Join Book Works at PEER Gallery to celebrate the launch of Hamishi Farah’s Airport Love Theme and the new Contact series, edited by Hannah Black. Readings from Hamishi Farah and fellow Contact authors Momtaza Mehri, and Derica Shields.

Friday 17 January 2020, 7pm-9pm
PEER, 97-99 Hoxton Street, London N1 6QL
Free – book a place here.

Airport Love Theme is a graphic novel set on two airplanes and in detention at Los Angeles LAX airport, recalling the absurd exchanges – about love and sex, celebrity, food and family – that once took place between US border security officers, an artist held and interrogated under suspicion while travelling to an art fair, and fellow passenger-detainees.

Contact can span from moments of intensity to networks of alienation, from the professional to the personal, from the colonial to the queer, from the stranger to the extra-terrestrial. – Hannah Black.

Contact is a new series of books commissioned from open call, guest edited by Hannah Black and published by Book Works, with support from the Contact supporters circle. Doomsday Gossip by Momtaza Mehri and Bad Practice by Derica Shields are forthcoming in 2021.

Artist biographies:

Hamishi Farah is a Somali artist living in Australia while retired from Australian art. States have edges, like words. Infants begin to see by noticing the edge of things. How do they know an edge is an edge? By passionately wanting it not to be. When not examining contemporary white lack through the edgelessnesses of Niggadom, Hamishi paints. Hamishi is represented by Arcadia Missa in London and Chateau Shatto in Los Angeles. Hamishi is also a member of family rap ensemble, Fanau Spa.

Momtaza Mehri is a poet, essayist and independent researcher. She is the winner of the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize and co-winner of the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Granta, Poetry International, Real Life Mag and Vogue, and has been developed by BBC Radio 4. She is the former Young People’s Laureate for London and a columnist-in-residence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space. Her chapbook sugah lump prayer was published in 2017. Doing the Most with the Least is Mehri’s new pamphlet, published in 2019.

Derica Shields is a writer, researcher and cultural worker from London. As part of a 2017 Triple Canopy commission, she is completing an oral history project around Black people’s accounts of the UK welfare state. Recent exhibitions and talks in the UK include those at Wysing Arts Centre, Cubitt, Cell Project Space, and the ICA, and in the US at BAM and Performance Space, New York.