Breathing Room

Martha Glenn Courtesy of HAU

Wednesday, 06 February 2019
6 PM
OR Gallery (555 Hamilton Street, Vancouver)
Free, all welcome

Performance artist and choreographer Ligia Lewis’s research residency at the OR Gallery is part of a constellation of events where artists and guest-speakers think alongside her on themes in performance and gesture. During this time, the OR Gallery will transform into the Breathing Room, a publicly accessible rehearsal space and reading room where Lewis will break from her near-constant touring schedule to view performance archives, respond to texts and develop ideas with visitors including keyon gaskin (Portland, OR), Joshua Chambers-Letson (Northwestern University), Tina Post (University of Chicago), Laura U. Marks (SFU) and Phanuel Antwi (UBC). 

More information about the exhibition can be found here.

As part of this constellation, Amy Kazymerchyk and Lewis will co-host a No Reading salon. Participants will read and discuss excerpts from Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s “Theorizing in a Void: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics,” which explores how discourses of chaos theory and physics reach beyond the limits of conceptualization and representation to image the performative, gestural, resonant and metaphoric dimensions of black feminist poetics; and Michael Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, which attends to how mimesis (the practice of imitation) and its proximity to alterity (the opposition of Self and Other) are deeply indebted to colonialism’s ideological constructions.

Texts will be handed out at the salon. No pre-reading or research is required.

Please RSVP to or@orgallery.org

Through her performance practice, Ligia Lewis engages affect, empathy and the sensate, her choreography considers the social implications of the body while evoking its potentiality. In 2017, Lewis was awarded a Bessie for Outstanding Production for her work, “minor matter” and the Prix Jardin d’Europe for “Sorrow Swag.”

Amy Kazymerchyk is a curator who has paid particular attention to moving image and time-based practices, with intrigue and care for their encounters with cinema, performance, painting and poetics. From 2013–18 she was the Curator of SFU Galleries’ Audain Gallery. Previously she was the Events and Exhibitions Coordinator at VIVO Media Arts Centre. In 2008 she inaugurated DIM Cinema, a monthly series of artists’ moving images at The Cinematheque, which she programmed until 2013.

Henri Lefebvre’s “Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life”

Wednesday, 21 November 2012
VIVO Media Arts Centre (1961 Main Street)
7 PM
Free

Facilitated by Kevin Rowe

Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (2004) presents Henri Lefebvre’s attempt at developing a novel scientific methodology for the analysis and critique of everyday life and its varying forms and rhythms. Developing on a Marxist conception and philosophy of time and space, Lefebvre provides us with an argument that exposes the effect of the capitalist inscription of the value of time on our biological and social rhythms. Weaving his argument through a series of discussions on music, commodity culture, measurement, and urban life Lefebvre provides us with a methodology that breaks radically from nomothetism providing us with a convincing example of the importance of the ideographic. This  collection of essays, published posthumously, should be of interest to  philosophers, geographers, urban planners, community activists, and  sociologists.

Henri Lefebvre was born in southwestern France in 1901. He worked in the fields of sociology and philosophy from the 1920s, navigating the fraught landscape of French Marxism through to his death in 1991. His book The Critique of Everyday Life was formative for the Situationist movement, and The Production of Space remains indispensable to many geographers and social theorists to this day.

Kevin M. Rowe is an educator and writer from Calgary, Alberta. He currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia where he works as an educator. Kevin holds a B.A. in Geography from Simon Fraser University. He has designed and taught alternative curriculum for high school students in Vancouver for two years. He writes poetry, short fiction, essays and creative non-fiction. He is currently interested in the concepts of violence, mental landscapes, dreamscapes, hallucinations, escapism, vernacular architecture, anarchism and urbanality, all of which are at play in his writing.

Eduardo Cadava’s “Lapas Imaginus: The Image in Ruins”

Wednesday September 19, 7pm, Free
VIVO (1965 Main Street, Vancouver BC)
Programmed by Alexander Muir. Facilitated by Penelope Hetherington.

