IACK Conversations 02: A Polyphony of Architecture and Memory — A Conversation with Maarit Bau Mustonen on Kirjan edustalla on aukio
Cover of "Kirjan edustalla on aukio" (Multipöly, 2026) ©︎Maarit Bau Mustonen
Finnish artist Maarit Bau Mustonen’s artist’s book Kirjan edustalla on aukio was published by Multipöly in 2026. The work is devoted to a single building in Vantaa, a city just outside Helsinki: built as a library in 1957, later used as a children’s art centre, and today a gallery. Mustonen translates the building into a book through photographs of the empty gallery space and a text, hidden inside the uncut pages, that traces the building’s history.
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The Residency at Hamuro
Yukihito Kono (YK): To begin, could you introduce yourself and your practice?
Maarit Bau Mustonen (MBM): I’m an artist and publisher based in Helsinki, Finland. I work with text, images, installation and performance, and my current practice is quite site-specific. I’m interested in specific places and spaces, and I work with the layers of those spaces — their memory, one’s bodily or subjective experience of the space. I think the project we’re going to talk about today is a nice example of that. And I make artist’s books. That’s how we met. And that’s at the centre of my artistic work.
YK: How did you come to take part in the residency at Hamuro?
MBM: I was very lucky to be invited to Hamuro. It is a very small artist-run residency programme in Awara, Fukui Prefecture. It was founded by a Japanese-born artist, Shoji Kato, who has been living in Finland for a long time. So far, all the residents have come from Finland to Japan, and I was invited to spend July here.
YK: And what kind of work or research are you doing there?
MBM: I came with my basic interests, which are books, spaces and language. It’s been really fascinating. Just observing Japanese books — which start from here, from the other end, and whose lines of text run vertically instead of horizontally. Even these kinds of basic things that I can find in the countryside where the residency is located are really inspiring for my thinking.
“Kirjan edustalla on aukio”
YK: We met for the first time in July, or at the end of June, as far as I remember, when you visited IACK. On your second visit, you brought your own books with you. One was a book of text works, and the other was a book made of photographs and text. I found the latter, your new work, really beautiful — both as a work and as a book. So I want to talk more about this project.
MBM: The title of the book is Kirjan edustalla on aukio — “A town square faces the book”. The book is made of photographs and a bilingual text. It is about a specific building in Vantaa, my hometown. Nowadays this building is a gallery space, but I have memories of it from the 1990s, when I went there to sing in a children’s choir at the age of five, six, seven. Some years ago, when I was visiting my parents, I walked past this building — today a gallery — and, remembering I had been there as a child, I decided out of curiosity to go in and have a look. And I was really amazed by it. It’s very beautiful. The architecture is fascinating, and it’s also a bit of an odd, atypical space. It has a pit — a space like one big hole in the middle.
©︎Maarit Bau Mustonen
I then read that it was originally built to be a library. And I realised that the name of the gallery, “Galleria K” — the letter K — refers to kirjasto, “library” in Finnish. So its history is known, but I felt that it was still quite invisible in the space. With my bookmaking and publishing practice today, I became really interested in this space that was originally built for books. And then there were my own memories of the space, and the fact that it is a gallery today — again something connected to my work. So I felt that I wanted to make an exhibition about this space, in this gallery.
I made several visits to see the exhibitions there, and I noticed that it is a protected building nowadays. What you usually see there is sculptures on stands or paintings on the walls. So the building is more like a backdrop for the art. I wanted to make something that would bring the space itself to the centre. And so I started to plan an application for an exhibition, and to think about what kind of works I would like to make.
Turning a Building into a Book
YK: At first glance it might look like a typical photobook, but it’s not. And of course it is not an exhibition catalogue either. The pages are uncut, and if you try to open between them, you can see the text inside. Could you tell us a bit about these texts as well?
MBM: On the surface, you have photographs of this empty gallery space, and inside — behind the photographs, as it were — there is a text running, which traces the history of the building and its different roles: first as a library, then as a children’s art centre, nowadays as a gallery, and now also as a book. The text mixes these roles together, so that the different identities of the building — of the space — swap places. The title of the book is an example: instead of saying “a town square faces the building”, it says “a town square faces the book”.
©︎Maarit Bau Mustonen
As part of this exhibition-making project, I had this idea that the building should become a book. It is forty years since the library closed. So I wanted to recreate the connection between the building and books by, in a way, turning the building into a book. And I ended up working with photography and text. I think the text hiding behind the photographs is somehow describing the invisible — that which cannot be seen, but can perhaps be felt or known otherwise in the space.
Reading the Book During and After the Exhibition
YK: And the colours of the cover come from the building too, right?
MBM: Yes, yes. The outside of the book reflects the outside of the building itself. In the exhibition, visitors held this book and looked at the images in the real place.
YK: But there were no photographic prints in the exhibition — just the books, right? Why is that?
MBM: Yes, that’s correct. I’ve been interested in making artist’s books as part of my exhibitions, so that the book is one of the artworks, and I enjoy the way the work then has a kind of double identity. It is an artwork in the exhibition, and it exists in relation to the other mediums. In this exhibition, for example, I had an installation and a sound piece. So the book goes into dialogue with other art forms. And, well, an exhibition is always temporary. After the exhibition, the book has its life as a book, and it goes amongst the other books. That’s something I’ve been interested in exploring. That’s why this work was made as a book, and why these photographs were taken for the space of the book, not for the gallery space. I don’t see myself showing them as prints outside of this space. And as you mentioned, reading this book was quite a different experience in that actual space, compared to reading it here, now. But I think that’s the beauty of a book. A book can travel.
