Friday: Language, Translation, and Editorial
Pub Fest Opening & Welcome
2.30pm, Programme Space
Roundtable: Publishing as Practice
2.30–3.45pm, Programme Space
All publishers
An introduction to the world of independent publishing through a roundtable where participating publishers present ideas, ask questions, and respond to each other's practices.
Workshop: Translating Waters – A Workshop in Literary Relation
4.00–4.45pm, Programme Space
Tilted Axis Press
What happens when we stop organising literature by nation, language, or region, and instead ask what currents connect texts across oceans? Drawing on Tilted Axis Press's ‘Translating Waters’ framework, Kristen Vida Alfaro of Tilted Axis Press invites readers, publishers, translators, and artists to explore translation as a practice of relationality. Participants consider how relationships emerge by working collectively with texts, themes, and literary fragments from different traditions.
Library Session
4.00–4.45pm, Library
Join an Asymmetry team member for an introduction to our Library, a specialist collection dedicated to Chinese and Sinophone contemporary art, alongside curatorial research, theory, and knowledge production. Discover highlights from the collection, explore its unique resources, and learn more about how the Library connects with research and artistic practice.
Lecture Performance: Please Shoot the Messenger
5.00–5.45pm, Programme Space
Jordan, jordan Édition with Allysha Nila
Indonesia’s current political climate is increasingly shaping the conditions under which artists, publishers, educators, and image-makers work. Jordan Marzuki of Jordan, jordan Édition and Allysha Nila combine their practices in publishing, pedagogy, and image making in a performance lecture, to subvert the adage on its head: the role of the communicator is usually placed as something passive, but can this continue to be the case?
Reading Performance: Pamenar – Hybrid Forms, Translation & Performance
6.00–7.00pm, Programme Space
Pamenar Press with Cat Chong, Iris Colomb, and Sophie Seita
Situated within a multilingual and cross-cultural publishing practice centred on poetry and literary translation, Ghazal Mosadeq of Pamenar Press presents a reading-performance with collaborators, exploring the intersections of sound, poetry, and translation through live reading and deep listening.
Saturday: Archives, Memories, and Counter-Histories
Reading Room & Breakfast
11.00am–12.30pm, Reading Room
A shared space featuring publications from participating publishers. Breakfast and refreshments are served alongside quiet reading and relaxed conversations in the reading room, which remains open throughout the festival.
Screening: Come Dance With Me (2022), directed by Yunyi Liu, Bozhi Wei
12.30–2.00pm, Programme Space
Presented by 51 Personae
A documentary on the Lai Lai Ballroom in Shanghai, once a well-known gathering place within the city’s gay community. Particularly popular among middle-aged and older homosexual men over the past decade, the ballroom closed in 2018, leaving the film as a valuable archive of the love, desire, loss, and grief that once filled the space.
Keynote: What is not enough? Rethinking Publishing as an Art Practice
2.00–3.00pm, Programme Space
51 Personae
Chen Yun of 51 Personae presents a keynote on the press’s publishing practice, outlining how it has grown from a community-based social experiment into a small press that uses publishing and guerrilla-style distribution as a means of forging solidarities across geographies and contexts, while attending to local life and personal stories from Shanghai, China, and beyond.
Reading Workshop I: The Ninth House – Collective Knowledges
2.00-3.00pm, Library (Sign-up essential)
Silver Press / Spiral House
Inspired by the Ninth House, traditionally associated with the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and expanded perspectives, this workshop explores knowledge-making and sharing. Throughout the weekend, visitors can book confidential one-to-one bibliomancy sessions with Sarah Shin of Silver Press / Spiral House, where questions are explored through divinatory readings from encounters with carefully selected books.
Check-in point: Bookshop (first floor)
Walking Workshop I: A Tea Break of Garden Wanderings
3.00–4.00pm, Outdoors (Sign-up essential)
Plant South Salesroom
Yao Jiang of Plant South Salesroom leads a site-responsive exploration of domestic gardens, plants, and personal memory, along with selected garden books and prints, around the neighbourhood.
Meeting point: Asymmetry main entrance (ground floor)
Screening: CROP (2013), directed by Johanna Domke and Marouan Omara
3.00–4.00pm, Programme Space
Presented by Kayfa ta
An experimental documentary about images, power, and the making of official memory during and after Egypt’s 2011 revolution. Filmed inside Al-Ahram, Egypt’s historic state newspaper, the film stays away from the familiar images of the uprising and instead looks at the institution that helped shape how the nation saw itself for decades.
