The most remarkable element of this exhibition is a slim volume that could escape notice….[an] enticing little 104-page paperback in the museum….Like a pocket edition, Burn the Diaries is designed to be affordable and accessible….So where does the reading stop and her life begin? This question gets raised early in Burn the Diaries when Davey […]
Wisława Szymborska Forugh Farrokhzad I am you, you and the one who loves and the one who suddenly finds a vague connection within herself with thousands of unknown, unfamiliar things. – Forough Farrokhzad ‘Sin’, from ‘Forough Farrokhzad: Poet of Modern Iran’ (I.B. Tauris: London, 2010), p. 17. Cecilia Vicuña A sound birthing its own death. – […]
Robin Coste Lewis We had books and a waterfall was falling in the corner. I didn’t tell you I couldn’t remember what that thing was you said to me once, that tender thing you’d said I should never forget. The moment you said it, I forgot it I wondered if you thought we were lost. […]
Lisa Robertson This is a history of sincerity. The tree uses silence. – Lisa Robertson, ‘R’s Boat’, (University of California Press: Berkeley, 2010), p.55. Cecilia Vicuña It’s difficult to understand to what degree miniscule species have survived in the leaves of books and even to imagine a reader for each of these books is absolute […]
Joan Naviyuk Kane In a way, the animal detaches itself from truth. I might lose myself amidst such strange propulsions. In a way, I am fooled into rooting for a cause, one that I clearly hate. There’s a hole here. – Joan Naviyuk Kane, ‘Another Bright Departure’ (Cut Bank Books: Missoula, 2019), p. 2. Alejandra […]
Brandon Shimoda When someone breaks down Everyone leans into someone breaking down And touches that one It can go on – Brandon Shimoda ‘The Desert’ (The Song Cave: New York, 2018), p. 129. Bhanu Kapil What did Ban do that outweighed art? What kind of art did she produce? Returning to the U.S., I lay […]
The woman making this film is writing on the subway… It was a brief encounter; she was meeting some of you for the first time. The day before you left, she turned on the camera without asking. She is fascinated by you, doesn’t want to be a voyeur, knows she is doing just that, eavesdropping […]
From where you stand, what is your position? How do you look at something? What is the story that comes out of what you’ve seen? – Otobong Nkanga Some books here hold stories about how they came to be in his library. For example, Otobong Nkanga: Luster and Lucre, Berlin: Portikus and Sternberg Press, 2017), […]
