Book Launch: That Fire Over There by Prem Sahib
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Friday 8 September, 6–8pm
Phillida Reid
10 – 16 Grape Street
London, WC2H 8DY
Free and open to all
Come and join Book Works and Phillida Reid Gallery for the launch of the new book by Prem Sahib, That Fire Over There at Phillida Reid Grape Street on 8 September.
That Fire Over There takes fire as a metaphor for ideas around queer attachment, proximity, and personal and collective transformation. It also excavates the history of a real fire which in 1981 destroyed the Hambrough Tavern – a contested site symbolic of provocation and conflict against far-right groups in Southall, west London, where Prem Sahib grew up.
Prem Sahib will also have a new solo exhibition, The Life Cycle of a Flea, opening at Phillida Reid on 6 October 2023.
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August Book of the Month: Today in History/Tarihte Bugün
Parodying the format of a regular newspaper column, Today in History/Tarihte Bugün presents a series of drawings and paraphrased stories, extracted from Turkish newspapers from the last four decades. The news stories are sometimes poetic, sometimes overtly political, and sometimes strangely surreal. Dislocated from their original context and presented as an artist’s impression, the work reveals a changing society, and questions what we perceive to be news and the construction of truth, fiction and history. The text is presented in parallel in both Turkish and English.
Co-published by Book Works and Platform Garanti, and edited with November Paynter, it is the third in a series of co-publishing partnerships initiated by Book Works, entitled Fabrications, commissioned and edited by Gerrie van Noord.
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New title: Queen For A Day by Deborah-Joyce Holman
Book Works is delighted to present Queen For A Day, the forthcoming book by Deborah-Joyce Holman, now available to preorder at a reduced price.
Queen for a Day is Deborah-Joyce Holman’s debut publication, staging a conversation between two of the artist’s films, Moment and Moment 2 (2022), and the work of cinema verité they take as a primary material: Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967). The book contains extensive representation of the films as still images, added to which are installation views of their presentation at the ICA, London, schwarzescafé, Luma Westbau, Zürich, and Cordova, Barcelona. Following this a conversation between Deborah-Joyce Holman and Cédric Fauq elaborates on Holman’s method, and suggests that there are parallels to be drawn between the cycle of oppression in which Jason is trapped by Clarke, and the way in which the contemporary circulation of images of Black people suffering triggers a retraumatising process of spectacularisation. Newly commissioned essays by Olamiju Fajemisin, Noémi Michel, and Francis Whorrall-Campbell, offer close analysis of Moment and Moment 2, opening up diverse ways of understanding Holman’s aesthetic strategies and politics of representation via film history, decolonial and queer theory.
Deborah-Joyce Holman is an artist based between London and Basel. Their work has recently been shown at Performing Arts Forum, Saint-Erme (2023), Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Castellón (2023), and Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich (2023), among others. They were Associate Director at Auto Italia, London (2020–22), and Founding Director of 1.1, a platform for multidisciplinary early-career practitioners with an exhibition space in Basel, Switzerland (2015–20).
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Queer Utopias
Saturday 2 September, 2 – 10pm
Zine Fair, 2 – 6pm
Wysing Arts Centre
Fox Road, Cambridge, CB23 2TX
Book Works is delighted to be participating in Queer Utopias, an intimate mini-festival of queer culture in Wysing’s rural setting, for the LGBTQIA+ community and their friends.
We’ll have a selection of publications on sale as part of their zine fair alongside a programme of workshops, conversations, performances and a football match! Queer Utopias is an offshoot of Club Urania, Cambridge’s premiere queer performance and music night. For tickets and more info visit Wysing’s website.
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