Appearing in the journal October in Spring 2001, this essay grew out of Cadava’s prior meditations on the photographic image and its relation to history. If, as Walter Benjamin wrote, there is no necessary connection between an empirical event and the time of its occurence, then history can be understood as a constellation of ruins, shaken loose from the linear and recoverable only by a present that is capable of “reading” them. History in its most Benjaminian sense–spatial rather than chronological–is where Cadava situates the image in question. Freed from any inextricable relation to what it portrays, the photographic image belongs to the future as well as to multiple pasts. If the text’s tone feels both melancholy and rhapsodic, it might be because, as Cadava suggests, the ruined and disappearing image has thrilling possibilities for an activist present.

Eduardo Cadava is a contemporary American literary critic, thinker and translator. He has written extensively on, among other things, philosophy, photography, architecture, music, democracy, memory, war and the ethics of decision. He has also published books on Benjamin and Emerson. Cadava is on the faculty of Princeton University and a professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.

Penelope Hetherington is a performer and emerging installation artist based in Vancouver.

MIchael Turner’s “On Becoming…”

September 26, 2012 – 7:00pm -9:00pm
VIVO (1965 Main Street, Vancouver BC)

On Becoming…. is Michael Turner’s contribution to the exhibition catalogue for “The Long Time: 21st Century Art of Steele + Tomczak” curated by Paul Wong and co-presented by VIVO and ON MAIN, 06-29 September 2012. Turner’s writing responds to the four-channel installation Becoming….  Initiated during a residency at VIVO in 2006, Becoming… frames tableauxs of contrasting eras in urban architecture in contemporary Berlin, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

Attuned to the process and conditions of Becoming….’s production and materiality, Turner unfolds Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on assemblage, the rhizome and the nomad, as well as dialectical materialsm and intemezzo.

No Reading will take place in the installation of Becoming… Participants wishing to view the exhibition may come earlier in the day from 12-7pm. “The Long Time” is open Sept 7-29, Wed-Sat 12-6pm.

Michael Turner’s books include Hard Core Logo, The Pornographer’s Poem and 8×10. He is also the co-author (with Grant Arnold) of Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs. In January 2012 he co-curated (with Scott Watson) Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.

The Long Time: 21st Century Art of Steele + Tomczak. Edited by Paul Wong. Contributors: Jim Drobnick, Jennifer Fisher, Michael Turner, Felix Vogel and Paul Wong. Published by On Main (On The Cutting Edge Productions Society).

Sarah Schulman’s “The Gentrification of the Mind”

Wednesday July 11, 7pm Free
1965 Main St. Vancouver
Programmed by Alexander Muir. Facilitated by Amy Fung.

No Reading After the Internet is a salon for communally reading cultural texts with an interest in reforming publics and experimenting with the act of reading, as its own media form, in our moment. Participation in No Reading is free and open to everyone, regardless of his or her familiarity with a text or its author. Texts will be handed out at the gathering. No pre-reading or research is required.

Sarah Schulman’s book, The Gentrification of the Mind (University of California Press, 2012) examines the intersection of the American AIDS crisis and urban development. She was the first person in America to write on AIDS and the homeless (The Nation and The Village Voice). Twenty five years later on April 25, 2012, Occupy Wall Street teamed up with ACTUP along with supporters from Housing Works, Health GAP, National Nurses United, OWS Healthcare for the 99% Working Group, Visual AIDS, MIX NYC, Le Petit Versailles, Queerocracy, Queering OWS and other groups who converged for a daylong siege in Lower Manhattan.

We will be focusing on Chapter 2, “The Gentrification of AIDS,” as a launching point to the evening’s discussions. A parallel interest in the discussion of gentrification is the role of documentation.

Download Text Here

Additional Links:

Act Up Oral History Project

Act Up United in Anger Trailer

Act Up Target City Hall

Sarah Schulman (b. 1958) is a prolific American writer, historian, and activist. She is the co-founder of ACTUP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) and MIX NYC. Currently, she is Professor of English at The City University of New York, College of Staten Island, a Fellow at The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, and on the Advisory Collective of the Human Rights and Social Movements Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Amy Fung is a writer and organizer currently based in Vancouver. For more information visit AmyFung.ca.