©︎Maarit Bau Mustonen
Returning to Photography
YK: Another thing I found interesting is your background. You studied photography at university, but you told me that this is the first photography book you have published, right?
MBM: I think I hadn’t worked with photography in my artistic practice for ten years or so. I had been photographing exhibitions — documenting my own exhibitions, and some of my friends’. So when I started to photograph this empty gallery space, I thought: this is what I’ve been doing, but now there are no artworks. It was strangely familiar. I had rather thought that I had left photography behind, so I was very surprised myself. I felt that in this case I had no choice. It’s not that I didn’t want to work with photography. I think I just felt quite insecure working with it, because it’s something I hadn’t actively followed for quite some time. When I studied photography, everything was about photography. But nowadays I’m not so up to date on what is happening in the field and what the current questions are.
But then I realised — because I had this interest in creating a dialogue between the architecture of the space and the architecture of the book — I realised that now I could do that with photography. Photography could make images of the space and bring them into the space of the book, and the book could lend its architecture to the images.
YK: I think photography works really well in this case. If the book were made only of text — it would still be good, I suppose, but reading it in the actual space would only be like reading someone’s memories. But this book has photographs, and the photographs are not from the old days. So visitors have a strange experience. They see the actual space, and at the same time they see the photographs — taken only recently, yet, read together with the text, they take on the expression of the past. There is a gap there. There is already a gap of time between the photographs and the real space. And the text, too, covers a long period of time.
MBM: Yes. On the spines, you have the years in which the building turned into something else, starting from the beginning. It was built in the 1950s — in 1957.
YK: When I think of the exhibition and the book, the photographs are like a bridge, I think: connecting viewers and the exhibition space — I mean the building — and also connecting you, the artist, and the people who contributed the texts.
©︎Maarit Bau Mustonen
Being an Artist and Publisher
YK: As we have been discussing, you know a lot about books, and you also run a publishing house yourself. Can you tell me a bit more about the publishing house as well?
MBM: Besides making my own books and publications, I have a very small, two-person publishing collective. In Finnish we say Multipöly; in English we can say Multipoly. Pöly means dust in Finnish, and multi is about many, multiple and various. I founded it together with the graphic designer Arja Karhumaa. Together we are interested in text-based practices — in art, design and artistic research.
At Multipöly, we focus on experimental publishing. We try to do things that are creative for us, which is a bit different from just producing a book. We can give only a little time to the collective and to the publishing projects, so we realised that we should do things that we enjoy making. And I think that as an artist, part of your work is also reading, viewing and interpreting, and perhaps responding to your peers’ work. So at its best, there is no difference between my own work and someone else’s. At its core, it’s not about whose work it is, because there is creativity in all parts of the work.
©︎Maarit Bau Mustonen
The Art Book Scene in Finland
YK: Is it common for artists to run their own publishing house in Finland?
MBM: We have some artist-run publishing practices — more nowadays than, let’s say, five years ago. I think maybe COVID did something to publishing. During that time you couldn’t gather together, and perhaps you couldn’t go to certain spaces, but books you can read at home. A book is like a private space of your own. So I think that period did something to publishing. Of course, in Finland the art field is small and the publishing field is small, but I feel there is more and more interest in publishing, among artists and writers alike. In photography, it has been popular for a long, long time. And I remember noticing, when I started to learn more about artist publishing, that in Central Europe, for example, many of these kinds of small initiatives are started by graphic designers, whereas in Finland they are often started by photographers — which is, I think, an interesting difference. But is it common? It’s not the mainstream. But it’s active and it’s lively at the moment.
There is something I should add, though — what is now changing is that the arts and culture field has faced a lot of cuts in funding. That’s quite a big issue at the moment. It’s always difficult to make your living as an artist, but especially with this kind of work that is in the margins. I don’t know what it will look like in three years — how to sustain these kinds of practices — because in Finland you can’t make a living by selling artist’s books, so you need to have some funding for your work. I don’t know if we can sustain this very lively publishing field with the current cuts.
YK: Of course, nothing is free.
MBM: Yes, that’s true. It really isn’t.
YK: To close, could you tell us about any works in progress or any upcoming events?
MBM: Yes. With Multipöly, we are finishing a long-running project, the Eurantie Window Publication. It has been going on for three and a half years: about once a month, we have published new texts, commissioned from an artist, a writer or a researcher, in our studio window. I have documented all of them in photographs.
YK: As a photographer?
MBM: Yes, as a photographer. And now we are making it into a book. That’s a nice thing to think about, a nice thing to work on soon. It is also quite site-specific and connected to the architecture. So now — to translate it into a book.
This text was edited based on the video interview “IACK Conversations 02,” recorded at IACK and released on August 20, 2026. It has been lightly edited for readability.
Interview and editing: Yukihito Kono, IACK
▶ Watch the full interview video with subtitles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QaWnSHErJ4
▶ Purchase Maarit Bau Mustonen’s Kirjan edustalla on aukio (Multipöly, 2026)
www.iack.online/products/kirjan-edustalla-on-aukio-by-maarit-bau-mustonen
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