In connection with the Crosscut exhibition, Ljiljana Maletin Vojvodić will hold an event at BIBLIOTHEKET’s new premises at Konstepidemin, titled Instruction Readings.

BIBLIOTHEKET is a small-scale reference library focusing on independently published printed matter and artist’s books.

Artist’s Books

Discarded book covers, handmade paper from recycled pulp, hand binding

Instruction Readings is a series of conceptual artist’s books that Ljiljana Maletin Vojvodić began during her residency at TYPA – Printing and Paper Arts Centre in Tartu, Estonia, in 2021. Combining discarded book covers, handmade paper made from recycled pulp, and traditional bookbinding techniques, the works explore the relationship between writing and reading, narrative and meaning, and the ways in which books are made and experienced.

Drawing on the tradition of experimental and conceptual artist’s books, particularly the legacy of New Artistic Practice in Novi Sad in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as Fluxus and Yoko Ono’s works such as Grapefruit, Maletin Vojvodić treats the book simultaneously as an artwork, an object, a medium, and a conceptual platform.

The covers of discarded books by Russian, Persian, and Estonian authors are combined with blank pages made from handmade recycled paper. The titles are embossed using a Gutenberg press, while the absence of narrative content transforms the book into a space for interpretation, alternative forms of reading, and recontextualisation.

By leaving the pages blank, Maletin Vojvodić deliberately gives the reader a role in the creative process. Imagination is not solely the author’s domain; it also emerges through the reader’s active engagement with the work. The blank page becomes an invitation to project, interpret, imagine, and create meaning. The works also address the contemporary crisis of reading in a culture increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and algorithmic content production.

The reuse of discarded book covers and recycled paper simultaneously raises questions of ecological responsibility, material memory, transformation, and slowness. Instruction Readings brings literature and visual art together by approaching the artist’s book as an expanded field of literature, not as a vessel for a predetermined narrative, but as a space for slowing down, reflection, and contemplation.

Ljiljana Maletin Vojvodić

Ljiljana Maletin Vojvodić is a writer, visual artist, cultural researcher, and art journalist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. Her interdisciplinary practice spans literature, research-based writing, photography, art criticism, and conceptual artist’s books, with a focus on contemporary art, image studies, intercultural dialogue, gender studies, and visual culture.

Her work has been presented in Serbia and internationally, including in Svalbard, the United States, Croatia, and other European countries. Her long-term artistic and research engagement with Nordic and Arctic cultures has developed through artist residencies and research programmes in Sweden, Iceland, Greenland, Denmark, Svalbard, Finland, and Norway, as well as through residencies and research projects in France, Portugal, Latvia, Estonia, Japan, and Spain.

She has received artist residency grants, literary and photography awards, and international cultural support from institutions and programmes including NORLA, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and the Embassy of Finland in Belgrade, the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Belgrade, the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, MuseumsQuartier/Q21 Vienna, Novi Sad – European Capital of Culture 2022, and EU-Japan Fest in Tokyo.

She has collaborated with visual artist Dragan Vojvodić on artistic and research projects in Serbia and internationally.

Maletin Vojvodić is co-founder of the Art Box NGO and its artist-in-residence programme in Novi Sad, and editor-in-chief of the Art Box portal, a platform dedicated to contemporary art and culture.