Hito Steyerl’s “Politics of Art”

Wednesday, 27 June 2012
Access Gallery (222 East Georgia Street)
7 PM
Free

In tandem with Always Working, on view at Access Gallery, curator Gabrielle Moser co-facilitates a meeting of No Reading After the Internet. Focusing on artist Hito Steyerl’s 2010 e-flux essay, “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy,” the group will discuss the text’s call for an art that examines the politics of its own production and its relation to the works in the exhibition. No Reading After the Internet is a monthly opportunity to gather and read a text aloud in hopes that it might provoke theoretical illumination on particular art works, or the broader scape within which such work exists.

Contact Narratives: Writings on Video from the First Decade of Independent Production

VIVO in June: Rosalind Krauss, Gene Youngblood, Phillip Lopate, Peggy Gale and Maria Gloria Bicocchi

Wednesday, 20 June 2012
7 PM
VIVO (1965 Main Street)
Free

Facilitated by Alex Muir in conversation with Allison Collins

This month’s edition of No Reading at VIVO, is in dialogue with the Movable Facture exhibition and parallel programming–and the research residency of Allison Collins, from which these happenings emerge. As stated in a write up for the exhibition, it involves “research into the material nature of video as a moving image medium.” If it can be said that all the works in this exhibition bear something ‘materialist’ or ‘structuralist’ in their approach, it is clear that the works take this turn in several different directions. A discussion of the ‘essence’ or materiality of video has arguably remained much more hazy and amorphous than its correlate in film, where the concept of structuralist film has been fairly stable and fairly articulated for almost as long as video, its younger sibling, has existed.

At some point Allison passed me an article by Rosalind Krauss from 1976 called “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” Whilst this piece eventually lands on a field of video practice that would prove to be much more narrow than what video has become (and was, even at the time), in her opening, Krauss writes this, which I found quite interesting and still relevant: “Yet with the subject of video, the ease of defining it in terms of its machinery does not seem to coincide with accuracy; and my own experience of video keeps urging me towards [a] psychological model.” Whether this observation is strictly accurate is less interesting to me, than the tendency to make it: what is it about video’s situation in our lives that would cause Krauss (and perhaps others) to write such a thing?

In keeping with the spirit of open-ended research that is pronounced elsewhere in Movable Facture, we will look at excerpts from a handful of texts, written throughout the 1970s, that give early impressions, analytical and otherwise, of video as an emerging artistic and social medium. Alongside the aforementioned Krauss article, which appeared in the inaugural issue October, we will look at texts published in Radical Software, and Parachute. The former was a journal strictly devoted to video, founded in 1970 in New York by members of the Raindance Corporation. Parachute was a bilingual contemporary arts journal that published out of Montreal from 1974 to 2006. The pieces sourced from Radical Software are “The Videosphere” (1970) by Gene Youngblood, and “Aesthetics of the Portapak” (1974) by Phillip Lopate. The pieces from Parachute are “Video Has Captured Our Imagination” (1977) by Peggy Gale, and “Use and Misuse of Videotape in Europe” (1977) by Maria Gloria Bicocchi.

Martha Rosler’s “The Artistic Mode of Revolution: from Gentrification to Occupation”

May’s Reading: “The Artistic Mode of Revolution: from Gentrification to Occupation” by Martha Rosler
Wednesday May 16 2012
VIVO Media Arts (1965 Main Street), Vancouver BC
7pm Salon Free
Facilitated by Randy Lee Cutler

“The Artistic Mode of Revolution“, published on E-Flux this year, is a survey of the contemporary political landscape, as it relates to the denizens of the so-called ‘creative class’. It is a reconciliation of discussions pertaining to gentrification, precarity, and contemporary resistance movements. Whilst it contextualizes the discussion of ‘artists’ and/or ‘creatives’ against the historical instrumentalization of this class and its precursors within the broader designs of the governing elite, the essay is interested in taking up the prospect of agency–as against or in contrast to sheer complicity. It takes the time not only to question the capacity of the corporate state to deliver convincingly on its promises to an aesthete subset of the middle class, but to pose the possibility of ‘sincerity of identity’ (a substance rising to meet its attendant style) as something other than a negatively foregone conclusion for this professedly progressive class.

Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York. She took her B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1965 and her M.F.A. from University of California, San Diego in 1974. Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, and writes criticism. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally. Her work in the public sphere ranges from everyday life — often with an eye to women’s experience — and the media to architecture and the built environment. (excerpted from website: http://www.martharosler.net/)

Whether through performance art, experimental video, photographs, recipes, interventions in gallery windows, or creative andcritical writing, Randy Lee Cutler’s practice explores the aesthetics of appetite, sustenance and embodiment. She has authored numerous essays published in C Magazine, Pyramid Power, The Fillip Review, FUSE magazine, Vancouver Art & Economies, Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, West Coast LINE, n.paradoxa, Backflash Magazine, Canadian Art and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art on topics as diverse as digestion, truth-telling, orientalism, feminism, photography and social change. Originally from Montreal, she lives in Vancouver where she maintains an experimental relationship with pedagogy, gardening and reading.

No Reading After the Internet is a monthly opportunity to gather and read a text aloud in hopes that it might provoke theoretical illumination on particular art works, or the broader scape within which such work exists. This program departs from Cineworks’ Thought on Film series, conceived by Cheyanne Turions. Whilst still very interested in cinema, the focus of this incarnation is softened to accommodate the more broad (and ever expanding) scope of media art.

The idea of a reading group isn’t new. No Reading nonetheless poses itself as an experimental learning and discussion space. Simply put, we are suspicious of our own reading abilities, and the extent to which our readings are conversant with one another. No Reading means to offer a slow space within which to retrace oursteps in the hopes of discovering individual and collective ways through the realms of language and interpretation. The strategieswe have at our disposal are twofold: through the yoking of our discussion to a text; and inducing conversation, where possible, between text and specific, local, contemporaneous art discussions and happenings.

Participation in No Reading After the Internet is free and open to everyone, regardless of his or her familiarity with a text or its author. Texts will be handed out at the gathering. No pre-reading or research is required. Those who wish to access the text in advance can find it here.

Bhagat Singh’s “Why I am an Atheist”

April’s Reading: “Why I am an Atheist” by Bhagat Singh
Wednesday April 18 2012
VIVO Media Arts (1965 Main Street), Vancouver BC
7pm Salon Free
Facilitated by Am Johal

The Marxist revolutionary penned ‘Why I am an Atheist’, a profound indictment of religion as he languished in an Indian prison awaiting execution.  Accused of “arrogant pride and vanity” by critics who decried his sustained repudiation of theism, Singh authored this compelling manifesto in an effort to articulate and expound upon his opinions on life and struggle.  Laden with polemics which lend new perspectives on fundamental philosophical questions of revolutionary theory, “Why I Am An Atheist” is a stirring argument against religious mysticism and dogma of every sort.

Bhagat Singh (1907–1931) was an Indian nationalist considered to be one of the most influential revolutionaries of the Indian independence movement. He is often referred to as Shaheed Bhagat Singh, the Hindi-Urdu word Shaheed meaning “martyr”.
Born into a Jat Sikh family which had earlier been involved in revolutionary activities against the British Raj, as a teenager Singh studied European revolutionary movements and was attracted to anarchist and marxist ideologies. He became involved in numerous revolutionary organisations, and quickly rose through the ranks of the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) to become one of its main leaders, eventually changing its name to the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) in 1928.

Seeking revenge for the death of Lala Lajpat Rai at the hands of the police, Singh was involved in the assassination of British police officer John Saunders. He eluded efforts by the police to capture him. Together with Batukeshwar Dutt, he undertook a successful effort to throw two bombs and leaflets inside the Central Legislative Assembly while shouting slogans of Inquilab Zindabad. Subsequently they volunteered to surrender and be arrested. Held on this charge, he gained widespread national support when he underwent a 116 day fast in jail, demanding equal rights for British and Indian political prisoners. During this time, sufficient evidence was brought against him for a conviction in the Saunders case, after trial by a Special Tribunal and appeal at the Privy Council in England. He was convicted and subsequently hanged for his participation in the murder, aged 23.

Am Johal is an independent Vancouver writer whose work has appeared in Seven Oaks Magazine, ZNet, Georgia Straight, Electronic Intifada, Arena Magazine, Inter Press Service, Worldpress.org, rabble.ca and many others. He has an MA in International Economic Relations from the Institute for Social and European Studies.

