We are pleased to announce New York and Beijing-based publisher te editions as our 2025 Librarians-in-Residence. From May to July 2025, their residency project, titled ‘The Borderless Shelf: Reimagining a Library Space’, will animate our library through themed acquisitions, participatory projects, public programmes, and writings. As our first Librarians-in-Residence entirely based overseas, te editions will foster dialogue between diasporic Asian communities across London and New York, through the lens of independent publishing and the evolving role of the library.

Founded as a bilingual magazine with a global readership, te brings a distinct transnational perspective to the programme, reflecting the shifting geographies of publishing and diaspora today. Their practice explores how publishing can connect dispersed communities, moving fluidly between online platforms, book fairs, and public events across diverse locations.

The residency invites us to reimagine the radical potential of libraries—not as static repositories, but as dynamic, collective spaces where the diasporic is lived as an ongoing practice of negotiation and imagination, and where multiple futures can be held. Departing from the notion of the library as a solitary reading space, te will convene independent reading rooms from Berlin, New York, and London—each committed to archiving and presenting Asian artistic publishing practices in transnational and intercultural frameworks—to share reflections on the labour, intentions, and encounters that sustain spaces of gathering, reading, and resistance.

Thinking beyond the walls of the library, te invites audiences to imagine the act of gathering around books as a shared, mobile site for connection and transformation—carried by the material and collective weight of reading and sharing. Manifested through a series of community-led interventions, the programme further dissolves the boundaries between public and private reading spaces. Recognising libraries as fragile sites where fragmented histories converge, this residency also probes the vulnerabilities of collective memory, exploring how absence might be reimagined as a site of renewal, resistance, and solidarity.

Drawing from their extensive engagement with international art book fairs, te will expand our library’s holdings through thematic acquisitions tracing narratives of displacement and precarious knowledge systems. The residency will be accompanied by the librarians’ journal, offering reflections on the labour behind independent publishing and documenting te’s collaborative processes across digital and physical terrains.

Further details on the upcoming public programmes will be announced shortly via our online channels.