation resonates with your intentions, or does it move the work far from its center?

R. Z.: I find the idea of speculative narratives emerging from gaps, which Rhonda mentions, very compelling. In a way, the last pages I collect also sit within such gaps, between disappearance and survival.

Some of these books will inevitably be forgotten, may never be reprinted, or might slowly disappear because of the fragility of their cheap materiality. In that sense, I do like the reviewer’s suggestion that the project turns these pages into a kind of fragmentary archive.

It also reminds me of another phenomenon in book history known as binding waste. During the late fifteenth century, many manuscripts in monastic libraries were replaced by printed copies. Misprinted works, surplus paper, and pieces of parchment were often reused as spine linings for these new books. Through this reuse, fragments of texts that might otherwise have been lost were unintentionally preserved. Each spine therefore carries its own story, a kind of hidden code beneath the surface of the book.

If Last Pages could one day function in a similar way, as small artefacts through which forgotten works might be rediscovered, I would be very happy about that.