Library Session
3.00–3.45pm, Library
Join an Asymmetry team member for an introduction to our Library, a specialist collection dedicated to Chinese and Sinophone contemporary art, alongside curatorial research, theory, and knowledge production. Discover highlights from the collection, explore its unique resources, and learn more about how the Library connects with research and artistic practice.
Keynote: How to Reappear – Through the Quivering Leaves of Independent Publishing
4.00–5.00pm, Programme Space
Kayfa ta
Maha Maamoun of Kayfa ta reflects on their exhibition-making and publishing practice, attending to the quiet resilience of overlooked practices, the disappeared histories, and their lingering resonance today.
Reading Workshop II: The Ninth House – Collective Knowledges
4.00-5.00pm, Library (Sign-up essential)
Silver Press / Spiral House
Inspired by the Ninth House, traditionally associated with the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and expanded perspectives, this workshop explores knowledge-making and sharing. Throughout the weekend, visitors can book confidential one-to-one bibliomancy sessions with Sarah Shin of Silver Press / Spiral House, where questions are explored through divinatory readings from encounters with carefully selected books.
Check-in point: Bookshop (first floor)
Walking Workshop II: A Tea Break of Garden Wanderings
5.00–6.00pm, Outdoors (Sign-up essential)
Plant South Salesroom
Yao Jiang of Plant South Salesroom leads a site-responsive exploration of domestic gardens, plants, and personal memory, along with selected garden books and prints, around the neighbourhood.
Meeting point: Asymmetry main entrance (ground floor)
Library Session
5.00–5.45pm, Library
Join an Asymmetry team member for an introduction to our Library, a specialist collection dedicated to Chinese and Sinophone contemporary art, alongside curatorial research, theory, and knowledge production. Discover highlights from the collection, explore its unique resources, and learn more about how the Library connects with research and artistic practice.
Performance & Drinks: SILENT ARROW
6.00–8.00pm, Programme Space
Flora Yin Wong with Ekaterina Bazhenova-Yamasaki
A collaborative performance that takes the stark form of spoken word, drone and ancient strings. It is informed by both artists’ overlapping practice in various mediums from writing, photography, and sculpture, to the core principles of the Japanese form of archery, Kyudo. The performance is followed by a DJ set by Flora Yin Wong, celebrating the community of independent publishing with all audiences and participants.
Sunday: Publishing as Infrastructure
Reading Room & Breakfast
11.00am–12.30pm, Reading Room
A shared space featuring publications from participating publishers. Breakfast and refreshments accompany moments of quieter rhythm and reflection, as the reading room remains open throughout the festival.
Lecture Workshop: Publishing as Method – Rethinking Publishing Through Asia
12.30–2.00pm, Programme Space
Mediabus / The Book Society
Kyungyong Lim of Mediabus / The Book Society shares their approach to publishing from an inter-Asian perspective in an interactive presentation, alongside reflections on their earlier initiatives and the gains and challenges of running a community-led publishing practice.
Reading Workshop III: The Ninth House – Collective Knowledges
1.30-2.30pm, Library (Sign-up essential)
Silver Press / Spiral House
Inspired by the Ninth House, traditionally associated with the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and expanded perspectives, this workshop explores knowledge-making and sharing. Throughout the weekend, visitors can book confidential one-to-one bibliomancy sessions with Sarah Shin of Silver Press / Spiral House, where questions are explored through divinatory readings from encounters with carefully selected books.
Check-in point: Bookshop (first floor)
Workshop: RISOnic textures (a cassette)
2.30–3.30pm, Programme Space (Sign-up essential)
Rabbits Road Press with Amrita Dhallu
Rose Nordin of Rabbits Road Press and Amrita Dhallu lead a session on collaging a sound score in response to site recordings of RISO machine sounds in action, using RISO textured offprints from the RRP community offprint bin. Considering the publication of sound through existing marks and texture repurposed into a fluorescent synthetic arrangement, each participant will produce an interpretative collage score that becomes a cassette cover to insert and take away.
Library Session
3.00–3.45pm, Library
Join an Asymmetry team member for an introduction to our Library, a specialist collection dedicated to Chinese and Sinophone contemporary art, alongside curatorial research, theory, and knowledge production. Discover highlights from the collection, explore its unique resources, and learn more about how the Library connects with research and artistic practice.
Workshop: Publishing Agony Aunt
3.45–4.45pm, Programme Space
Silver Press / Spiral House
Alongside the individual consultations in the Ninth House sessions, Sarah Shin of Silver Press invites participants to submit anonymous publishing dilemmas and issues via the public question box in the space. These questions are addressed in this collective workshop drawing on the shared knowledge and experience of the community to offer advice, reflect on common challenges and imagine other ways of publishing together.
Closing
5.00pm