‍ ‍Image: Installation view C& Center of Unfinished Business, ifa Gallery Berlin, Berlin 2017. Photo: Florian Bong-Kil Grosse.

Mobile Reading Room: The C& Center of Unfinished Business by Contemporary And

The C& Center of Unfinished Business is a reading room that offers an extraordinary, sometimes disconcerting selection of books connected to the topic of colonialism in various ways – from German colonization to Congolese fashion to twenty-first-century capital markets, it stretches into many different areas affected. Launched in 2017, the reading room has travelled and connected in various ways with institutions from Cincinnati to Hong Kong, via Berlin, Vienna, Toulouse, Athens, Kassel and New York. 

Initiating encounters and open conversations around persistent colonial power relations, including issues of accessibility and historical awareness, the Center encourages critical questioning and invites visitors to reflect on their own weak spots. The Center does not aim to create a coherent and complete library on colonialism, because when could that ever be the case? Colonialism is unfinished business. It continues to exist in various forms. This mobile reading room contains books from C&'s collection curated by Ethel-Ruth Tawe.  

For this Helsinki edition, Southnord will be contributing our collection of art reference books to the room.

Lateral Reading: Longitudes & Latitudes

How can gestures of reading become deliberate acts of connectivity? In what ways might we stretch and reach towards each other across increasingly hostile borders? This reading room underscores Southnord's themes of roots, routes, and records across Black geographies, and the C& Center of Unfinished Business inquiry into the afterlives of colonialism and its ruptures.

The reading room is curated as a convergence point of multiple cartographies, where books have migrated to this site from Berlin, Stockholm, and beyond, each carrying traces of several encounters. The gathered material aims to provoke analog methods of cross-referencing, linking ideas, and jumping between disparate sources. It sits in conversation with the C& Cyclopedia, accessible on mobile devices via QR codes, which expands these experiments into digital space through practices of lateral reading: verifying and synthesizing information by reading across multiple tabs and sources. Beyond a search tool, the C& Cyclopedia is an expansive digital knowledge platform mapping new epistemologies, rooted in multiplicity, unfinished stories, and transformative connections. Language itself is treated here as a form of migration, often crossing geographic fault lines. With titles spanning themes of mobility, mapping, and contemporary artistic practice, the reading room punctuates the possibilities that exist when we surrender to being expanded in non-linear ways.

Curatorial note by Ethel-Ruth Tawe, Editor-in-Chief at C& Magazine

Date: 26 October 2026 – 17 January 2027
Drop-in during venue open hours.

Helsinki Central Library Oodi
Tölöviksgatan 4,
00100 Helsinki

  • Ethel-Ruth Tawe

    Ethel-Ruth Tawe (b. Yaoundé, Cameroon) is an antidisciplinary artist and (re)searcher exploring memory in Africa and its diaspora. Working across photography, collage, text, moving image, installation and other time-based media, she uses image-making, storytelling and time-travelling to examine culture and technology through a speculative lens. Her curatorial practice began with African Ancient Futures, and she is currently Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary And (C&) Magazine.

    Tawe is the recipient of the Magnum Foundation’s 2022 Counter Histories Grant for Image Frequency Modulation, which was selected for IDFA’s 2023 DocLab Forum and received Black Public Media’s 2024 PitchBLACK Immersive Award and Fellowship. She was also awarded the 2024 10x10 Photobook Research Grant for The Algorithms of Colonial African Photobooks. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Eye Filmmuseum, the National Museum of Cameroon, Rele Gallery and PhotoIreland.

    Alongside her artistic practice, Tawe works in editorial, cultural research and creative consulting. She has produced campaigns and conducted talent, film and image research for cultural platforms, brands and international organisations, and has contributed to publications including the British Journal of Photography, Quartz and Feminists. She holds an MSc in Development Studies from SOAS University of London and a BA (Hons) in International Human Rights.

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    Installation view C& Book Residency, Dortmund Goes Black Festival at Schauspiel Dortmund, 2025. Photo: China Hopson.