No Reading After the Internet is a monthly opportunity to gather and read a text aloud in hopes that it might provoke theoretical illumination on particular art works, or the broader scape within which such work exists. This program departs from Cineworks’ Thought on Film series, conceived by Cheyanne Turions. Whilst still very interested in cinema, the focus of this incarnation is softened to accommodate the more broad (and ever expanding) scope of media art.

The idea of a reading group isn’t new. No Reading nonetheless poses itself as an experimental learning and discussion space. Simply put, we are suspicious of our own reading abilities, and the extent to which our readings are conversant with one another. No Reading means to offer a slow space within which to retrace oursteps in the hopes of discovering individual and collective ways through the realms of language and interpretation. The strategieswe have at our disposal are twofold: through the yoking of our discussion to a text; and inducing conversation, where possible, between text and specific, local, contemporaneous art discussions and happenings.

Participation in No Reading After the Internet is free and open to everyone, regardless of his or her familiarity with a text or its author. Texts will be handed out at the gathering. No pre-reading or research is required. Link to Reading

Steve Collis presents selections from David Harvey on Marx

March’s Reading: “Companion to Marx’s Capital” and “Spaces of Hope by David Harvey
Wednesday March 14 2012
VIVO Media Arts (1965 Main Street), Vancouver BC
7pm Salon Free
Facilitated by Steve Collis

March’s edition of No Reading will be hosted by Steve Collis. Steve has been busying himself for the last few months with the local Occupy movement, in part as a member of the grassroots media corps that has sprung up. For the salon he will be presenting work drawn from his recent research on ‘change’. We will look at two sections from the works of David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital and Spaces of Hope. Both of these readings build out of a footnote from Marx’s Capital, wherein he is situating his project in relation to the work of Charles Darwin–calling for a “critical history of technology” that answers to Darwin’s pioneering work in the natural sciences. Harvey touches on Marx’s discomfort with the pitfalls of Social Darwinism, but nonetheless (in Spaces of Hope) Harvey invites a contemporary discussion on what is constitutive of ‘humanity’–precisely what we are being alienated from, if indeed we are ‘alien’ to our proper selves. Navigating the path between the ideal and the material, Harvey touches on important discussions of causality, technological determinism, architecture, and civil planning.

David Harvey (born 31 October 1935, Gillingham, Kent, England) is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A leading social theorist of international standing, he received his PhD in Geography from University of Cambridge in 1961. Widely influential, he is among the top 20 most cited authors in the humanities. In addition, he is the world’s most cited academic geographer, and the author of many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. His work has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate; most recently he has been credited with restoring social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism. He is a leading proponent of the idea of the right to the city.

David Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010) and Spaces of Hope (2000) are facilitated by Stephen Collis. Stephen Collis  is the author of Mine (2001), two parts of the on-going Barricades Project, Anarchive (2005) and The Commons (2008), and On the Material (2010), which won the 2011 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. He is also the author of two books of criticism: Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (2006) andPhyllis Webb and the Common Good (2007). A former member of the Kootenay School of Writing, he teaches poetry, poetics and American literature at Simon Fraser University.

No Reading After the Internet is a monthly opportunity to gather and read a text aloud in hopes that it might provoke theoretical illumination on particular art works, or the broader scape within which such work exists. This program departs from Cineworks’ Thought on Film series, conceived by Cheyanne Turions. Whilst still very interested in cinema, the focus of this incarnation is softened to accommodate the more broad (and ever expanding) scope of media art.

The idea of a reading group isn’t new. No Reading nonetheless poses itself as an experimental learning and discussion space. Simply put, we are suspicious of our own reading abilities, and the extent to which our readings are conversant with one another. No Reading means to offer a slow space within which to retrace oursteps in the hopes of discovering individual and collective ways through the realms of language and interpretation. The strategieswe have at our disposal are twofold: through the yoking of our discussion to a text; and inducing conversation, where possible, between text and specific, local, contemporaneous art discussions and happenings.

Participation in No Reading After the Internet is free and open to everyone, regardless of his or her familiarity with a text or its author. Texts will be handed out at the gathering. No pre-reading or research is required.